Week 11: "Just Keep Writing"

Week 11:
March 15-21


This week, the week before SPRING BREAK, I am finding my energy drained and my efforts spread thin. In addition to teaching full time I am taking an online graduate school course and as much as I love it, there are times when I feel it more as a burden than a blessing. Every week we must write a commentary expressing our thoughts and reactions to the week's assigned readings. I genuinely love doing this. We share our thoughts and then respond to one another and engage in an online dialogue about matters of education near and dear to our heart. Usually our commentary pieces are thoughtful reflections. Very seldom do we argue or disagree with one another. Earlier in the course, our professor had made us read some articles by a literary theorists that just rubbed us all the wrong way. We were united in our respectful disagreement with his ideas and concepts. 

Sometimes I feel as though my graduate school cohort may be too supportive. I love my peers deeply and genuinely see them all as friends, in addition to partners in learning, but shouldn't a learning environment contain a bit of controversy and push-back? I do not wish to be in a hostile learning environment, but a little healthy debate and disagreement is what, for me, makes learning so fun! 

So for this week's blog post, I am taking the easy way out and rather than coming up with a new or original piece of writing, I am going to be copying and pasting my graduate school commentary. I spend approximately 45 minutes to an hour composing my commentaries. Sometimes the words flow easily and other times, I find myself struggling to articulate my thoughts. Fortunately my professor doesn't much care about our writing style, so long as it is authentic! Sometimes I write in a very free and stream-of-consciousness style of writing and sometimes I strive to be more "academic". 

As much as I love having this blog as a place to publish my thoughts and hold myself accountable to my discipline of writing I do feel pressure to keep it up and maintain my weekly commitment to posting. 

Writing is a discipline. Even the best writers in the world must force themselves down and put fingertips to keypad, or pen to paper. Inspiration is fleeting. Sometimes we just have to be our own kick in the ass. 

The readings for the past few weeks have confirmed for me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I am a literature teacher through and through. I love writing, but like my yoga practice, writing is something I do privately, for me. Sure, I’ve had fantasies about publishing a book of my poems or travel experiences, but my love for classic literature stops me from making that dream into a reality. I don’t consider my writing to be worthy enough to be placed on bookshelves alongside the works of Plath, Chatwin, Thoreau or Emerson (four of my favorite writers who I draw tremendous inspiration from in my “personal” writing). However, when I walk through bookstores today and pick up copies of the newest and shiniest bestsellers, self-help texts and memoirs, I cannot help but think, “Ok, I can write better than this person”.

Like Peter Elbow, I love that I was trained in classical literature. I love that I had older male professors who walked through the hallowed stone hallways of Wellesley with their beaten leather briefcases full of spindly handwritten lecture notes on texts they knew inside and out. I hung on their every word and considered insights on literature from them to be gold. My literary education definitely felt like a religion at times. These professors were the high priests who knew how to access the secrets of the Gods – Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Plath, Bishop.  I was a lowly servile nun, furiously pouring through scripture looking for the “key”, the secrets that I knew lay beneath the words, if only I was smart or dedicated enough to find them.

But this kind of attitude is completely lost on most of my students. Most of them want to go to college to escape their parents, make money or take steps towards forging a successful career. In many ways, I admire them, they are much more practical than I was in high school. I applied to the best liberal arts schools in the country and honestly, if I had unlimited funds, I would happily just stay in school forever. Learning in and of itself was the gift for me. This may be one of the reasons why I push so hard against the current trends in education to make learning more “skills” oriented. Our learning coordinator (curriculum police, as I quietly refer to her) repeats in all of our planning means, “If you can’t measure it, then you can’t assess it”.

So much of Elbow’s article resonated with me. I have numerous notes that I wrote down in the margins of his paper that I wanted to share with you all, but I want to challenge myself to write about something that makes me slightly uncomfortable: getting kids to read.

Gerald Graffs’ article was a perfect piece to read this week as I have just begun tutoring a sixth grade boy who is a classic “reluctant reader”. His reading teacher has shared with me that he reads at fourth grade reading level and that he likely has undiagnosed ADHD. His father won’t hear of it – he’s a military man who just wants to see his son “buckle down” and start improving his reading scores. “Go hard on him”, he’s told me. “Just hit him with the tough stuff”. Oh boy. What have I gotten myself into, right? Truth be told, I know that I am probably not the best person to be tutoring this child, but I am a friend of the family and none of the other teachers really want to deal with this father any more. So here I am, tutoring a twelve year old four times a week in basic reading skills.

I must admit, I was hoping that Graff’s piece would give me more answers. After all, he too admitted to being a “reluctant reader”. Now the big difference between Graff and my tutee, J, is that J is so much younger than Graff. J is just in 6^th grade, while Graff describes his struggles with reading through high school and college. Most of Graff’s struggle with literature stemmed from his insecurities about not being able to grasp the “critical vocabulary” of literary analysis. J, however, doesn’t have to do literary criticism in sixth grade. In fact, from what I’ve observed, the educational system in middle school is actually perfect for reluctant readers. The sixth grade English team uses book clubs and literary circles to engage kids in reading – that is the social component Graff (and Appleman, last week) mentioned is so necessary to fostering a love of reading. Yet, J still doesn’t like to read. In sixth grades, the kids get to pick their own books – free choice! Another strategy I thought would help foster a love of reading in a reluctant reader. Nope. He just passively picks the books he sees other kids reading and says, “this is good”, but he doesn’t actually care. He doesn’t know what he likes to read and furthermore, it doesn’t even bother him all that much.

I became frustrated. While I appreciate Graff’s points about how literature teachers teach more criticism than actual literature, this information wasn’t helping me get through to my little reluctant reader. Though I must admit, I liked when he wrote “…students who do well in school and college are those who learn to talk more or less like their teachers, who learn to produce something resembling intellectualspeak” (47). I couldn’t help but smile as I recalled the fruitful discussions I had with my students last semester when I taught 1984. Teaching 1984 in Saudi Arabia had to have been one of the more enjoyable experiences of my teaching career. If the Saudi authorities had heard some of our discussions, I am sure I would have been exported in a hot second.

But back to J. How am I going to help this kid not only improve his reading skills but actually come to enjoy reading? I don’t think it is possible to improve reading skills without actually buying in to the process of reading (right guys?). So how do I pull him out of his reluctance to accept reading? 

Graff writes, “reading books with comprehension, making arguments, writing papers, and making comments in a class discussion are social activities….the social conversation that reading, writing and arguing must be part of in order to become personally meaningful”.

J will read if he thinks that reading is meaningful. But right now social activities aren’t doing it for him. So what is missing?

The answer was in front of me the entire time. His father. Two nights ago I was at their house for a few hours tutoring J and when the father came home from work I looked over and saw him relaxing on the couch. What was he doing? Playing on the iPad.

I realized that if I am to get J to read and see reading as an important life activity, I am going to have to get the father to read. I’m a little scared to bring this up to him, he is an intimidating person after all, but I think that this is the key. For the most part, we mimic the behaviors of the people we look up to and respect. Growing up, that was my parents. I loved them and looked up to them. Whenever they got home from work, what did I see them doing? Reading. They were always reading.

This week I finally realized that teaching really is impossible. Because we cannot confine our learning to mere classrooms. If we are to truly master the art of teaching, we must also get into the homes and work directly with parents.  I know that parenting is a tough job. I am sure that most parents at the end of hard working days do not want to sit and do homework with their kids or read books with them. I don’t have kids, but I get it, I really do. But it has to be done.

Cover Photo from Stephen King's inspirational memoir, On Writing.

After reading this book, I finally began to understand that great writers
aren't born, they are made. Writing is hard work, it requires tremendous
discipline and above all, a thick skin. King was rejected hundreds upon
hundreds of times. Yet he kept writing. He writes that he must force himself
to write for a few hours every day and that it is crucial for writers to have an
isolated, quiet space that is only used for writing.