Three Teachers Talk

3TT writers have employed a variety of useful analogies to our experience in reading-writing workshop — from little league baseball to a trip to the dentist! To me, these analogies collectively speak to our constant, evolving understanding of our own work (let alone refining our attempts to explain it to others). Allow me to “weave” mine into the mix.

I bet I’m not alone (at least I desperately hope not) in that I still haven’t even had a chance to process everything I took away from NCTE, what with reconciling my sub plans with what actually occurred, catching up on all the grading time I missed, and coping with the energy sap of the holidays. The chapter covering Saturday evening in my world is the one that features A Lengthy Car Ride through Rural Iowa (read: Without Internet Service) in Which a Teacher Becomes Increasingly Anxious About Aforementioned Concerns and Impending Week of Classes and in Which Teacher’s Husband’s Attempts at Assuagement are Rebuffed with Increasing Venom. So, because in these moments of anxiety and dread it can be so helpful to resurrect and dwell upon our failures, upon returning home I took out my knitting.

As I get older, any amateur attempts at fox-like knowledge are totally overwhelmed by my fully-developed hedgehog sensibility (note: Quick-Write prompt?). I’m really good at a narrow few utterly arcane skills, like paring down 1000+-word college essays to below 650 and breaking down a mentor text like nobody’s business. I’m a decent cook and a better seamstress (nonsexist “seamster”?), but I’m notorious for my “SnickerPuck” cinnamon cookies and knitted hats with signature random and inexplicable holes. I’ve given up the baking, but for some reason I can’t let go the knitting. These three piles of SnickerPuck were supposed to be a hat each. That night my husband hesitated but was brave: Why I was taking a photo of this trifecta of failure? “I think it might figure into my blog post,” I obliged. “I’m just not sure yet how.” He obliged by offering vague encouragement and vacating the premises. (Note: guest-blog about living with a RWW teacher?)

The physical presence of these knit squid-carapace non-hats helped me begin to see: I have to tether these loose pedagogical tentacles to some greater purpose for the rest of the quarter. I decided to make use of this textile and cephalapodian imagery to look forward in concrete ways.

1. Infusing revision strategies across writing “laps”: My sophomores have two working drafts right now, not by design but rather by my inability to return either assignment in a timely way with any meaningful feedback. So, the “loose threads” of the skills they need to move these pieces forward — engaging leads, arguable claims, effective discourse markers to signal arrangement — will the the focus of mini-lessons next week, which they will then apply to both pieces of writing (a multi-paragraph media review based on a mentor text a la Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O’Dell and a focused one-page mini-essay supporting an arguable claim). The hope is to reinforce the value of these writing attributes across the singular tentacles of “assignments.”

2. Revitalizing independent reading: Last year I tried Amy’s personal reading challenges, which she writes about here. In true late-to-the-party form, last year I finally got around to it in the middle of quarter 3. But with love to my student Nasade and gratitude for providing confirmation of its value beyond my poor planning in the 11th-reading-hour of sophomore English, she so politely suggested, “Ms. Maguire, maybe we should have done this earlier in the year.”

3. Thus, weaving the threads of our RWW community: I’ve come to live with the reality that RWW workshop courses tend not to coalesce or liven up until second quarter (even though I totally forgot about that and beat myself up about it for all of first quarter). Nevertheless, it’s happening now with my sophomores. With of course a few exceptions, they are sharing book recommendations and writing challenges at their tables as a matter of course. Rather than follow my tendency to focus on the outliers — who (at the risk of abusing the metaphor) may need a new color/texture of yarn or needles of a different size — students will be invited to channel their writing conversations into more focused workshop experiences (for quarter 2, based on skills outlined above), to make their impromptu book talks more public (in place of my [ir]regular book talks), and to continually share titles via their reading experiences and their personal reading challenge cards.

The knitting analogy only goes so far — after all, those tangled shrouds need to be torn out and started over, which isn’t the most productive option in RWW if students are producing any writing at all. And thicker, fuzzier yarn may only serve to better conceal those gaping holes. But as it turns out, the fresh eyes that come with a brand new project out of class can renew the perspective from within.

I woke up this morning in Key West after yesterday’s Miami sunrise.  I promise I’ll stop thinking about the conference at some point and enjoy this get-away.  First, I want to share just a little of my experience from NCTE.

Thank goodness NCTE brought their annual convention to Houston this year.  I cannot overstate the importance of the shared experience that comes with conference attendance. Sitting next to colleagues as you soak in the collective wisdom of our field’s leaders, turning and talking with a complete stranger, meeting people you’ve only known through social media, we need these experiences.

We may not come away from events like these with a new-found awakening of what teaching means to us. It’s not, to me, the profundity of the experience that excites.  Instead, it’s the almost guaranteed replenishment of confidence and strength that I need, every so often, to redouble my efforts in the fight for literacy.

Conferences give me courage.

I’ll take time to reflect on the teachers who stood in long lines to meet Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Elizabeth Acevedo and shared their adoration. The reading and writing call-to-arms delivered by Pernille Ripp, Donalynn Miller, and Penny Kittle will, for a long time, echo, in my mind. Dr. Christopher Emdin’s charge to change my world-view knocked me down in the moment, and then picked me up again.

In the mean time, I’m going to rev up my step count as I recharge in sunny Key West.  I hope you find a way to recharge too.

Charles Moore can’t wait to write a professional learning proposal titled: Your Worksheet is Ruining Our Workshop. Maybe the warm temperatures down here at the southernmost point in the U.S. will heat up his teacher angst. Maybe not. 

“Cultural competence is having an awareness of one’s own cultural identity and views about difference, and the ability to learn and build on the varying cultural and community norms of students and their families. It is the ability to understand the within-group differences that make each student unique, while celebrating the between-group variations that make our country a tapestry. This understanding informs and expands teaching practices in the culturally competent educator’s classroom.”

-National Education Association

Part of being a culturally responsive and competent teacher includes learning how to cultivate critical conversations. However, competence also includes taking a long, hard look in the mirror to figure out how our OWN individual identities impact our pedagogy.

Working together with students means modeling how to explore the ways in which our identities impact how we view the world. Creating classroom environments and cultures that encourage self-discovery through critical perspectives are vital to culturally responsive teaching. It is not enough to be AWARE that issues exist, we have to foster COMPETENCE among ourselves and our students enough to be critical voices in these conversations.

This Saturday, please join me at NCTE as I engage with my colleagues across the nation to discuss the importance of taking action to develop cultural competence among teachers and students in today’s ELA Classrooms.

Can’t make it? Start a conversation in the comments! What are ways you actively engage in cultural competence with your students? What are ways that YOU are looking to become culturally competence in your classrooms? I would love to hear your feedback as to how we can start a plan of action for ALL educators!

Gena Mendoza teaches High School English in San Antonio, Texas. Her most salient identities include female, Chicana, feminist, mother, wife, educator, dog mom, and self-proclaimed advocate for social justice and equality. In between managing her career and grad school, she enjoys making paper flowers and spending quality time with her family. She invites you to connect with her on Twitter at @Mrs_Mendoza3 and looks forward to collaborating with you at #NCTE18!

“There can be no settlement of a great cause without discussion, and people will not discuss a cause until their attention is drawn to it.”  William Jennings Bryan

We’ve written quite a lot about the importance of talk on this blog. Too often, classrooms remain quiet as teachers impart their wisdom instead of helping students discover their own. Listening and speaking often get short shrift in our classrooms; however, with concerted team effort, we can change this.

At NCTE this Saturday, Lisa Dennis, ELAR teacher, and Alejandra Ovalle-Krolick, World Languages teacher, will share how they had a meeting of the minds and began shaping opportunities for learners to read and discuss culturally relevant texts across disciplines.

Opening windows and inviting critical conversations that explore our shared humanity is one way we become allies and advocates who instigate positive change.

In RWW, we aren’t teachers of literature per se.  Still, the spectre of the literary ideal can show itself in our workshop classrooms for reasons from the pedagogical (as mentor texts) to the administrative (curricular requirements).

In Advanced Writing, an elective class for seniors, Mariana and I are taking students through a fiction-writing unit. As we blithely assembled a set of short stories as mentor texts, it dawned on us — more slowly than I am proud of — that with minimal exception, our short-story mentors were all writing about women in peril.

In an effort to ground what has in the past been a scurrilous unit, both teaching-wise for us and writing-wise for students, we required students to ground their stories in some real-world element. We read an excerpt from Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates’s retelling of the Chappaquiddick incident from Mary Jo Kopechne’s viewpoint. Then, because they are exquisite examples of the form — and because Mariana and I love them so much — we read “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by JCO and “Victory Lap” by George Saunders, for plot/characterization and character/p-o-v, respectively.

Lo and behold, a young woman is preyed upon in each of these three unconnected stories. Ha ha, we laughed. How art imitates life, we laughed. We then went about the business of selecting short-story material for students to “read like writers” while we are at NCTE later this week, intending to offer an oeuvre of stories representative of sex- and region- and race-diverse viewpoints.

Here’s what we came up with in our initial brainstorm:

• “Hairball” by Margaret Atwood
• “Brownies” by ZZ Packer
• “Welcome to the Monkey House” by Kurt Vonnegut
• “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor

In “Hairball,” a woman undergoes surgery to remove an ovarian cyst and then has her job stolen from her by her married lover. The little girls in ZZ Packer’s Brownie troop suffer both racial and disability slurs. Kurt Vonnegut’s 6-foot asexual heroine is abducted and raped inside a futuristic museum of the Kennedy Compound. And in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the grandmother “would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

How much of what we teach — in English and other curriculum — reminds students of the perils of patriarchy but without the empowerment? How do we balance our content to provide windows, mirrors, sliding glass doors, AND those heavy doors that take effort, will, discomfort to open, as Amy writes about so eloquently here.

I face a similar struggle in my class of sophomores. Our curriculum calls for a literary analysis, yet the suggested texts typically depict the great suffering endured by a variety of marginalized groups. (It just occurred to me in writing this why so many high school students still prefer to read about superheroes.)

In our persistent efforts to give voice to the voiceless without beating the same very-much-alive patriarchal horse, we turned to some more recent fiction by writers of color. Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires includes a story called “Fatima, the Biloquist: a Transformation Story,” in which a young Black woman who attends a mostly-white private school seeks to embrace her Blackness. The title story in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut collection Friday Black exposes the grave danger inherent in American consumerism from the perspective of a retail clerk who, literally, is above it all. I also love to use Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me” as a quick write prompt.

Alas, if art needs must imitate life, we can find ways for students to see triumph and celebration without oversimplifying their experience. Or putting them in even more peril.