Philosophy of Teaching Writing
The first day of school, I gathered my freshmen around the Promethean board and asked them the questions that would define the entire year:
"What does it mean to write? What does it mean to write well?"
The students stared at me as images of hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and Navajo blankets and wrote some responses that writing conveyed information in a physical form. We discussed symbology and coding and, predictably, the conversation remained largely sterile. Equally predictably was the sterile tone of the year's writing process. My instruction focused on "training" writing. Students crafted thesis statements, learned to proof-read grammar, and cite quotations to support arguments or literary analysis. Yet this never qualified as "teaching writing." I was simply training students to write the acceptable answers for solid Regents and SAT scores without regard for what it meant to actually write. At the end of my first year, the question that now defined my instruction adjusted. "Is writing a science or an art? How can it be taught?"
It is this focus which must serve as a core to my undefined philosophy. If writing is a science, I have perhaps developed effective strategies for teaching it. Students examine solid writing and can even develop their own criteria for what strong narrative writing looks like. Students can utilize graphic organizers to formulate lengthy argumentative essays. However, the result is robotic, reducing students to automatons with no real distinguishing voice within their writing. Yet this approach is unsatisfying. There seems to be little creativity or individuality in this approach and reduces writing to a sterile and academic task which is entirely utilitarian. If students are writing under these conditions, are they truly writers or simply regurgitates of formula?
My ideal instruction would involve on teaching writing as an art. While certainly standards exist such as content, form, style, and technique, this process would allow for students to experiment with writing, to engage in the feedback process from peers and instructor, and would see their writing evolve based on self-designed standards. However, I recognize my current inadequacies to teach this style of writing. Additionally, I am concerned as to the potential for backfire in terms of test scores if students are not to some degree trained in the "science" of writing.
Evocative Writing: Five Memory Poems
The following poems represent the steps of my life, evoking vivid images that for some reason or another disturbed or interested me enough to commit them to memory and involve my memories of living in the south which could be simultaneously beautiful and shrouded in a hideous history of oppression.
Poem One:
“How I Learned to Swim”
The echo of splashing water, refreshing like iced cherry coke
Tosses about behind the thick walls of brick and marble.
The concrete path to the pool (ancient and grey, cracked
With lines of green where plants moss or perhaps small clovers
have grown to seek the rays of unrelenting August sunshine) is
surrounded by deadly brown grass, poking hard and sharp
from over-mowing and the wrong combination of pesticides.
I walk in the brief shade of the arches, grateful for my mother’s guiding hand,
(moist, slick and smelling like sunblock) and her diamond engagement ring pressing
Into my flesh while I carry the plastic basket with my aqua blue beach towel in the
Other.
The black and white umbrellas hovering clean above the smooth tiles offer refuge
To parents and nannies who preferred to enjoy the water from afar.
I, instead, gazed at the turquoise lapping against the metal railings,
Jewel-like and precious against the scorch of late summer.
Suddenly, the towel slips from my hand and I turn to pick it up.
It is here I see the words, old and etched into a concrete block above the door.
“This entrance is reserved for members of the colored race.”
I tug at my mother’s skirt, pointing at the words.
She pauses for a moment, explains it is from a long time ago, tussles my hair around my scalp,
Slightly pink from the sun and walks towards a vacant umbrella.
While I stare into the vast blueness before me.
Poem Two:
“Rattles”
I would see the two of them only once in my life,
The pair with grey beards and drinking Mountain Dew
From glass bottles (it was 1996, for God’s sake). They were
Old friends of my great-grandfather who sat smiling
Constantly in a green plastic yard chair and who I seriously
Doubted could remember his own name by this point. The
Dust broke from the gravel and gave their red Ford pick-up
An almost religious sensation as if its bed held something
More than a dead rattlesnake. Patsy Cline was playing from
The car radio where I played horseshoes with my sister and
Cousins and the sweetness of her voice seemed to melt like
A Mars Bar in the teasing heat of April. I suppose the pair
Intended to amuse us, dropping the back of the truck to
Reveal the corpse of a timber rattle snake, shot cleanly at the
Neck so that the head lay only a few feet away. The older of the
Men smiled and I could see tobacco juice stains across his teeth.
The head had captivated me. Bleeding, dangerous, and full of secrets
I would have been better off without. “Hey,” said the younger. “Want
To see a magic trick?” He did not wait for the answer and began poking
The severed head with a metal rod. A meager flop, then the sudden
Burst of an open mouth, the color of clean cotton held against a wound
And the magic was done. The last burst of life had sailed from the now
Open mouth of a creature whose mere presence meant death to me.
Poem Three:
“The World Series”
I retreat from the galaxy of wires and machines,
The sterile glow of numbers and beeps which
Monitor the heart rate of the dying man.
I did not share his blood. I only knew him as
A neighbor. And yet my mother held his hand,
My father gave him ice chips from a silver bowl.
I doubted he knew where he was.
A larger room waited just behind the door.
It was cool and smelled like medicine and
Some sort of chemicals sold in a can to brighten up a room.
She sat in front of the television, harmless, eyes closed
A Braves cap snug over her silver hair, clinging to her scalp
In thin wisps. A tray of food sits in front of her.
Half-eaten meatloaf, untouched mashed potatoes and pudding.
I ask to sit and she makes no reply.
The top of the fourth passes without ceremony.
I never liked baseball but there is nothing to do but wait.
Nothing passes the time but the sound of leather cracking against
Wooden bats and occasional trips to a vending machine
For peanut butter crackers and a cherry coke.
It is October, but the men sweat heavily through the glass.
I struggle to hear, but am afraid of waking her.
It is the bottom of the eighth before I realize it.
A nurse in white tennis shoes and blue pants responds quickly,
Wheeling her away. He returns in ten minutes, takes a seat
On the sofa next to me, spooning chocolate custard into his mouth
From a plastic cup.
“That’s better,” he sighs. “What’s the score?”
Poem Four:
“How I Learned to Drink Beer”
I still remember the forbidden foam
Floating like low tide on top of the amber
Liquid. I am four years old and my great aunt
Has fallen asleep in her favorite chair. Her hair
Tumbles like cigar smoke down her cheeks
And I determine she won’t miss one sip.
My lips pull back from the bitterness and
She sits up laughing in sharp gasps and
Grabs my wrist with her claws (sharp,
Like some avian predator).
The oak shines too bright from the bar
And I think of coffins with expensive brass
Handles. “I get off at 9.”
The bar-tender has written this on the coaster
But I doubt he knows I’m only 15. The sips
Slide down my throat against my will and with
Each spasm of muscle, I feel myself age into
Someone who wants nothing more than a nap
In the high grasses.
I order this beer by my own choice. It’s a vital practice,
I am told. A rite of passage for the 21st birthday, like killing an elk.
I take what I am given and pray that it will be over soon.
“Fuck yourself,” I scream into my brain. “You think that if
You play their game that they won’t come for you.”
I know myself that it is true and
Concentrate on the white and blue Christmas lights
Damning me in the reflection of the brown glass bottle.
Poem Five:
“The Christian Quarter”
I had been warned the pavement was slick
And my shoes had little grip on its surface,
A stubborn ice that would not melt in Jerusalem’s
Heat. I had stopped to look at coins, pressed
And punched with holes. “Palestine, 1947”
One whispers to me in a voice hidden
Deep within ancient bronze. Across
The alley, you too gaze as spices (mint tea,
Sage), Turkish delight packed into metal boxes,
And yards of fabric which unraveled would
Suffocate the merchant who smiles calmly,
Her lips wrapped around a cup of coffee.
Across the wall, we hear a call to prayer
And I feel a tap on my hand. I follow the bones
Up the arm into the purple flesh, cracked and
Concrete-looking wrapped around the face
Of a leper. His eyes hide pink and frantic,
Holding secrets and sadness in the same
Pools of blood. “Where is the kingdom?”
He asks but he knows I don’t know the answer.
“Where is the kingdom?” I shrug and pull away,
Tightening the muscles on my face to show no
Reaction. I gaze down the street of crafted bronze
And the cries of merchants looking for their next sale
But you are nowhere to be seen.
Unfamiliar Genre
Narrative Writing
Children's Short Story.
Extinct: an Evening with Monique, the World’s Last Dodo Bird
If you happened to be walking by the National Academy for Arts, Science, and Suddenly Discovered Zoological Oddities on the morning of November 8th, you would see a blue poster with silver letters and a detailed, if somewhat old-fashioned, sketch of a large, grey flightless bird. If you were to approach the poster closer, interested perhaps in this oddly out-of-place illustration, you would see the silver letters spelled the following: “Extinct: an Evening with Monique, the World’s Last Dodo Bird. Coffee and light refreshments to Follow.” There was only one poster, simple, direct but entirely interesting. You couldn’t help but be captivated and this was exactly the reaction the National Academy was hoping for.
If you happened to be familiar with the Academy’s Board of Trustees (a collection of aging doctors and professors who had once made spectacular contributions to science but now seemed content to drinking coffee and having long, boring conversations on the telephone with other, equally boring doctors and professors who had made equally spectacular contributions to science at one point) you would be relieved to see that they finally decided to tone this one down. Naturally enough, they were anxious men and women. Specifically, they were anxious to avoid another evening like, “Rex: a Lecture on the Late Cretaceous Period with Franklin, an Actual T-Rex.” And let’s not forget, “Bunny the Neanderthal Explains How to Go from Caves to Caviar in 10 Simple Steps.” The trustees had pulled advertising, leaving the subway riders and local television watchers unaware of the event. It had been unanimously decided that the lecture could become a series without much drama providing that Monique didn’t follow in the footsteps of previous guest speakers and eat three graduate students like a certain T-Rex who shall remain nameless or brain a reporter with a club for taking a flash photograph in the middle of a session on tasteful bone-china patterns.
If you happened to be Dr. Precious Qing or Professor Bernardo Herrera, you would have spent the entire morning on the phone with Professor Lorena van Daan, Monique’s discoverer, agent and free-lance publicist, confirming and listing all the things Monique would require that evening.
“Room temperature effervescent mineral water with a twist of lime. But don’t let the taste of lime be overpowering. Call the University of Cairo if you think I’m kidding. It also might be wise to have a second bottle with a twist of lemon just in case Monique suddenly decides she would prefer lemon. Y’know what? While we’re on the subject, have a mint-cucumber infused still water on hand. Just to be safe.” Oh! And don’t forget that Monique will require a kosher meal but no meat because she’d also like a vegan pineapple Greek yogurt. I’ll put all of this in an email when we’re done,” Professor van Daan said, seldom even stopping to breathe.
Never before had the Academy hosted such a demanding guest. Bunny’s agent had requested Brie cheese which stank to high heaven, imported French champagne to be served in crystal stem glasses, and half a wildebeest carcass served on watercress. Franklin’s agent had only asked that her client’s privacy be respected and that questions about Franklin’s membership in the Church of Scientology and the remnants of a McCain/Palin sticker on his cage that looked like it had been excessively scratched at be left out of the evening’s talk-back session.
The two doctors shared a glance as they began to call grocery stores and kosher delis that delivered. They were already tired and the evening hadn’t even started.
The ultimate turnout exceeded expectations. A few doctors and professors even stood to hear what Monique had to say.
“I’ve heard that she is an expert on ecosystems of the Indian ocean!” shouted one doctor her best lab coat.
“I’ve heard that she offered blanket forgiveness to the people who wiped out her species,” boasted a professor with red glasses.
“I’ve heard that she golfs with the Dali Lama!” exclaimed one eager graduate student who was brave enough to attend an Academy lecture after the infamous Franklin fiasco.
“We want Monique!” a third Academy member in a purple bow-tie began to chant.
Right on cue, the lights dimmed and Monique strutted out on the stage. A bucket of fruit and seeds had been sat next to the microphone, lowered to match Monique’s own small stature. She glanced around the room, tilted her head to the left as if to get a better look, and helped herself to a ripe, peeled mango near the top of the basket.
For a moment, no one said anything. A rockstar might as well have walked on stage. The entire Academy waited while Monique continued to explore the stage, dragging the mango remains with her and periodically stopping to squawk, knock over the poster with her name and picture on it, and attempting to make a comfortable nest out of her lecture notes.
“You know these academic types,” the professor with red glasses said to the doctor in her best lab coat.
“Do I ever. She’s brilliant,” she responded.
Finally, Monique settled in front of her microphone after tasting it and stomping on it with her foot just to make sure it wasn’t some new fruit.
“Monique will now entertain questions from the audience,” a voice boomed from the over-head microphones.
“Monique, what are some of your fondest memories before your family and friends were killed by Europeans?”
Monique, staring at no one in particular, blinked twice.
“Monique, what advice might you give to people today to avoid going extinct?”
Monique squawked and snapped her beak.
“Monique, what is it like having a Nobel prize?”
Monique stuck her head in the bucket and pulled out a strawberry.
“Monique, what are your opinions on global warming?”
Wait. It was actually a Brazil nut she pulled from the bucket.
“Monique, what’s it like golfing with the Dali Lama? I bet he’s stuck up.”
Monique got bored and waddled around some more.
“Monique, why did you insist on a kosher meal if you were just going to throw it all over your dressing room?”
Monique spilled her water glass while staring at Dr. Herrera who still had on rubber cleaning gloves and smelled like liverwurst on rye.
She didn’t say a word but everyone felt like their questions were answered and this prompted the professor in the purple bow tie to ask:
“Monique, what does it mean to be extinct?”
By this point, Monique had settled back into the nest she’d made of her shredded lecture notes. For a moment, nobody said a word. Everyone was afraid this question had offended her or crossed the line. Monique, shuffled under her feathers, let out a sudden squawk and quickly scampered off the stage. However, no one watched her go.
Everyone stared at the gift that Monique had left for the Academy. There, on the white shreds of paper sat two eggs, yellow and round.
The audience was on its feet, hooping, hollering and calling for Monique to take a bow, insisting that this was the best lecture they had ever seen. Who needs a hungry T-Rex or a cavewoman with a summer estate on Martha’s Vineyard? The Academy had Monique and her fabulous answers to the toughest questions they could throw at her.
However, this sound spooked Monique who had never cared for loud noise to begin with and found the stage alarmingly boring despite the free fruit. Monique waddled back to her dressing room, snuggled into a pillow and began to peck at a chunk of liverwurst sandwich stuck to the wall.
Saving the Pig: a Retrospective Learning Reflection on Writing and Its Instruction
Learning Reflection
We are occasionally asked questions that seem transparent in their obviousness. These are deliberately broad. As I would tell my students when I asked them question like “What is literature?” (their first writing assignment of the year), “There is no wrong answer!” However, when the tables turned and I was asked, “What is writing and what do writers do?Who am I as a writer? As a teacher of writing? What works in writing instruction?" I found myself unable to clearly answer the question. Writing could mean anything. It could be a text message, graffiti, tattoos, plays, blog posts, chain mail, you name it. In that definition, everyone is a writer. Was there any possible way that the depth and intricacies of writing could be summarized into a single document? Ultimately, my comprehension of writing and teaching writing has undergone the same metamorphosis that a piece of writing arguably undergoes. Additionally, my definition of what “classroom appropriate” writing constitutes has likewise expanded to include multi-genre and multimodal writing.
As a writer, I have stuck to four different styles of writing: plays, poems, journal entries, and academic essays. These offered comfort, a sense of a controlled voice, and a means of expression. In times of stress, I find myself returning to my weathered writing notebooks and have even shelled out $19.95 for a Moleskin journal once when I had just experienced a minor catastrophe and found no means of expressing my frustration. This is why for my portfolio, my evocative piece stemmed from my own love of poetry as a means of writing and my constant scribbling of journal entries to encapsulate a moment that I wish to remember. This definition was less abstract for me. As a writer, I tend to have a better sense of identity than my identity as a writing instructor. This second question of who I am as a teacher of writing took a bit of extra reflection.
My grandmother has an infamous and disturbing mantra that she would throw out in times of adversity. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” I always hated this expression. Who wears cat skins? However, it is this exact expression that came to mind as I began to reflect upon and expand my own definition of writing. I had to begin the process by defining writing. This definition is broad and encompasses a plethora of both academic, legal and casual uses. With this in mind, I next used the readings to reflect on what the purpose of writing is. Previously, I had used three types of writing in my classroom: essays, paragraph responses, and occasionally Power Point presentations. Yet I realize now that there are a variety of ways to express information. That is not to say that academic essays and personal responses are useless. They are both important skills for students to master. However, the cat, excusing the expression, can be skinned multiple ways. Could my students not have done blog posts on the evolution of Shen Teh’s conflicts between economics and ethics in “The Good Person of Szeschwan?” Could a brochure be used to compare the process of cultural desecration in “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” to the Native American boarding schools in the United States?
Ultimately, my one reservation in making the full jump into a multi-modal and multi-genre writing classroom comes from the long, lingering arm of standardized testing and classroom observations. Formal essays and styles of writing (such as Prezis or Power Points) still have a high stature in school settings. Creative projects tend to be viewed as superfluous and distracting from high-stakes test scores that students face at the end of their 10th grade year or at the end of AP courses. These tests both emphasize paragraph response and formal essay. Additionally, students certainly struggle with formal essays and short response. While multi-genre and multimodal writing absolutely enhance students’ writing abilities and help scaffold formal writing by teaching skills in a less intimidating manner, an outsider looking at a classroom where students are making brochures, comics, and podcasts may not hold the same reverence for the impact of multimodular writing as it relates to student achievement.
When EB White penned his immortal children’s book Charlotte’s Web, he commented that the whole point of the story was to “save a pig.” The author was referring to the death of a piglet that the author witnessed at a young age and White still experienced guilt over this loss at an adult age. His text was his effort to fix a problem that he felt he was too late to fix. While I am not returning to the classroom for at least a year, my approach to writing has undoubtedly been altered. The rigid and old-fashioned model that I adhered to as a first and second year teacher may have enhanced student performance in personal response and academic essays, there is a variety of writing that students have not experienced. I now feel a sense of academic obligation to right this wrong. Similar to White, I feel that my style of teaching writing must change to demonstrate growth as an educator and to open up a variety of writing to students. This is why that both my research project and my unit map are revisions of a unit that I taught and ended with a sense that an opportunity had been missed. As I conclude this reflection and as my research project unfolds, keep in mind that, while I may not be teaching this unit in the near future, it serves as my attempt to “save the pig,’ so to speak. It demonstrates my growth in my comprehension of what it means to teach writing and my hope that when I return to the classroom, my writing instruction can truly be characterized as multimodal and multi-genre.
Multi-Modal Writing
This comic strip is a depiction of a moment in my life that is of particular importance to me. It is perhaps one of the first times I realized not only that I was queer but also the disturbing and bleak images mainstream media used to and to some degree still continues to saturate American culture with. The modes of narrative writing and picture were used in tandem to tell the story. The lack of color comes from the motifs present in Streetcar that compromises the strictures of black and white in favor of a grey area where people tend to live. Incidentally, grey was also the name of Blanche's suicidal husband (although the film changes the reason of his death from Blanche's exposure of his homosexuality to his own inability to cope with a vague "weakness). In some ways, this film is even more criminally homophobic due to the Hayes Code which worked with the Catholic Church for roughly 40 years to ensure that no one had any fun at the movies or anywhere ever. I'm not sure which is worse: killing the gay character or taking away his homosexuality all together. There's something much more compelling about Blanche's "I saw. I know. You disgust me" rather than Vivien Leigh's "You're weak and I despise you." Furthermore, the comic also comments on the sexual desire that Marlon Brando awakened in most people everywhere by being dark and devastating. However, there is something disturbing about feeling a physical attraction to a character who is ultimately a rapist and abusive husband. It left me with a sick feeling for finding Stanley attractive considering his unforgivable actions against women characters. This was the thing I was more eager to hide. I didn't necessarily register the feelings as the whips and scorns of puberty as I did having some bizarre obsession with the worst character in the film.
