Putting all the pieces together

I work with the United States History and the other American Literature teachers on a project that is wholly valuable, consistently maddening, and frequently time sucking.  There are definitely days when it doesn’t feel worth all the work, all the talking and thinking, all the mediating and prodding.  And then a student will remind me about why we do this.

Community Connections

We call the project Community Connections and it is the junior class community action project where we engage in major social justice issues in the city and connect those issues to the works that we read in American Lit and trends and movements in US History.  Our brain dump, The Pensieve, is where we try to capture the work of graderoom meetings and fieldwork days.

Common Air

Last year we published an anthology of student work (titled Common Air for a line from Song of Myself) from narratives collected from one of the assignments – the new chapters for the Grapes of Wrath.  They were often very good, but the work reminded me that juniors in high school are not all at the same developmental level when it comes to abstractly connecting big ideas to events or taking a small moment and seeing the universality in it.   (I posted about the process last August.)

One story in particular was troublesome.  The writer seemed not only snarky and smug, but there was not even a glimpse of empathy in his narrative for the people who are homeless (the social justice project he was working on).  I  helped him to excerpt his narrative, and the teacher that he was working with dismissed him as a privileged jerk who was more concerned about the songs on his iPod than people freezing on the streets.

And then there was Walden

by flickr member moriza

This year that same boy/child/student is in my Autobiography and Memoir class.  Last year he read On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Thoreau, and as I didn’t share that text with him I have no idea how he reacted to Thoreau’s charge that we should throw ourselves on the machine to stop it.  But this year I know what we did with Walden.  We paired it with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Dillard) and The Sand County Almanac (Leopold) and we went to our own pond and wrote.   And then we wrote some more.  And here is what he wrote:

Henry David Thoreau chose to put himself into nature to “live off the land.”  I don’t think that is possible to achieve in the city.  This may sound a bit racy [**love this adjective], but the closest thing to Thoreau in the city is a homeless person, though they probably did not choose to put themselves on the street. They are not exactly living off of the land and in a city such as ours the living style of Thoreau would be quite impossible.

Okay, it’s not a fully formed thought yet, but what I see is this student thinking.  He’s got a “racy” thought – and I read that as an idea that to him is exciting.  He’s spontaneously making a connection between the work he did last year and the work he is doing this year.  It’s “racy” because it is unexplored for him, unusual in that it is an untested, unsupported idea.  Thoreau was living off the kindness of friends, exploring his world.  Although the need to live “deliberately” (as HDT would say) is not a choice that most homeless make; it is forced upon them.  What is most exciting here for me is that the work from last year is still present for this student, and he is still struggling to make sense of it.

The Upshot (as Leopold would say)

What do I take away from this?  Don’t give up.  Don’t stop trying to help kids find connections in their world to their work in class.  Remember that developmental abilities trump so many other factors.  They are just kids.  They know when we care about them.  This essay changed me.  The work we do is worth the frustration and effort.

 

Writing and Revision – to Re-see

Thanks to Clay Burell for asking me to consider finishing this entry.

As part of our Community Connections work this year we published an anthology of student writing. The anthology included the writing of every member (but one) of the junior class, and each student was asked to revise a piece of writing until their teacher/facilitators (or I) thought that was ready to publish. We did not have any standards in place for what was publishable besides these:

• Each narrative was in three parts.
• Each part reflected a different perspective of an experience that they had in their work on a social justice problem or initiative.
• The narrative was to be free of spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors

For background, the Community Connections assignments and reflections are here.

There were some interesting things that this assignment showed me.

Working with colleagues: while the assignment was based on the style of Dos Passos or Steinbeck (we all read Grapes of Wrath), we had different ideas about what exemplifies the intercalary voice. I think that asking students to write in “the style” of Steinbeck is fine, but as to criticize them because they are not “Steinbecky” enough leaves me puzzled. In addition, we are deeply divided about whether or not grades are a motivating factor for student writing. I argue that students want to look good in the eyes of their peers and that publication is a public enough forum to raise the bar on student performance. In addition, the conversations that I had with students (using Google docs) about their writing was intense in many cases. I made the conscious choice not to ask students to “rewrite” but to “look again” at their writing. (Thanks to my colleague George Drury for the linguistic connection of rehearsal – to re-hear something and revision – to re-see it.)

Some of the group leaders were not satisfied with the narratives until the students did exactly what they asked for in a revision. “You still haven’t done what I asked,” or “You didn’t make the changes that I want,” were comments that I saw on more than on occasion. I think that this was less than helpful to student writers trying to find their voice.

As the only member of the team that read all of the submissions, I can say that part of the problem with the “Steinbecky” nature of the assignment is that some students were/are not developmentally ready to see the Big Picture. They can not extrapolate from their experience to understand how it is an example of a larger issue. Some of them could not understand why they had to be outside on a cold day. Others are ready and able to empathize and make larger connections to the city and the world beyond the school borders.

A couple of examples of those that have reached beyond concrete-operational in their development.

Regarding women in the world: “The women’s battle in the 21^st century therefore is not one against the government, rather against a way of thinking. For example, in the case of Democrat Hillary Clinton, a woman that has gotten involved in what has formerly been a male dominated race. Though the fact that a women running for president is a wonderful idea as it shows the remarkable progress America has made, the ridiculous criticisms she receives regarding her actions as a woman are what truly show America’s inability to rise to the occasion of having a woman as president. An ice queen or an emotional wreck, Clinton is continually ridiculed. If Americans could only think of women in a brighter light, as an integral part of our society that adds depth, strength, intelligence and so much more to our American character, then maybe the women’s fight for equality would no longer be a fight but instead a reality.”

Regarding class and the drug war : From his spot on the other side of the glass, the zookeeper watched the lion pace about the cage. Its steps were regal and grave, its golden mane brilliantly catching the light as it surveyed its territory with a haughty air…. Gradually their eyes were drawn together, their gaze made mutually contemptuous by familiarity. Both blamed one another for the glass wall, believing the other to be the causer of its existence while wanting nothing more than to smash it into a thousand shimmering flakes.

The lion averted its honey-flecked eyes and stared at the translucent wall, as did the zookeeper. Both hated the thing. It was an illusion to create a sense of nearness when they knew all it did was divide, its transparency the only difference between it and the fences and chains. The lion hated the wall for its denial freedom. The zookeeper hated the wall for its perceived necessity. Both hated it as a surrender to the belief that they could not live peaceably together.

Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the mind. And so the lion paced and the zookeeper watched, both hungering for the day when the fury of their hearts could join to shatter the barrier and undo the divisions of their minds.

A couple of writers who are not there yet:

On meeting with the city about homelessness: We walked off the train and were met with gale force winds. While the walk was only five minutes or less, it felt like an eternity. When we finally arrived, a man who seemed like an assistant of some sort welcomed us. It was a sort of surprising atmosphere, not quite what I would expect from a city of Chicago politician. She had some people in her office before us, and we filed into the narrow hallway outside her office. Why was everywhere we went so small? Not long after we arrived, we were told to enter. Her office was similar to the conference room we were in all morning; there was a table with chairs surrounding it. There weren’t enough chairs, so we gave them to those who intended on talking, while the rest of us hugged the walls.

On learning about AIDS and GLBTQ issues: After we had gotten the conventional questions out of the way, he talked on tangents about anything and everything for the two hours or so we were there. This is quite literal, from designated drivers to how it’s possible to catch an STD in your bum. But I digress. Eventually we had to leave and grab some lunch, but on the way out at least he explained the mural even if I can’t remember it now as I write this.
We stopped for Mexican food (which would come up to my dismay later on), but at the moment it was just what everyone needed. In the background of the restaurant there a TV that played incredibly strange programming, Spanish soap operas, and incredibly weird music videos, none of which I had the slightest comprehension of. For the first time in my life I had authentic horchata, and it was possibly one of the most delicious drinks which helped when it took us so long to find the guacamole, and all the chips I ate were topped with hot sauce. Lesson learned from the day however is, don’t be negative if your original plans go astray, and never eat burritos and rice milk if you have to spend the rest of the day with other people.

So we asked a lot of them, and for the most part they gave us their best work. Some students were only able to write about their experiences in the concrete – what I did/ate/saw – and others were able to look at how what they did connects to what we all do. It was impressive to read all of their narratives. We published the anthology as a paperback using the amazing folks at WordPro in Ithaca, NY. I called it Common Air, taken from Song of Myself by Walt Whitman:

17
These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they
are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to
nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are
nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe.

And you know what? Each student got a copy, and I didn’t find ONE in the trash.