New blog: www.eloranicole.blogspot.com

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Sunrises make me come alive. I’m usually up far before the sun makes an appearance anyway, so when the first light of the day creeps its way across the sky I can’t help but smile. Sunsets are relaxing. Sunrises take my breath away.

It was three months ago, in the middle of a gorgeous sunrise filled with glowing iridescent clouds and trees that looked on fire, that I met her. We had both gotten to school early, before the janitors came and lights in the classrooms made a dance of electricity. We stood next to each other, completely silent.

And then I heard it. She was crying. I remember distinctly the feeling of dread. I hated coming into contact with people who cried, especially those who made a habit of it. I tucked my brown hair behind my ear and focused on the light blue that was taking over the deep violet of the sky.

“I never should have gone home yesterday.”

My insides sank. Was she seriously trying to make conversation? My eyebrows bent in frustration as if suddenly my nail beds were absolutely fascinating…I hoped she would not say anything else.

“I never should have believed him when he said he’d change.” Her words were stilted, interrupted by hiccupped sobs.

Obviously she wasn’t going to stop talking, so I figured I’d just sit there and listen. I turned my face halfway towards hers and raised an eyebrow.

Apparently, that’s all she needed. I never even had to say a word.

“I mean, it’s not like he’s my dad or anything, but he’s sleeping in the same bed as my mom. You’d think I’d get some kind of perk besides him trying to crawl in the same bed as me.”

She had my attention then. Was she…was she serious? Somewhere in the recesses of my social understanding I found my voice.

“Is this some kind of sick joke?”

She didn’t even pay any mind to my question. “I had to wait a little longer than normal to get out of the house this time,” she shuddered, “he uh…he fell asleep…” She couldn’t finish save the tears streaming down her face.

“Listen, you don’t have to tell me this.”

She turned and looked at me with mascara inked around her eyes like a wet raccoon. “Do you ever look at the sunrise and feel hope? It’s a new day. What’s left behind in yesterday has passed and there is nothing you can do to bring it back. It’s reliable. The promise of a morning sky supersedes anything I’ve ever known. It’s beautiful. All of the colors, mixing together to create a new shade…” Her voice dropped to just above a whisper. “Without the sunrise I wouldn’t feel alive. The sunrise reminds me there’s always another day coming…”

I was speechless. Who was this girl? I looked closely but didn’t recognize her despite the oversized hoodie, sock sleeves and greasy hair.

Somewhere in the distance, birds began to sing, a three note song of hope and promise; glancing at the sky I gasped, the light blue had begun to mix with red to create a rainbow of radiating light that stood in stark contrast to the few stars that remained stubbornly behind.

I turned to hear more of her story, I was held captive by the intricate connection I had felt in such a short amount of time. I remember being keenly disappointed when I realized she was gone.

Her words echoed in my brain. How had she known my story? How could someone be going through the exact same thing, but different? I looked around one more time, to make sure that I hadn’t missed her hiding in a corner or shrinking back undetected, but she was no where to be found.

That was when I met her, though. That was when I met the girl who changed my life.

* * *

His name is Kevin Matouse. At six feet, he’s easily a head above the rest in our class. But he’s so cute and every time he gets close to me my knees start to wobble and my hands start dripping with sweat and I start to stutter. A shaking girl with leaky hands and a speech impediment is really not conducive to the whole, “I’m trying to impress you” vibe I attempt to give off, but it’s whatever.

I’ve heard he’s not the best guy around, and that he’s not good for me, but there’s just something about him. Perhaps it’s those baby blues; a girl can get lost in some baby blues, especially when they’re paired with shining white teeth and a body with muscles I didn’t even know existed. Crap. I think to myself. I’ve gone and drooled on my homework again.

I’m at home now, and all I can hear is my mom and dad arguing. Breath falls out of my lips in an exasperated sigh. You would think that after twenty years of marriage, they would have figured out how to get along. I think about Kevin again and smile. We would get along. We would get along just fine.

Forgetting my homework, I close my eyes and dream about being Mrs. Kevin Matouse with knees that don’t shake and hands that don’t sweat and words that don’t skip.

So, I've been a little incognito for a while; 125 benchmarks to grade and two papers to write and lessons to plan and parent e-mails to respond to kind of took over my life this past month, but I'm done with graduate classes at least for a month (yay!) and I'd thought I'd share with you one of the papers I wrote...if only because it means I would have posted something. :)

Anywho, enjoy. Let me know your thoughts.

Do not come lightly to the blank page. I stole this sentence from Stephen King, and it’s all I can think about as I glance through my students’ papers. For the most part, my students have taken the assignment seriously. It’s simple, really: write about something (or someone) that is significant to you. Two – five pages. Double spaced and rough draft attached. But it’s the life that is in these pages – the thoughts and the fears and the uncertainties – that force me to tread lightly.

I am a writer at heart. If I go weeks without writing I am not content and I get tense and my mind wanders to the blank side of the receipt stuffed in my purse from my Wal-Mart trip. It’s only a matter of minutes before my thoughts are transcribed on the small piece of paper. Yet, as much as writing is a passion of mine, it’s seen as something weird and unusual to my students.  Even more shocking, very few teachers who stand in front of the classroom and spout tenants of good writing are writers themselves.

Writing has become nothing more than a brief paragraph here, a small response of the novel there, and lest we forget, the oh-so-tempting plot summary posing as literary analysis. I don’t know about you, but these activities scream that writing is an integral part of society and should be taught with formality and precision. I mean, what student wouldn’t love to write after experiencing his or her daily dose of “Steps to Becoming a Literature Pundit: Mencken did it, You Can Too!”?

The more I experience writing the more I am convinced that writing is a process. There is no way that someone can learn how to write without well, writing. Teachers using curriculum as a crutch cripple students by relying on the supposed formulas presented in many writing programs. In order for students to truly formulate a reading/writing connection, they need to think. And in order to think, they need to be engaged. And in order to be engaged, they have to be emotionally connected to what they are writing.

In his article Teaching Writing from the Inside, Tom Romano (2007) includes a statement from the Ohio Department of Education (2001): “Students will learn to write expansively, trusting language to lead them to surprises of meaning and insight” (169).  According to the research done by Ohio, the skill of allowing language to lead to individual insight holds as much importance as creating an outline or coming up with a solid thesis statement. How can we teach this? It seems a bit awkward, standing in front of the classroom and allowing the strict regime of rationality take a back seat to emotion-driven writing. Everything spoon-fed to us during our days of Education courses seem to slowly fade away: Have a plan! Be the boss! Show authority!

You mean I need to lose my authority? Not necessarily. Obviously, good teachers have good class management. There is a difference, though, when dealing with teaching students how to write. Murray (2007) believes that with the lack of authority comes respect. A true writing teacher becomes a colleague to students – one who has walked the road before them and assists them in their own journey. It’s not enough to just teach writing. No, teachers who claim writing as their classroom initiative should be writers themselves. And his reasoning is clear: “Would you send your child to a piano teacher who couldn’t play the piano? A tennis coach who never charged the net? A driving instructor who didn’t have a license? Of course not” (2007, 180). 

He continues in his rationale with simple truths. The most important thing for a teacher of writing to remember is to write with the students. Even more so, write the assignments. Giving a writing assignment is fine. However, if you as an adult with at least a college degree are unable to complete the assignment, how in the world can a high school student who struggles with dyslexia or subject/verb agreement sufficiently complete the assignment without becoming completely frustrated and ready to give up writing all together? Murray (2007) actually goes so far as to say banish all assignments because most bad writing is the reflection of bad assignments.

What he says holds merit. This past summer I took part in a Summer Writing Institute through New Jersey Writing Project of Texas. This rigorous three week course quickly became a life changing experience for me. As part of the workshop, we were responsible for writing two pieces: a reflexive piece and an extensive piece. Both of them were written in week and a half increments, with plenty of revisions. The reasoning behind the curriculum of NJWPT solely rests on the belief of getting teachers to write with their students. For three weeks, you experience every range of emotion that students feel when placed with a writing assignment: I don’t know what to write about. What if it’s not good enough? What if they laugh at my serious story? I don’t want to share about something so close to me…

Each individual was expected to read their piece out loud in peer editing circles, something that Linda Rief (2007) expects of her students as well. Reading my writing out loud did something for me. It forced me to make connections and to see gaps of misunderstanding. It also revealed to me the emotions behind my words.

My first piece was about my name – and what my family’s heritage has done for me. The first draft was simple – sharing memories of being in a small dusty library with my grandmother who happens to be my namesake. This memory moved to stifling road trips with my grandparents to Idaho during the summer and my experience as a ranch hand to my great-grandfather, one of the original cowboys in Idaho and kin to the original settlers of this beautiful mountain state. Reading it out loud led me to experience these memories in a new way, and something happened similar to Romano’s (2007) belief of writing: I gained insight. Looking back at my saved drafts, it’s amazing to me the difference between the first and final. The first is good. It’s loaded with memories and I received compliments about my experiences and how I described them in detail. However, it’s the final draft that brings a smile to my face. So much work went into that paper – and without the stress of just writing to get it done, I actually tried to do my best. I took part in the process of writing. Writing and rewriting until I saw the paper in my sleep and was able to type with my eyes closed did wonders to my capability as a writer. No longer could I stare at a paper needing revision without hearing the tenants of ratiocination: watch for “be” verbs! Beware of redundancy! Keep your sentence beginnings fresh and your diction precise!

Murray (2007) discusses the importance of draft-writing in his article Teach Writing Your Way. He challenges the reader to an activity: take an index card and just write; let your pen do the talking. Not worrying about spelling or legibility or what you will write next, just write. Anything, really. Words, what you need to know, anything, as long as you “put words down until they wiggle, snake-like, toward a sentence. Write the sentence. Follow it” (181). There is no prompt or thesis or starter word – this activity simply allows the writing to open up and start a discussion, telling you what needs to be written. After the index card is full, take another and write again – revising what you have written. Doing this about five or six times, compare your first card with your last. You may be surprised – more than likely you had something important to say. Why? Because everyone is a writer. Everyone has a story. It’s just up to us to listen to our story. Through drafting, we reveal something that is a part of who we are and we understand where we began.

The index card idea is similar to Romano’s (2006) belief that we can always let the writing do the talking. In a conversation with a friend, he mentioned how he never really knew where a piece of writing was going to end up. Only when he was finished did he realize what he needed to say. His friend quickly responds with a rebuttal of that only happens in creative writing, in which Romano (2006) disagrees. He points out grocery lists as an example. Writing down things we need leads us to think of other things which lead us (if we allow it) to something completely different than what we were thinking of originally. In our classrooms, students need to have the freedom and the ability to think on paper. Allow their thoughts to spill out on the blank sheet before them and be surprised at the result.

Yet, as great as this process sounds, we are still teachers in the real world teaching students who are faced with a number of distracters that keep them from writing. If it’s not the influx of inventive spelling used in “txt mssgng” then it’s the inability to use proper pronunciation because of the myspace craze. If a student is given a writing assignment without the opportunity for publishing (whether it be classroom wall or local newspaper or magazine submissions) then what expectations should we have for quality writing? Both Murray (2006) and Rief (2006) believe in the writing process culminating in publication, and for good reason.

Every student has a story. This story may seem small and insignificant to them, but it could make the difference in the life of another. But how can we convince the student this, especially when up until now his or her writing has been bordering on meaningless – placing words on paper for a teacher who will glance though it and slap a grade on the top that really doesn’t equal the amount of time the student put into it. Rief (2006) says that we need to continually be searching for opportunities that allow students to take their writing public so they can finally understand that they do have a voice and what they have to say is of importance to society. No one else can speak of their story. What they have is truly original and only they can share it in their words. Without their story, something is lost.

Murray (2006) holds a twelve week seminar in his class that focuses on writing as a process. The end result is submission to a magazine or local newspaper. By the time this project is completed, students will have written a total of four drafts and taken part in three conferences over their piece. The students will also practice in writing leads (creating at least fifty that would work for their particular piece) and come up with 150 potential titles for their paper. Most impressive though is that students will experience the joy of submitting a piece they know is good. It’s not enough to write a paper and send it in, crossing your fingers for publication. What students develop in his classroom is a sense of self. More importantly, his students develop a sense of their individual voice. By writing and rewriting and revising and throwing away and polishing, the end result is something the students can truly be proud of. More often than not, the students will finally understand the joy that comes with writing – and the insight you receive when finishing a piece that two weeks ago you had no idea existed.

I am a writer. I try to bring this into my classroom on a daily basis. But I fail my students more often than not when the weight of TAKS and benchmarks and Pre-AP come full force. More than anything I wish for my students the ability to think on paper. To experience the amazing feeling of realizing something you hadn’t known before through writing cannot be explained, only experienced. I return to the stack of papers my students just turned in and am amazed at the tenacity seen through the pages. One girl writes of her burden: knowing her mother is cheating on her father but not wanting to split the family in two. Another writes of a poor decision: the consequences of going against mom and dad turn out to be far worse than she anticipated. Still another one works through the disappointment of having a hero fall from grace: a father leaving his family and the fear that stays with this boy of doing the same. Not all are serious. One student speaks of his triumphant feeling the first time he tied his shoes by himself. Another describes music through color: an attempt to put into words his love for feeling and playing and being music is a success. His words sing off the page. Many speak of family: rocks of support that have been there through thick and thin. Most of these students come to the realization through their writing that family is highly underestimated and unappreciated. All of them, whether the students realize this or not, reveal a voice that begs to be heard.

 Do not come lightly to the blank page. King’s words echo through my head like a broken record, but for good reason. More than ever, I realize the impact writing can have on an individual’s life. Writing shares burdens we don’t want to carry ourselves. The life that is revealed in the pages – the thoughts and the fears and the uncertainties – is what keeps me going. Every student has a voice. Every student has a story. It’s my belief that these voices and stories will change the world. I think of the students that have walked through my classroom door and smile. Hopefully, one of them holds close to his or her heart what we study in class and is putting pen to paper right now. Hopefully, one of them will take the words of Tom Stoppard and change the world: Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.