Are You There, Creative Writing? It's Me, Ms. B

     "Give me a 'P'!" [Hands go up]
     
     What. the. fu---

      Oh no.

        Near-hyperventilating from my rush inside the school administrative classroom, I realize that I've just silently mouthed those syllables in a room full of my colleagues. Even if I did not, my face is very expressive, and I cannot hide my confusion and disdain.   I've arrived four hours late for day one of my training on the "new writing program" that I am expected to learn and teach to students in the fall, and I haven't the slightest idea what's happening.

          This was me back in May when I attended a mandatory "all-day" professional development on the same day that I had to proctor/facilitate RICAS for my students until noon. The training went until 2:40.

         Reading Michelle Kenney and Chris Kindred's article "The Politics of the Paragraph," I felt like they was echoeing many of the things that I think and want to say about "canned" writing programs. As an English teacher who cherishes her relationship with writing all sorts of material, I recognize the positive impact that my teachers had on me throughout my education. According to my memory, at no point did any such writing programs disguised as cheesy acronyms enter my experience. Instead, I fondly recall my time with my English teachers as when they taught my classmates and I a more organic, less "tight" approach to writing.

           Perhaps I wouldn't have such a strong response to Kenney and Kindred's words, if only I weren't in the throes of implementing a "canned" writing program in my own classroom. This one's been adopted by my district, and I do see its value in helping struggling writers to see a light at the end of the research-based writing tunnel. At the same time, however, I have taken issue with the approach since I was first introduced to it back in the late Spring. My biggest problem? It doesn't allow any room for creativity, nor does it include it as an expectation on its rubrics.

         So when Kenney and Kindred write that,

               "systems like these encourage students to produce shallow, fast-food versions of paragraphs    

               that don’t allow much elbow room for creativity or critical thinking, yet lend themselves to

               speed grading by a standardized test scorer or an overworked instructor only 50 essays into a

               stack of 160 on a Sunday night,"

         I agree with these writers wholeheartedly. I feel their words reverberating in my gut.  In my opinion, the system that I am tasked with learning and teaching to my students is helpful because it's so formulaic, but at the same time, it's centered on one way to write academic papers. Also, it eats up time that students could spend writing more freely and injecting creativity into their work.

        One of the fabulous takeaways I got from my student-teaching cooperative teacher (this was when I was studying for my elementary teaching degree; now I teach middle school) was that great teachers make time for and place emphasis on students' creative writing ,even when their curriculum doesn't. Tara was my cooperating teacher, and I loved how she made a big deal out of teaching her kids "entertaining beginnings" (AKA "hooks," exciting ways to being a piece of writing). Tara required students to include entertaining beginnings in everything that they wrote that year. When I got my own classroom last year (eighth grade), I did the same and saw my students' writing blossom from dry explanatory pieces to intriguing, humorous, and dazzling pieces. I saw how one student, who I'll just call "H" here, took the concept from our English classroom into science when the science teacher and I decided to have our students work on their state-mandated argumentative science essay in English class as well as in science. The topic was terrible. "Is the Earth round or flat?" was the key question. When I ever read H's essay and how she'd chosen to start it off with the sound of a man falling off a cliff (because, she quipped, he thought the Earth was round), I lost it. I was entertained, but I was also thrilled that she'd chosen to take her paper one-step-further by adding her own creative flair. I think that entertaining beginnings (and figurative language) should be welcome coexist with text-based essays. Last year, I required  students to include an entertaining beginning when they did their research papers on historical topics related to Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, and it was a big success.  It forced the students to do additional research (a Hitler quote here, an onomatopoeia to make the sound of World War II bombs exploding in readers minds there) and push themselves as writers and revise-ers. Thanks to Tara, I even started this blog post with an entertaining beginning. I think it makes for a better read.

         Fast-forward to this year and my personal experience with a dreaded "canned" writing program that Kindred and Kenney refer to. Since I have no say in choosing or refusing to do our writing program, I need to incorporate "entertaining beginnings" and the like into what I teach my students. Fortunately, my autonomy as a classroom teacher (and the support I receive from the two special educators who share the room with me for three of my five English classes) enables me to do what I want with my students, sort of. Narrative writing, according to Teaching for Joy and Justice author Linda Christensen, is also an area that I can exploit (it's part of my school district's curriculum that I'm teaching a bit of now) to help further my students' writing and reading comprehension. "Telling stories from their lives opens opportunities to talk about meaningful, important, sometimes life-changing events with their classmates," she explains on page 61 of her book. While analytical essays written in response to one or more pieces of literature is important, so is narrative writing.

         When Christensen writes about using guided visualization to inspire students to write about their own formidable experiences, I remember the one time that I did that as a student, which was during my senior year of high school, in a University of Rhode Island credentialed creative writing class . I remember how our teacher took us on a quest to "find our inner writer," and I distinctly recall how I pictured green jell-o as a treasure I unearthed during this visualization, as well as how my black cat experienced the journey with me. Christensen's connection reminds me that narrative writing is creative writing.

         In the narrative writing chapter of her book, she details one way that teachers should share narrative writing pieces with their students and engage learners with a free-flowing (not cookie-cutter) writing process that varies based on who is experiencing it. For instance, she says, "Struggling writers need lots of time working one-on-one with a teacher in class" (64). This is obvious, but in a school where I teach 129 students, the time flies by, and often, I find myself delaying lessons to make sure that all students have gotten the hand of their most recent writing assignment. This doesn't go hand-in-hand with the lightning-fast training and instructions-for-lesson-roll-out that I received to complete at my last writing program PDs, but it's what's right.

         I agree with Kenney and Kindred that instructors do a "disservice" to students by using a formulaic writing program as a crutch upon which to teach. For me, the challenge lies in simultaneously teaching this program and teaching writers to get creative, personal, and think "outside the box."