Affirming the Student Author and Artist (Writing in Color, 2012) Affirming the Author/ Effective Teacher Response/ Taped Response/ Examples of Actual Teacher Response to Student Writing/ Parent Response / A Cautionary Tale/ Famous To Themselves/ Voices of Fame/ Writing and Reading for Ourselves Affirming the Author When teachers read my students’ picture books, they sometimes exclaim: “These were written and illustrated by fifth graders?” Few readers would respond with equal surprise if reading these same students’ unrevised and unedited daily journal entries. What’s the difference between the daily writing that students do for practice and the project writing that they do over a long period of time and for a specific audience?
Lucy Calkins explains that knowing that their work will be published energizes students. My students begin writing picture books and autobiographies because I require it of them, but somewhere along the way they end up writing these books because they have stories inside that they want to share. They no longer write for me; they write for themselves and for their bigger audiences. But I am still their first reader, and the pleasure I find in every step of the process that we take together makes a difference. Margaret Atwood, in Negotiating with the Dead (NY: Random House, 2002), wrote about
her
Brownie Troop Leader, a woman who loved her early writing. Girls earned badges in Atwood’s Brownie troop by making little books sewn together with the wool usually used for darning socks, and Atwood shared her stories with her mentor through this book project. When Atwood’s troop leader was over ninety years old, her niece read the novel, Cat’s Eye. She ‘recognized’ her aunt in Atwood’s story and brought Atwood and Brown Owl together for tea fifty years after Atwood had first earned those Girl Scout badges. Three days before her death, Brown Owl retrieved the little hand-sewn books from a box of memories and returned them to Margaret Atwood.
A close friend of mine, Mary Jacobson, had a similar experience. In her early married years, Mary taught sixth grade in Northern California before beginning her own family and moving with them to Norway and then back to this country to pursue several careers. Her children’s adolescence ended before Tamora Pierce’s books were published, but Mary is an avid reader herself who continues to do volunteer work with children. She found herself reading a newspaper review of Pierce’s books one day and wondering aloud, since Pierce’s name is distinctive, if this could possibly be the same Tamora Pierce she’d once taught and loved in her sixth grade class many years earlier.
Mary’s daughter, Karin Brouillard (now South African Bureau Chief for the Washington Post), was visiting that day. She responded to her mother’s offhand musings by immediately checking out Pierce on her computer. Mary kept on reading her newspaper while Karin typed away at her computer. Suddenly, Mary’s reading was interrupted by her daughter’s happy shout of recognition – she’d found her mother’s name mentioned by Tamora Pierce at www.tamorapierce.com/bio.html.
The next year, as I was still scribbling my own stories, my English teacher (bless you, Mrs. Jacobson!) introduced me to the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R.Tolkien. I got hooked on fantasy and then on science fiction and both made their way into my stories. I tried to write the kind of thing I was reading, with one difference: the books I loved were missing teenaged girl warriors. I couldn’t understand this lapse of attention on the part of the writers I loved, so until I could talk them into correcting this small problem, I wrote about those girls, the fearless, bold, athletic creatures that I was not, but wanted so badly to be.
After reading more about Tamora Pierce online, Mary picked up several of Pierce’s books at the local bookstore to read for herself. She found among them a book Pierce had dedicated to: “To Mary Jacobson, my Former Teacher” that is now one of her proudest possessions. Of course, Mary sent off a letter of response to Tamora immediately.
Parker Palmer writes in Courage to Teach that great teaching happens only in relationship, when the minds of a great teacher and a great student meet. Young writers hope that this will happen
for them and recognize it when it does; they hunger for purposeful coaching and a relationship with a teacher that will endure. When I googled “Tamora Pierce” myself in order to write about her connection to my friend, Mary, I found 111,000 hits to explore. Her books have been translated for young readers into: German, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, and Japanese. I particularly loved the words of a young fan on Pierce’s website who wrote of her gratitude to Mary for introducing Pierce to The Lord of the Rings and for inspiring Pierce to write. Pierce and her fans have turned my friend into a teaching legend!
Since we are our young writers’ first readers, we are called upon to respond not only to the structure of their sentences but also to the contents of their minds and hearts. Mary paid attention to both when teaching Tamora.
Effective Teacher Response My students learn to respond to one another in personal but nonjudgmental ways, to quote back exact phrases, lines, and even full sentences that sparkle, and to ask questions of other young writers that will help them to clarify their own thinking. Both students and teachers, when responding to student writing, try to stay in the role of reader.
Respecting the autonomy of a writer while simply engaging him in a conversation about his writing isn’t easy, however. Preservice teachers responding to only one young writer at a time as an exercise find this tough to do well. As classroom teachers we must often write back to thirty writers in a single afternoon, a far more difficult task.
Some teachers don’t like anything you write. If you don’t write exactly the words they want, they say it’s bad writing. Some teachers think everything you do is perfect and don’t give you any suggestions on how to be a better writer. My teacher gives you ideas on how to improve what you’ve written. Now I am not afraid to put my ideas down on paper and have others read my work. Sander Gusinow, Grade 5
The vast majority of the hours I have to respond to student writing I devote to work-in-progress. I want to give students like Sander “ideas on how to improve,” so I spend most of the time available to me talking about such ideas with my students. However, I know that students also expect something substantial from me in the way of response at the end of each of the bookend projects, and I try not to disappoint them.
I use stationary (with envelopes) whose petite size dictates that I write only short letters when I respond to the ‘published’ picture books. I write these letters while I am reading the finished books, quoting favorite passages back to the writers as I encounter them. When responding to autobiographies, I don’t use stationary but write on specific pages in the Critical Acclaim section of their books set aside just for that purpose.
Letters in response to picture books take me about ten or fifteen minutes a book to write. Sometimes I find myself so excited about the growth of a book from its earliest draft that I reread a story and linger over it, but I try not to do this. I am already familiar with the picture books by the time that they are published; my response writes itself. It’s the illustrations that I am least familiar with when I first hold the books in my hands since students tend to do at least a third of their artwork after completing their stories. For the autobiography, I also write and evaluate while I read but, since these books are longer, it takes
more time to write a final
response letter.
The rubrics I use for grading change each time I teach the writing of picture books. I mark what my state assesses each year such as: ideas and content, sentence structure, organization, voice, conventions, and presentation, and I assign a numerical value to each. I also mark categories my students and I have agreed upon together to consider such as: growth from early to finished draft, attention to spelling and punctuation in final draft writing, cooperative work in writing groups, deadlines met on time or not, evidence of research, focus on specific audiences, and effort expended on book design and illustration. Students evaluate their own process and product formally before I do so.
To discourage competition, I hand out grading envelopes to students at the end of the day on a Friday. I ask students to share the contents of their letters only with parents, not with one another. Accountability, as far as the writing of picture books and autobiographies in concerned, is about producing students who will continue to love to read and will continue to choose to write. It’s not about any letter, number, or percentage grade. Alfie Kohn wisely advises us to grade infrequently and only at the end of big projects rather than during the learning itself. Taped response I responded to fifth grade writers two or three times a year by audiotape. I’d read through a draft silently and mark talking points with numbers. Then, I’d read through the draft aloud into a tape recorder, stopping at talking points to discuss options with writers. This won’t work for every writing teacher, but it worked for me.
I timed myself taping response for students. If it took me 40 minutes to respond in depth in written form to a major piece of work, doing so by tape added 5 minutes to the process. And I never had to explain to students what my notes meant - I could talk on at length on the tape on various topics, and I didn’t have to use any kind of shorthand.
Students listened to my tapes about their writing over and over again; they even listened to them in the car with parents and extended our conversation in multiple directions that way. The technology has changed, but MP3 players make teacher ‘tapes’ even more portable. One high poverty school in my district used their technology grant not only for laptops and color copying costs but to buy iPods that students could wear home. One kindergarten teacher sent her students home regularly with lessons on their Shuffles. Our “plugged in” generation can now plug into their teacher’s voices even after the school day has ended.
Though recording my voice was productive, it took time. I learned to tape response from an exemplary high school biology teacher who taught for the Bay Area Writing Project at Berkeley. He used tapes with five classes – one per student per week. I don’t have his energy. I used them
only infrequently and only with two fifth grade classes per year and one evening class for teachers. Students appreciated the effort I put forth and most met it with a similar level of effort.
MW did more than teach me how to revise and edit. She encouraged and praised me. She sometimes even called me at home to compliment me on my writing. She put poems and articles she thought I would enjoy in my mailbox at school. (She thought correctly!) MW takes me seriously as a writer and pays attention to my work . . . (For my picture book) I never thought I was capable of creating good artwork. I surprised myself by painting and drawing quite well. I really gained confidence in both my writing and illustrating skills through creating the picture book. MW gave me response to my story on a cassette tape. I listened to the tape, thought about each suggestion she made and then applied it to my writing. I had to write several drafts of the s t o r y ; w i t h e a c h n e w d r a f t I l e a r n e d m o re a b o u t w r i t i n g a n d re v i s i n g . Aaron Wells
Notice that when Aaron wrote about the teaching of writing, he mentioned the taped response that took hours to complete but he also described the phoned-in compliment that took only minutes. As significantly overworked and often overwhelmed teachers, we need to adopt whatever practices we can that produce maximum impact with a minimum investment of time. Phoned in compliments ‘cost’ little.
One weekend, while shopping at our local farmer’s market for its end-of-the-summer bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables, I met the parents of children I’d once taught. The dad offered to share a basket of fresh local strawberries with me while catching me up on the news of his three children. Before I could leave this family to return to my own shopping, the mother told me she had a question for me. She still had on her answering machine – six years after I first recorded it - a message I’d left after school one day about her oldest child.
Their answering machine was showing its age. The mother asked me if I knew how she could transfer the message I’d left on it onto a disk so that she wouldn’t lose it when she replaced the old answering machine with a newer one. I told her that I could not solve her problem as the technology was beyond me, but I left that farmers’ market convinced that I must write more about this teaching practice.
It’s a simple one - as the best ones always are. I called students’ parents at home from time to time during the year, not to discuss problems or arrange for the business of school but to comment on something the child had done that was exemplary. I tried to call right at 3:00 - when hardly anyone is ever home - so that I could leave a message on the ubiquitous answering machine rather than talk for an extended period. A typical message?
“Hi, Andersons! Merrill here – don’t worry about returning my call. I wanted to talk to you about something that happened in school today. When the children shared their writing, I sat in on Joe’s group. He was responding to the work of a new student who is a bit unsure of herself. Joe was trying to figure out for himself how to integrate dialogue in a natural way into his story. He told this girl that he believed that the conversation she’d written for her two characters flowed well, made sense, and helped move her story along. I was pleased to discover that Joe knows how to talk about writing in such a focused way, but that’s not why I called you today. What I wanted to share with you instead is that Joe reached out to Melinda with a kindness that I see repeated in his interactions with other children day after day. Thank you for raising such a thoughtful boy.”
Examples of Actual Teacher Response to Student Writing I try to establish an encouraging tone. Dear Charlie, What a beautiful book you have designed and written! The dedication you wrote about the members of your family is detailed and thoughtful. I’m sure your parents and siblings were pleased to be remembered on this important page. It was a wonderful idea to use quotations from writers from Gabon. Yours is truly a tri-lingual, tri-cultural book.You make a strong statement against racism on p. 4, and then you go on to point out that ‘My maternal grandparents faced difficulties in their lives, but they succeeded in overcoming them.’ In the biography of Eleanor Roosevelt we are reading in class right now, we see how Eleanor had to struggle to overcome difficulties, too. In each student autobiography you read, you read about challenges faced and met. You recognized that you yourself overcame difficulties in learning to communicate fully in English. You have come so far this year and I am so proud of you, Charles Jean! I want to linger over the pictures you’ve drawn for chapter four so I can study them carefully. You wrote that you hoped your pictures would inspire; they do! MW I quote the child’s words back to her before reflecting on them. Dear Jackie,
The writing in your school years’ chapter is eloquent - you focused on the many meanings of the word ‘style.’ I found myself rereading what you wrote about Ms. E. “Ms. E told me how special she thought my writing was. I look back at it now, and it doesn’t seem so special, but she gave me a compliment that counted. Writing is a way that I express myself.” You wrote about this teacher giving you a “compliment that counted,” about another teacher who allowed you the “freedom to choose how you learned,” and a third teacher who guided you to become an “original thinker”. Each piece in this chapter is more reflective, more thoughtprovoking than the one before. Please be sure you share your drawing of Ms. E. with her! MW I respond to both writing and art. Dear Ila, (Ila is the illustrator of Writing in Color) You wrote, “After the divorce, I continued living with my mom, and her personality never changed, she was still crazy. She still danced around, pulling me to my feet and dancing with me to crazy music, singing along in her mommy-nonsense words. I love my mom’s craziness, even though it drives me nuts.” You’ve painted as vivid a portrait of your mom with words in these sentences as the picture of yourself you sketched with pastels on the cover of this book! MW Parent Response Teachers don’t need to “teach” volunteer parents how to respond to student work, but a written guide helps those who don’t write often to respond effectively. They may look at it only for a moment or they may refer to it repeatedly as they work with young writers in your classes. Response Specifics, A Model Guide 1. I found this page of text and illustration memorable because 2. The introduction works when 3. The conclusion ties it together as you 4. (FOR FICTION) To resolve the conflict, you seem to 5. (FOR FICTION) The protagonist grows or changes in your story when 6. Verbs empowered during revision include 7. Editing successes I recognize include -
A Cautionary Tale
One year, at a fifth grade authors’ tea, a stranger sat down at my table while I was trying to respond to a student’s somewhat tardy autobiography, and I wasn’t happy about being interrupted. The young man I was attempting to write to (I’ll call him Pat for the purposes of this story) was a wonderful writer and illustrator, but he saw a deadline set before him as only a vague suggestion at best.
On the day of the autobiography tea, Pat’s was the only one of my fifty students’ books I hadn’t yet had a moment to evaluate formally. Since it was the last one turned in, I’d hoped to be able to find time to write to Pat during the three-hour open house for authors and families. However, I’d barely written a line when this strange woman walked toward me, sat down at my table, and looked pointedly at the book I was holding in my hands. She announced - in no uncertain terms that she had come to the tea to read this book and only this book. I responded in a similarly chilly fashion to what I took to be her rudeness that guidelines for readers at the tea were clear. All guests were supposed to read a sampling of the books that the children had written. If this woman were Pat’s aunt or a close family friend, surely she’d have other chances to read his book?
When I suggested to this stranger with little finesse that she choose another book to read first, she was unyielding. Not in the least bit interested in reading a book by any other student, she told me that she’d just sit there at my table and wait until I would give up Pat’s book. And so that’s what she did. She sat there and waited, staring at me fixedly. She wore me down with her eyes until I quietly handed Pat’s book over to her in a dispirited fashion. Soon after, I was distracted by questions from other more enthusiastic family members and students, and the afternoon hours passed by in a blur.
At six o’clock that evening, I shooed people away from the gym and hunted through the books left on the tables to find Pat’s book to take home with me. Late that night, I read all the way through the final draft of his autobiography, wrote my response to it, and turned at the last minute to check out the final pages of the book’s Critical Acclaim section. I decided to see if I
could locate the letter that the mysterious stranger had written to Pat. One letter stood out for me from all the others, and I knew instantly that this was the one that she had written. I’ll have to paraphrase it here the best I can, as I foolishly did not take time the next day to make an exact copy.
Dear Pat, You don’t know me, but I’m the mother of your first grade buddy, the one you dedicated your picture book to. When you two were first matched up in September, both Amy and I were worried. She had hoped to be matched up with a fifth grade girl, and of course you are a boy. (Maybe you, too, wished to be matched up with a first grade boy?) Still, when she came running home to tell me all about you on the first day that you played together on the swings at recess, I knew that everything was going to be all right. I knew that you were going to watch out for my girl and that you would be her protector and her friend. As you probably know, Amy’s had to undergo a number of facial surgeries (with more yet to come). Because of the scars she sees on her face in the mirror, she’s not as confident as we wish she would be. “Cuteness” is closely connected with a sense of self worth and happiness for many first grade girls. Of course, we think that Amy is more than cute - but we know that not everyone sees her that way. You do, and this is obvious to us. Thank you for being wise beyond your years, kind beyond our experience, and a very good person. I feel honored that you were chosen to guide my child through her first year of elementary school. What a beautiful autobiography you have written and illustrated here and how pleased Amy was that you wrote to her and about her in this book as you did in your picture book last fall. I am so glad that I was able to come to this tea, to meet you and to read your book, and to write to you here about how much you’ve come to mean to my family. We will never forget you. With Love, Respect, and Appreciation, Amy’s Mom I read this letter, wiped the tears from my cheeks, and then called Pat to share it aloud over the phone with him and his single dad (at the same time on two phones) since his book had been “in use” during the tea. I thought back at my impatience with Pat for turning his book in late and my impatience with Amy’s mom for taking Pat’s book out of my hands at the tea. Grateful for what Pat and Amy’s mother had both taught me, I resolved to meet the demands of the next school year with greater humility and greater patience.
Famous to Themselves I write frequently for teaching journals.
My students, however, publish much more than I:
stories, essays, poems, articles, letters, and reviews in journals, magazines, newspapers, and books for local, statewide, national and even international audiences. It takes a great deal of teacher time to scaffold for success when publishing in the wider world, no matter what the age of the writer. Almost every successful attempt to support students’ efforts to publish formally springs from a series of unsuccessful attempts. The only reason I invest time in helping students find publishers for their work is because I have seen that the experience of being published can be transformative.
I’ll never forget driving with my daughter to the post office late one Friday afternoon. We were rushing to make a five o’clock postmark deadline for a fifth grader who’d applied to serve on the board of a national children’s magazine. The application included her writing sample, art sample, an introductory letter (all of which had been handed in on time) and my somewhat tardy letter of support. These papers had sat all week long on my desk at the bottom of a pile of things I’d planned to get to but hadn’t. I finally did make it to the post office on time - but then had to pay handsomely to expedite delivery of the envelope.
On the way home from the post office, Malena asked why I had expended so much effort that day to support the work of just one child when I had fifty to teach and when the chances of her winning the position on the magazine were slim. I explained to my daughter my belief that in teaching we succeed or fail one child at a time. If teaching students is ultimately about loving them, then acting on that love means finding time for them when they are most in need of it. The girl whose application I encouraged in such a tardy fashion that day did in fact earn an honorary position on that national magazine and works as an artist today. She is Ila, the illustrator of Writing in Color.
There are ways to publish student work that are neither time nor labor intensive. Many of my San Francisco students were new English Language Learner, and it was difficult at first to find a larger audience for their writing as it emerged, but I called the editor of the independent paper (an advertiser/ “throw away” paper) that served my neighborhood and became editor of the Children’s Page of The San Francisco Independent in return for a guarantee of regular space on the page for my students. I posted suggested themes for each month’s columns, contacted other teachers to solicit their students’ work, and set myself up in business.
I spent only an hour or two each month editing this newspaper but many students saw their work in print, and students from my fourth grade class were published in every issue. My writers were pleased to be published in a real newspaper, and I could provide plentiful free copies of their work at no cost for students to take home and share.Today, it’s harder to find newspapers like this one but easy to find equivalent blogs that will accept student work.
One of the teachers I admire most, Judy Davis, teaches in New York City and makes it her project to make her students as famous as possible. She acts in the classroom with constant, unflagging confidence that her students are about to do incredible things that everyone in the world will want to know about. The famousness of Judy’s kids isn’t limited to publication. Judy also makes them famous to themselves … Judy takes notes on just about everything her students say or do; she’s constantly writing as she teaches. It must be a transforming experience as a student to have your teacher write down your words, as if they were really interesting and smart. It makes you say smarter things or at least what you understand to be considered smarter things. Katherine Bomer, Time for Meaning, Crafting Literate Lives in Middle School and High School, Heinemann, 1995.
Voices of Fame A hush washed over the room as my voice dropped from the air. My twenty-page story of Little Walrus was finally finished. The hush was overcome by the excited noise of my classmates, waiting to comment. This experience was a substantial boost to my writing career. I learned that I could write well and that people enjoyed my writing. David Platt., age 11 Dear Merrill,
I love you for many reasons, but today I love you most for ‘making the fifth-graders write books!’ This assignment has been the most significant task my son has accomplished in all his school years. I have watched him struggle with and thrill at what he has written. Kathy, mother of Christopher Barnes, age 10 Merrill, You showed me how to love something that you do in ‘school’ that was not necessarily the ‘cool’ thing to do. It’s something I could not live without now. You made everyone special, reading from everyone, saying it was ‘an excellent piece of writing’ which was so very important in our young innocent lives. I remember bringing home writing and beaming, telling my family that my teacher had read my work out loud to the class.” Clara Bradley (In high school, reflecting on her work as a fifth grader)
David, Kathy, and Clara each wrote about the “thrill of fame,” the sense of importance that children feel when their voices are heard. That’s why young writers work so hard at writing to be published, and why projects like the picture book and the autobiography are worth doing with all children, not just children of privilege.
In The Children in Room E6 (Algonquin 2006), Susan Eaton wrote about a group of poor children in Hartford who labored at writing long sets of test-aligned exercises, writing to 45 minute deadlines over and over again during segregated school days unpunctuated by recess breaks. She compared this Hartford education to that of the nearby – wealthier and whiter district of Marlborough where children as young as eight spent weeks working on one story that they wrote, revised, and polished until it shone. One third grade teacher at a Marlborough school must have believed in project learning because his students wrote and rewrote entire novels before the year’s end. Of course, the Marlborough kids made good use of twice-daily recess breaks since the schools they attended were not ruled by text anxiety.
Writing and Reading for Yourself I felt hopeful when I read about this third grade teacher and his kids writing books together and wished that the Hartford children could have similar opportunities to publish their stories. I’ve
written this book for teachers at every kind of schools and at all levels. Third graders may not be able to develop stories or artwork as fully as fifth graders can, but by second or third grade most children have a definite sense of what a story is all about. They can invent memorable characters and write stories about them that readers will want to return to time and time again. They can become “famous to themselves� and to those they care most about. In the foreword to this book, Sander wrote that he learned in the fifth grade that what he wrote, he wrote for himself as much as for his readers. The writing-to-publish I’ve written about in Writing in Color is all and only about that kind of writing.
Merrill and Max, photo by Matt Schumaker