Holes

Some books you simply miss. Your school didn’t read it, or you moved that year. The Outsiders is one of those books.

I also didn’t see the movie, so I was completely unaware of the story when I picked it up to read for my sixth grade class this fall. What is astounding is not only how beautifully it is written but the fact that it was published when the author graduated from high school.

“I knew I was going to be a writer. I love to write. I began in grade school, because I loved to read, and liked the idea of making stories happen the way I wanted them to. By the time I was in high school I had been practicing for years.” – S.E. Hinton

The Outsiders would be a tremendously powerful novel to read when I was an adolescent, but it is simply devastating to read as a parent.

I am looking forward to the deep conversations I know I will have with the sixth grade this year.



Full Circle

I’ve always wondered why my uncle and my dad, both products of the New York City public school system, turned out to be fine writers. They knew how to write well, and they understood the mechanics of writing.

Turns out they had been taught. A 2012 article in The Atlantic perfectly outlines the problem: recent writing teaching focuses more on engaging students with fun assignments in fiction and memoir rather than instructing them in the nuts and bolts of sentence structure and grammar. Now the backlash has begun.

My argument is that you can do both: embed the spelling and grammar in the fiction assignment and you can show students that they can have fun while writing and learn how it all comes together.

Next week, I’ll be starting a new job as a middle school writing support instructor. I am so excited about learning with my students about writing at this level.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/

Never Writing Down a Word

“I never write down a word until I know exactly what I want to say.”

This statement was made by my advisor in graduate school. And I’ve wrestled with it ever since.

It all started because I overwrote and struggled with outlines. The professor asked me to rewrite my thesis several times.

And over the years I’ve had multiple conversations with other writers who have argued against this idea. “I write precisely because I need to figure out what I’m going to say,” my friend Clifford Thompson told me.

Here’s where I think this concept does work well: the academic assignment. Working with high school seniors on the Common App, I do not ask them to write a draft. We focus our first sessions on brainstorming their ideas, then, only when we are sure about what they are going to write, do we get to the sentence structure. I even find myself telling my students it would be harder to cut back their writing rather than expanding it in the later stages.

After all this time, I finally get what the professor was getting at.


Me, Girl Friday

There’s a lot of dictation in the rapid talking, speed typing, black-and-white-film His Girl Friday.

Cary Grant’s on fire brain does not stop, weaving yarns, spinning tales, and delivering headlines via his star reporter and recent ex-wife Rosalind Russel. What’s fascinating is that a team – Grant and Russell -- crate their headlines together. He throws his ideas at her, while she bangs them into her Smith Corona. 

While I wish I could be either Grant or Russell I will say that several years ago, I discovered dictation as an invaluable tool for the disconnected writer. Such a student is one who tells you their great ideas but struggles to get them down on paper. They stop, they stare into space, there is silence. There is a disconnection between orally delivering their story and writing it down.

There are dozens of articles online about the use of dictation as a writing tool both for older and younger students, as well. Perhaps my discovery wasn’t an accident at all, now that I think about it. I had used Patsy Cooper’s wonderful When Stories Come to School when I taught storytelling with the little ones in preschool. Possessing only their oral skills, their stories often come out so naturally that the printing and paper piece of the endeavor never comes into play. Except that sometimes the stories come at such a rapid pace – not unlike those of Grant and Russell – that you have to ask the student to “slow down.”

One of the most satisfying dictation sessions I’ve ever had took place last week with a new college applicant. We brainstormed her ideas, and I wrote down what she was saying, because it was coming out so naturally. Before I knew it our session was over. It felt less like a writing session and more like a conversation.

And that is what we’re aiming for.

Midsummer Musings

“I hate writing,” – a third grade student

“School assignments are so boring,” – a fifth grade student

“You do what for a living? I couldn’t stand writing when I was in school.” – an adult

I hear comments like this all the time. It is the recurring theme in my work with students.

When I first started working as a tutor, I assumed I would simply help students become better writers, polish their work, and clarify their message.

What surprised me was the visceral reaction some students, as well as adults, had when a writing assignment or even the subject of writing came up.

Was writing, for some, the equivalent of being forced to sit at the dinner table and finish some unpalatable food as a child? Did writing elicit an almost PTSD response in others? What was the story?

Naturally, my curiosity lead me to start doing some anecdotal, as well as formal, research on the subject.

While I am still in the process of doing the formal research, I will take a few moments to report on some of my experiential findings on the hatred of writing.

The baseball story is the one I always recount because the third grader who starred in this story was my best writing teacher ever. I was a Learning Leader volunteer at P.S. 282, in the early 2000s and I was assigned to work with a struggling third grade student. At our first session, we worked alone in a classroom, and I tried everything I could to get him to do some writing in his notebook. Nothing. He was unresponsive. The clock ticked. Finally, as the period came to a close and I had absolutely nothing to show for it – proclaiming myself a complete and utter failure in my newfound role as a writing teacher – I grasped at the last straw I had: “What do you do when you’re not in school?”

The student paused, looked at me, and quietly said the word “baseball.”

“Baseball?” I asked.

“Yup, baseball,” he responded. “I play in a little league.”

After that, I could not get this formerly reticent student to stop talking about little league, the positions he played, and the uniforms he wore. The only trick was to get him to transfer all his many thoughts to paper. Moral of the story: kids need to be engaged with their writing.

The assignment is another story I like to recount because it speaks to the difference in the way we teach writing now. When I was in high school and college, I was expected to write the final paper on my own. It was assumed that the tools were given to you over the course of the semester and that you would plan and execute the paper by the last session. While that works for some students, for others, it’s a lot of pressure to build that house on their own, regardless of whether they have the right tools or not.

As a graduate education student, my final project was written with my class. In other words, we spent the semester working on each chapter together, with the professor supporting us along the way. It was like a set of teams doing a jigsaw puzzle together versus a group of individuals doing their own puzzle. At the end of the semester everyone had finished their project and the professor didn’t have the unenviable task of chasing down those who were pulling all nighters, trying to finish the bloody thing. Lesson learned: writing collaboratively is more productive than doing so in isolation.

The tyranny of the blank page is one more example of the kind of challenge I’ve seen young writers face. When I started teaching early childhood I noticed that some three-year-olds knew exactly what they wanted to draw when given a blank piece of paper. For others, they had no clue. What was worse, that blank sheet of paper seemed to stare them in the face, challenging them to create something when they had nothing planned.

I’ve certainly seen this with writing students, as well, that empty notebook demanding they create something original and noteworthy. Some students will rise to this challenge. For others, the task is overwhelming, and they need support breaking it down. This is where brainstorming comes in.

Brainstorming is collaborative and the teacher helps students come up with their initial thoughts. It is an excellent tool for those who have great ideas in their heads but have trouble executing them on paper. The takeaway: It always helps to share your ideas with others.

A final thought is on the use dictation to elicit writing from struggling students. There are those who can tell you their story but cannot seem to write it down. There is some kind of disconnect. “Tell me the story,” I once said to a fourth grader, who had amazing ideas and could even put them into full sentences but could not write them down on paper. We tried something different. He dictated the story to me and I wrote it down. Then I read it back to him and he wrote it down, including his final revisions. What we learned: There are other ways to get your ideas down on paper.

These are some of my mid-summer musings on the craft of teaching writing. I look forward to continuing my formal research as we head into the new school year.

With students back in the classroom, there will be many challenges to address, using both formal and anecdotal research.

Pen Pals

“Dear Little Red Haired Girl,” Charlie Brown writes. Or “Dear Mom and Dad.”

Letters are a big part of Peanuts. Sometimes they were printed. Sometimes they were in longhand. They are a reminder of the era when we wrote letters to friends and relatives on paper. Some of us even saved all our letters.

The art of letter writing, while mostly lost, is a great summer tool for teaching students how to organize their thoughts, practice cursive, and tell a story.

My sixth grader has taken off for California, but we agreed that we would be pen pals while he is there.

Time to run out and make sure I have those Snoopy stickers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/books/art-of-writing-letters.html

Puzzle Pieces

Putting it all together. That’s what we did with an essay over the past three weeks.

My rising sixth grader found a subject he was interested in – the beach – and we brainstormed the elements he would include: the sun, sand, ocean, snorkeling, and a refreshing glass of lemonade. Then we got a graphic organizer, put all the elements in order, and wrote them down, using connecting phrases between the paragraphs. At the end we did a final read, revising as we went along. The last step was typing it up.

One of the things we talked about is that an essay can seem overwhelming when you start but if you break it down to its parts and you focus on each one at a time, it’s not so bad, after all. In the end, you put it all together, just like a puzzle.

Oh, and another thing. Writing this out in cursive helped the student practice his handwriting. Another win.

Snoopy Is My Co-Pilot

I grew up with Snoopy and the Peanuts gang. I read the comics, had a stuffed Snoopy, and even a cutlery set for meals.

When I taught preschool, Snoopy was my co-pilot. At the beginning of the year, I would introduce stuffed Snoopy and tell the kids that he was going to help teach class. “Snoopy says…” (i.e. “please help pick up the toys,”) became a regular part of our school day.

Lately Snoopy’s been sitting on the shelf, because the older kids don’t really need him. Or do they? Last week, I wrote a letter to my middle school student and sent it in the mail, as an example of a fun way to practice handwriting. While cleaning out my desk I found some Snoopy stickers I used with the little guys. “Do you like Snoopy?” I asked, as an afterthought, at the end of the letter.

Who knew what was coming? Not only does he like Snoopy, but he has a Snoopy watch. At our next session, which turned out to be the best one ever, I downloaded an image of Snoopy at a typewriter, and added a thought bubble: “Snoopy says, “We need snacks!” This is the student’s grocery list template, which is a great way to practice cursive writing.

Oh, and something else. His essay on the beach is almost done. Not only has he written all the parts for his graphic organizer, but he even volunteered to finish writing it on the weekend! Talk about being in the zone. This is what I meant several weeks ago when I wrote about being “lost” in play or reading.

In the end, everyone needs Snoopy.

Icebreakers

Last week I started working with a middle school student on summer reading and writing assignments.

I love meeting new students and getting to know them. One of the first things we did was an icebreaker called Three Things About Me. The student began by writing something important about them on a sheet of paper (i.e. I love cooking). Then it was my turn. We went back and forth until we each had three important facts about ourselves written down so we could get to know each other. Another game we played was Best/Worst Day Ever. Finally, My Favorite Things was a big hit, devoted to three prized possessions that give pleasure.

Icebreakers are creative, revelatory, and most importantly, show students that summer learning — indeed all learning -- can be fun and doesn’t have to feel like “school.” 

Unless, of course, they like school, and that’s okay, too.

Ages and Stages

One of the challenges of tutoring students of all ages is just that. Different ages, different stages.

In one season you may be working with a fourth grader and a high school senior all at the same time. Which means creating curriculum for differing needs.

This summer my rising 7th grader is finishing a Harry Potter-inspired play and my rising 6th grader is learning how to develop his ideas, as well as practice cursive handwriting. Oh, we’re also reading The Diary of Anne Frank.

Being organized is key. Also, remembering that it’s summer and it should not feel like school. During the icebreaker stage we discovered a point in common. We both love the beach. Which is why he will write an essay about the joy of being there. 

During the brainstorming process we wrote down five details about the beach: the ocean, snorkeling, lemonade, the sun, and sand. Then we added three reasons why each detail is pleasurable (i.e. lemonade is refreshing on a hot day). Next we will fill in a graphic organizer with this information. I’m really looking forward to reading the final product.

Sure, it’s challenging to keep all these plates in the air. But I forgot to mention the most important thing: I love every minute of it.

Pete From Park Slope

I met Pete Hamill at a book reading some years ago. He was lovely, affable, and we talked about Park Slope, where he grew up.

There were a lot of characters back then, he told me.

“There still are,” I said.

Hamill was fascinated that gentrification hadn’t killed the gentleman who repeatedly asked for a cigarette on Union Street, the “man in white,” – yes, he never wore anything but a white sweat suit -- or the woman in the black skirt. The one she wore every time I saw her, winter or summer, rain or shine.

On Memorial Day weekend the weather was lousy. Folks were wearing coats and scarves. There was less iced tea and more soup. But there was time to finish the exquisite A Drinking Life, Hamill’s memoir of growing up in what we now refer to as the South Slope, during the Depression and World War II.

In Hamill’s extraordinary storytelling hands memory and detail create a long-gone Brooklyn where kids owned the streets and drinking made you a man. It also got in the way of his relationship with his father and eventually nearly broke his ability to write.

I’ve always loved the great journalists of the 20th century, those hard-boiled men and women who lived for the printed word. Hamill is at the top of this list, a master of his craft, a New York storyteller of the first order. 

Weekend Plans

“I am happiest when I am reading a good book and drinking iced tea.” 

So said the math teacher in his All About Me share at the end of the year. There’s a theme running here…the joy of quiet time…reading and drinking tea or lemonade.

The weather’s supposed to be lousy this weekend…there goes the beach. What could be better, though, than curling up with my latest, A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill, with a tea or lemonade?

Lost In Reading

“What is your favorite weekend activity?” the Second Grade teacher asked her students this week.

“Drinking lemonade and reading a book,” one students answered. Wow…sign me up.

“The more you read the better a writer you become.” I’m sure you’ve heard this one. I remind my students of this all the time. Watching the Second Graders do their independent reading for 20 minutes, where there are no sounds and everyone in simply focused on one activity – reading – is simply joyous.

In our noise-crazed world it seems out of time, as well.



Lost In Time

One of the joys of working with young children is watching them get lost in play.

What a luxury. They simply have nothing else to do. They don’t have to pay bills, mow the lawn, or contemplate careers. They are at one with play.

It’s getting harder and harder to get lost in time in our ultra-connected world. When was the last time I had that chance? So long ago I cannot remember. What I do know is when it happens. The house is quiet, the phone isn’t ringing, and I have the time to get lost in whatever I am doing for more than five minutes.

Sheer joy.

Back to Juggling

Last month I started teaching again as a preschool sub. 

That changed everything. I was thrilled to get out of the house, be with the little ones, and have a new rhythm to the day. At the same time, though, time was going to be a challenge. I’m a morning person -- everything that has to get done happens early in the day. 

Writing has always happened first thing. It’s when I have the energy to be creative and think clearly. When you’re working out of the house though, morning rhythms are completely different. There’s no more rolling out of bed in sweats and a tee with a leisurely cup of coffee. Now there’s showering, getting dressed, and the all-important preparation of snacks. In other words, there’s a schedule. Where does writing fit in?

For many years, I adhered to the I-can-only-write-in-the-morning maxim, until I realized that in the end you make your plans and the universe laughs. Nobody, least of all a deadline-wielding editor, cares whether you are a morning, mid-afternoon, or late- at-night person. They care about the job getting done. 

Then I realized I had to face facts. I could no longer be precious about when I write. I simply had to get the job done. Sometimes that means coming home from a day in the classroom where I am completely whipped, lying down for 45 minutes, then getting back to writing. The important thing is not to beat myself up on these days if I don’t get a massive amount done. Some writing always trumps no writing.

It’s great to be back in the world again. Now, I just have to do a bit of juggling on the writing front.

Magnolias and Irises

In the Writer’s Circle at the New York Public Library, we have written letters, fiction, and non-fiction. This week we tackled art, for the second time. Initially, we had done so looking at still life objects when we were in the physical space. This time, we looked at an online image of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s stained-glass Magnolias and Irises (1908).

Writing about art can be as simple or complex as the writer chooses. The beauty of this exercise was how diverse the responses were. Participants wrote about feelings, abstractions, and ideals, and each one could not have been more different from the other.

One of the more fascinating discoveries of the session was that the postcard I was working from was more muted than the vibrant image the Metropolitan Museum of Art posts on its website, which was the one the participants used. This in itself prompted a discussion of the different perspectives we had of the work.

The exercise was a wonderful reminder that art is truly in the eyes of the beholde

Stuck in the Middle

The Week In Writing

Here’s another problem: going down the rabbit hole.

We’ve all been there: the storyteller who isn’t an effective storyteller. They start telling you what they are going to tell you, and you’re with them…so far. You know what is coming. Except you never get there.

Instead, you get every detail -- so much detail and way too much information -- that you do not need for the story. Often, this is where the listener has no choice but to finally jump in and ask, “So what happened? Did you (fill in the blank)?”

In his book Developmental Variation and Learning Disorders, Dr. Mel Levine identifies “poor narrative sequencing” as a possible manifestation of a Sequential Ordering Problem, or what I like to call being stuck in the middle. The student has the beginning, ones hopes that there will be an end, but, for the moment, they cannot get there because they are in a muddle in the middle.

Another reason this may come up is what Levine refers to as “sense of the audience” (or lack thereof) which can be a sign of a Higher Order Cognition problem. For such storyteller, it is almost as if there is no audience, and they are simply in their head but speaking each thought and detail aloud.

How to support such students?

First, signal how interested you are in their story. Let them know how hard you think they worked on it and how much you want to find out what is going to happen.

Second, use positive language to reinforce said interest, i.e. “I love the dialogue you used for your characters and the way they are interacting with each other.”

Finally, remind them that they want to keep their reader engaged, and that in order to do so, their story should have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Asking them to identify what information is crucial to the story and what is not can help writers stay on track with the stages of their project, whether it be fiction, non-fiction, or academic assignments.



What’s the Story?

Here’s a problem I come up against a lot: great atmosphere, little story.

It’s when the writing student has a great sense of character, dialogue, and setting but there’s not much happening in terms of a story. The reader reads but they are going nowhere.

How to help?

Even the smallest children understand that good stories always have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The trick is always to hook the reader from the start. Kathy Caprino, a Senior Contributor at Forbes, says,

“We don’t start a story with: “I am going to tell you a story about the summer that I found out I wasn’t as timid as I thought.” What we publish instead is: “As I hung over the cliff, clinging to the exposed root of a windswept tree, I realized that I was braver than I thought...”

Another important point is…what’s the point? Why is the student telling this story in the first place? What is it that they want to get across? 

Which brings me to the final issue: what’s the problem? Often, the crux of the issue is that students are displaying great skills at the big three — character, dialogue, and setting — but have not identified why they are using these skills. When they can show the ultimate problem that the protagonist is about to solve – what every Bildungsroman, or hero’s journey is about – they have a real story.

For more on storytelling and how to engage readers:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2014/04/10/7-essential-tips-for-writers-who-hope-to-engage-millions-of-readers/?sh=5e2053451cad

Remembering Research

Some things stick.

For me it was Mr. Shapiro’s eight grade English class. We read some great books that year: Welcome to the Monkey House, A Separate Peace, and the iconic Catcher in the Rye.

We also learned how to research. On old-school index cards. Idea on the front. Citation on the back. Last name, first name. Title. City, publisher, year. Page. Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York, Bantam, 1969. This would be the ubiquitous, maroon-colored paperback that everyone everywhere read at the time, although the novel was first published in 1951.

Research meant going to the library, and Mr. Shapiro taught us that the largest collection was at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library.

Ah, Mid-Manhattan. What a dump. Although the outside of the former Arnold Constable and Company department store was lovely, the inside, designed in the brutalist style and opened in 1981, was brown and bleak. I look forward to seeing the stunning renovation, which was, sadly, to open in the spring of 2020.

Something about that research lesson never went away. To this day, I prefer index card citation to keep track of my research. One reason is that I find it harder to lose information when I have it in my hands. On my laptop there is that gaping black hole.

On a recent research project, I hauled out those index cards and file box and got to work. It was deeply satisfying.

Thanks, Mr. Shapiro.



The Art of Editing

Editing is really hard. Teaching editing is even harder.

I’ve had this conversation many times with students and parents. I don’t even know how I edit. I simply do it. And therein, perhaps, lies the problem. How do you teach something you simply do?

There are three cardinal rules I follow when editing. The first is that the little picture has to match the big picture. In other words, what the writer is trying to say in each sentence has to be consistent with the overall message. When presented with a new project — whether it be paper, play, or essay — I always look for what the writer wants to tell their audience. Then we work on each paragraph and sentence together to make sure they match that message.

Second: “Omit unnecessary words.” Strunk & White said it decades ago and it still holds true today. It is also one of the hardest aspects of editing to teach because writers can become very sensitive about having their words cut after having worked so hard on them in the first place. I always ask the writer whether there is a better way to say it, or if they see how they are repeating themselves simply using different words. By placing the responsibility for editing the work in the writer’s hands, it feels less offensive than the old red-pen-through-the-writing of yesteryear.

Write for the reader (part of “Omit unnecessary words”). One issue I’ve dealt with, which can be particularly challenging, is when writers are not writing for an audience but rather for themselves. A scene, for example, is described in massive detail that is not only unnecessary, but will turn the reader off, or worse, lose them by this point. One helpful tip here is to have the writer read the scene aloud and remind them that they are telling a story. Effective storytellers always use the least amount of words possible so that they keep their audience engaged.

Third, order equals method. One of the common mistakes new writers make is placing their paragraphs in the wrong order — “burying your lede” in the world of journalism. I’ve read many manuscripts where the story started in the wrong place and the paragraphs had to be — like a jigsaw puzzle — reconfigured in order for the reader to have a clear sense of how the story is going to unfold.

One of my favorite books on the subject is William Zinsser’s On Writing. “Clutter,” Zinnser says, “is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.”

And one of my favorite moments in the book is when he refers to a World War II government black-out order:

"Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal buildings and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination."

“I would have preferred,” Zinsser states, “the presidential approach taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he tried to convert into English his own government's memo[s]:”

"Tell them," Roosevelt said, "that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something across the windows."

As it turns out, the government must have read Zinsser’s book. How else would plainlanguage.gov have come about?

He’d probably approve of their reading list, as well.