Belgrade High School Sophomore Writing Workshop

Today I had a most enjoyable time working with Mr. Aaron Yost's classes at Belgrade High School.  He asked the MSU English Education Community for volunteers to help his sophomores with their creative writing pieces as a writing workshop.  I gladly signed up.  I arrived at 8 am, checked in with the school office, and waited outside Mr. Yost's door.  Once we entered his awesome, quirky classroom, he told me a little bit about what they were doing and gave me a copy of the list of instructions he gave the students.  We had a brief discussion on the use and acceptance of adverb use in writing before the students arrived.

I was there for 3 hours and worked with maybe 20 different students.  Only a few were expounding on a common prompt Mr. Yost had given them a while back, and other than those few, everyone's work was different.  Some simply talked about what they were writing and others shared.  I tried to ask thoughtful questions to get them thinking of how they can build on what they have.  I attempted to ask them questions to help develop detail and even sequencing.  I thought of Dr. Wynhoff-Olsen's class Teaching Writing to Secondary Students.  I thought of the show don't tell concept, and I'd like to think some of the students got it when I tried explaining it to them.  I wrote on one girl's paper, "Tell me more.  What does freaking out look like?"

So what did I learn today?  Here's what isn't taught in school except in theory, yet given the theory I was at least aware of what I was experiencing:

Confronting my own biases
During first period I sat at the back table before the students arrived and sat with whoever sat at that table. It turned out to be a group of girls.  They were willing to share and for the most part, they were prepared for the day's work.  I noticed a table of all boys, and I was honestly intimidated by them.  I realized that my feelings of intimidation were not about them but rather my own fears of being rejected by them.  I did not move from my table during first period, but by second period I was ready to move around and confront my biases.  I decided to sit with a table full of boys, and must say they were really funny.  As soon as I sat down I noticed one of them had drawn a picture of a penis on their paper, and they weren't even embarrassed when I said something about it!  Their stories were wildly imaginative.  One was about rescuing a beautiful girl and riding off in an outrageous sports car.  Another wrote a disturbing internal monologue of a man who had been marooned on a deserted island.  I expected them to be withdrawn and disinterested, but I found them almost more willing to share than the girls were.  During another class, I noticed one boy sitting all alone.  I went to the table to try to engage him and I realized I knew him.  I had known him since he was in diapers but had not seen him in 5 years.  Puberty sure changes people!

Seeking Balance
I realized how easy it could be to neglect the loners or abandon those who don't participate.  It's easy to engage those who respond, and I could have so much fun spending all of my time with those students, but that's not ethical, and as a teacher I must be conscientious of the disenfranchised students and be an advocate for social justice.  A teacher must always seek balance in the way she treats her students.  It's hard and takes concerted effort at times.  Trust and trauma were an issue for one student who was absolutely not going to expose what he/she had written.  I later learned that with this student, it simply takes time.  Another student completely shut down once we started dissecting the work.  The foreign exchange students, on the other hand, were grateful for the feedback I gave them.  

After all the students left and it was lunch time, Mr. Yost and I discussed how the students were functioning under the loose constraints of creative writing.  We agreed that burn out happens quickly when we constantly ask students to write about or comment on scholarly, assigned literature.  Mr. Yost believes, and I concur, that the best writing and the best learning happens when the students care about what they're doing, when it's personal.  I concluded that creative writing is exactly what all the great authors before them were doing, too, and maybe that's why we call it great.  Those authors gave a damn about what they were writing be it creative, personal, or spiritual, etc.  Students are no different than Orwell, Steinbeck, Alexie, Buck, Austen, and countless others.  They just haven't practiced as long.  No, they're not all going to be great writers, but their current task just may showcase the best they currently have.