AUSSIE

Blog entry posted July 13th, 2010 by Dale Worsley

I’m asking myself two questions in this last blog of the school year. How many students are celebrating the ideas that have inspired them throughout the year, along with the skills they’ve developed? Conversely, how many are feeling the sting or the exhilaration (or, worse, the indifference) of their standardized test scores?

I suspect the latter number is far higher. John Dewey, who I mentioned in an earlier post for his concern about students’ “continuum of experience,” said, “We don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.” Enlightened schools will have students looking back over their portfolios (which may well include standardized test results), reflecting on their experience, and setting goals for the future. Other schools will dust off their hands and say, “Well, the tests are all in, we got through another year. Off to the beach or, on second thought, maybe the mountains this summer.”

What does this mean to us as educators? As a society?

The question is too big for me. I’m with Zora Neale Hurston who says in her essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me”:

BUT I AM NOT tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. … No, I do not weep at the world. I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

My oyster knife? This blog.

Writing sharpens my thinking, keeps me honest, gives me the option (a) to wallow in the slough of pedagogical despond that seems to lie all about like an oil slick, or (b) to latch onto a pelican, clean it up and set it aloft again over clearer waters.
I’ve delved thoroughly into the values of freewriting. What about writing in general? I offer this list of understandings:

Understandings
Writing Across the Curriculum

• Writing subsumes reading, speaking, listening, viewing and presenting.
• Authentic writing communicates, and is not merely used as a performance task for evaluation.
• The writing process is congruent with, not separate from, the thinking process.
• Writing is a singularly useful tool for the consolidation of learning and the expression of understanding in all curricular areas.
• Writing synthesizes disciplinary studies meaningfully, reflecting the way people are expected to think and communicate in college and beyond.
• Everyone can write well enough to communicate ideas and feelings effectively.
• Writing is developed best not in isolation, but in collaboration with colleagues who guide us in the refinement of our thinking, organization and expression.
• Writing is a useful tool for reflection.
• While writing, like all learning, has phases that may tedious or difficult, it nevertheless yields fulfillment.
• Writing can be an effective and healthy medium of self-representation.
• Sharing writing in a trusting atmosphere helps to build a productive learning community.
• The development of students’ writing skills must be driven by careful assessment and appropriate guidance.
• In becoming writers ourselves, we can enhance our expertise viscerally and intellectually, enabling us to teach writing with more depth, flexibility and creativity.

But those are only abstractions. I’d rather leave this post with concrete images of a couple of oil-free pelicans soaring over the surf of our summer plans:

Pelican # 1: Last week I mentioned a fourth grader’s research into rottweilers. He was a student in Amy Caputo’s class at PS 124 in Brooklyn. Amy conducts a mean writing workshop. Carlos (let’s call him that for the sake of this blog) took full advantage, using his time to develop an ongoing picaresque novel about the superheroic adventures of himself and his friends. Cervantes was probably a lot like Carlos when he was in the fourth grade (if they had fourth grades in 16th Century Spain). In the course of his preadolescent 21st Century version of Don Quixote, Carlos made the claim that the rottweiler was the biggest breed of dog in the world.

As a good editor, I had to question him: “Are you sure rottweilers are the largest?” Without delay, we did our internet research, and a new canine world opened up to Carlos, of mastiffs and Great Danes and Irish wolfhounds. This led not only to a better novel, but to an eye-opening “report of information” (as the standards like to call it) to friends in the class. For me, it provided an experience of the power of education to be creative and flowing as it inspires with ideas and liberates student voices. All made possible by Amy’s teaching.

Carlos, at least, was one who had something to reflect on beyond his test scores when he assembled his portfolio to carry with him to the fifth grade.

Pelican #2: Rebekah Dillahunt, ESL teacher at the Edmund W. Miles Middle School in Amityville, New York. In my mind’s eye, I am watching her deploy the combined caring forces of skill and will to have her students write nonstop, with laser focus, word upon word, throughout a ten-minute freewrite exercise. They are producing as much thoughtful language in their allotted time as I have seen in any classroom anywhere. I am watching as Julissy (that’s what we’ll call her), a non-English-speaking immigrant, write 90 words, 34 of them in English. It is April. In September, when she first moved to the country, she had written 55 words, 12 in English. The content? In September, simple words about her family members. In April, an elaborately described trip to the city, the movies, the important buildings and “…the boys so cute, omg!”

Do the math. You can measure learning’s pleasure for yourself. I’m sure Julissy feels it.

For my part, I hope readers have enjoyed reading this blog half as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. I thank my kind, consummately professional colleagues at AUSSIE, Rob Manning and Gina Scala, for making it possible. Hope to see you in September.