AUSSIE

Blog entry posted April 22nd, 2010 by Dale Worsley

In a fit of pique a couple of blog posts ago I wrote my suggestion that DaVinci’s exhortation to “Develop your senses, especially learn how to see” be extended to read, “learn how to see the students.” Wouldn’t you know that the words had hardly been written before someone picked up that thread and wove it into a memorably golden tapestry of words?

ELA special education inclusion teacher Janine Cobian, her math special education partner Renee Silon and I had been conducting an informal collaborative assessment conference. (See http://www.lasw.org/CAC_description.html for a description of this eye-opening protocol, developed by Steve Seidel and colleagues at Project Zero.) We were analyzing a student’s piece of writing from John Katsigiorgis’s English class at the Edmund W. Miles Middle School in Amityville, NY. Janine invited me to the class to observe the student, who had recently been adopted, to see if we could bring him out the shell into which he’d retreated. I intended just to watch, but Janine and John encouraged me to orchestrate a freewriting activity.

Being unprepared, I played fast and free with DaVinci and wrote on the blackboard “The most important thing is to learn how to see.” I gave the students a choice to freewrite openly, to respond to the quote, or to sketch. The work was intended to be shared, I warned.

As the students bent to the task during this timed exercise, I noticed a boy crumple up his paper and start to throw it away. Not wanting any unworthy thoughts to be sacrificed to the false god of perfectionism, I asked his permission to uncrumple it and read what was written there. (As Anne Lamott colorfully puts it in her entertaining writing guide Bird by Bird, “Perfectionism is the enemy of ****** first drafts.”)

Turns out the boy was José (not his real name), the student I was supposed to keep an eye on. I hadn’t known. Fate was at work. While I read his scribblings, he began to doodle a prosthetic hand in his writing journal. I picked José to be my partner during the pair share stage of the activity. “Seeing is not believing,” he had written on the wadded paper. “What was that about?” I asked him. He said people tried to fool each other all the time by making things look different from the way they really were. He didn’t want to share that with the whole class, but didn’t mind my sharing with the class his artful sketch of the prosthetic hand, a pincer device worthy of The Terminator.

I bonded with José over all of this, and sent him an article from National Geographic on prosthetic limbs, which he read avidly. (Nothing like the right material to get kids to read, eh? Try this yourself by playing matchmaker between kids and books, articles or websites on what they love. You’ll meet the standards! And…they’ll become proficient in reading the nonfiction they’re destined to confront in far greater quantities than fiction later, when so-called “real life” overtakes them.)
Overall, the freewrite/pair share/class share activity worked well. Janine and John reported that, besides José, several kids who didn’t normally speak up did so on this occasion. One boy in particular, who had come into class angry at being teased for being gay, felt affirmed when he got applause for his writing. I concluded that the cause of getting students seen had been advanced a bit and for lagniappe (as we Louisianians like to put it), some belief had been generated in José by the seeing of his artistic talents.

In her own teacherly freewrite, Janine wrote:

To really see something or someone takes a great effort. It requires seeing beyond the five senses. For an object, there may be underlying memories that go with it. For another person, there are so many areas that make up who the person is beyond what you see, like their heart, their intentions, their loves, their nature. In all of us there lies so much more than what someone can see – we look past the superficial and can see so much more.

Not bad for an on-the-spot effort, wouldn’t you agree? (And thank you, Janine, for allowing me to represent it this way, an example of the eloquence that can come from taking the pressure off of writing through freewriting.)

Wallace Stevens, the lonely poet who looked at a blackbird thirteen ways, wrote, “Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.” Janine would extend this to feeling, and perhaps to understanding. And what could be more enjoyable than the connections we form with each other through empathy, capped by the wisdom that comes from understanding?