Tell your story. Tell it well.

by Fitz | Apr 27, 2019 | Essays, The Crafted Word Blog, Workshops

Some thoughts from the trenches…

        Not everything can be put into a box. For years I have been trying to teach middle school and high school age boys “how to write” by using a series of extremely detailed rubrics that leave little to chance, but maybe (I can’t believe I am writing this) I should just stick with helping them think imaginatively, take risks, learn the meat and bones of effective writing—and then write, write, write, write, write…

I am serious. It seems like every time I try to “teach” writing, I am met with sincere, yet vacuous eyes almost pleading to be freed from the contradictory admonitions spewing out of me like smoke from a tall factory stack on a wild and windy day. 

Yet…

When I simply let them write and blog and journal about “whatever,” they sooner or later become better writers, more interesting writers, more confident writers—writers who are invested, engaged and inspired by the “process” of writing. They are more like kids at recess playing whiffle-ball for the sheer joy of the game. Not baseball you might say—but pretty damn close. By and large, when the boys come to like writing, they might actually listen to my droning. Heck, they sometimes even (maybe) want to write the classic five-paragraph expository essay.

I need to get back to the more magnanimous and enlightened practice of allowing my students to write instead of mega-focusing on teaching them how to write. In the same way they learned to speak, they will figure it out how to say what, and when and why what they write works or doesn’t work. (How’s that for convoluted writing!) I am not ready to can my rubrics and chuck them in the trash. I just think they have become the cart pushing the horse for me—an easy fallback that gives shape and form and meaning to content—never a bad thing!

A writer needs to feel that he or she is the engine pulling the train and not the passenger being pushed to a dark precipice. Every English teacher should let kids write. (Even better, every English teacher should be a writer—a flesh and bones writer in the same way our music teacher knows and plays his music and is, hence, a real musician!) Writing for the sake of writing should be, front and center, a part of every academic day. As a parent, I would be more than willing to let go of some “critical” component of the schools curriculum to allow it to happen. The old adage: “Readin’, Writin’ and ‘Rythmatic” rings pretty soundly for me. Everything else is tasty, but proscribed, icing on the cake.

Sometimes nothing works. No matter what I do as a teacher, some few of my students will learn little, write little and leave my class little the wiser, which is a sad, but hardly debatable, reality. We just don’t reach everyone, and we often don’t reach the students that need to be reached the most. In those times, all we can do is keep the red pen of criticism wisely at bay and hope they see that the door to our heart is always open and that the starting line is still there.

And let them tell their story.

And show them how to tell it well.

And hope they listen…