Survival Is Insufficient

Saturday night at midnight, the 22 young writers in my first block class will launch  into the National Novel Writing Month, known as NaNoWriMo, a thirty-day gauntlet to write 50,000 words of a novel. The past two weeks, we’ve crafted character charts, tested out working titles, designed book covers, and written popping taglines and loglines. We’ve plotted dozens of scenes and sequences to sustain us through the month. We even read about the habits of novelists. On Monday, we talked about different plotting systems, and I told them about visiting William Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Mississippi. My favorite part was seeing the plot of his 1954 novel A Fable sketched out on the wall in his study.  As we prepped  for this gauntlet, there’s been a palatable excitement in my students. They’re nervous about whether they can do it, but excited about the prospect of challenging themselves.  

I’m glad they’re looking forward to it. This week has been difficult. The school district where I teach has been 100% virtual since August. We’ve had two will-we-or-won’t-we board meetings on Facebook Live, and finally, on Monday night, the board said, enough.  We’ll be virtual until January with some targeted intervention services for kids who are really struggling. 

With the exception of a group of protestors who are still pushing for a return to in-person school, there was a collective sigh of relief that passed through the district. We are in a rhythm online now. Students are showing up; they’re participating. Parents have called me and sent encouraging emails; they’ve had their child up, fed, and ready to roll at 8 am.  It’s not ideal, but it’s better than the nightmares we’ve all heard from teachers in other districts teaching hybridly. 

And yet, Tuesday morning on Zoom, it seemed to dawn on my students they wouldn’t be back with their friends for the rest of the year, which in high school time seems like forever. They seemed weary like I’d never seen them before. 

The days are getting shorter; it’s getting darker earlier. This week, the remnants of Zeta moved into central Kentucky, and a cold steady rain has been knocking fall leaves to the ground.  Our state’s COVID-19 cases have exploded. On television, political ads are relentless. The most contentious political election of my lifetime is four days away. No one knows when any of it will end. 

All of these stressors coalesced this week. Several asked to stay after class and talk about the pressure they were feeling. Two students told me they’d reached out to our school’s mental health services. Another student told me she feels like all she does is school all day. She goes to bed overwhelmed and gets back up the next morning to do it all over again. 

This summer my book club read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, a novel that follows the Traveling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians, as they travel around the United States after a pandemic has wiped out most of humanity. The Symphony visits outposts and settlements, performing Shakespeare, keeping the arts and humanity alive in a world dominated by merely surviving. Kristin, one of the performers, gives voice to a line that has haunted me during our own COVID lock down: “Hell is the absence of the people you long for.” Another theme of the book and the reason that the Symphony keeps traveling and performing even though it’s dangerous to do so is summed up by Dieter, one of the actors, who quotes Star Trek: “Survival is insufficient.” 

This year has been too much about merely surviving. This week, two different teacher friends sent me this article: “Your Surge Capacity is Depleted.”  It was published in August, a lifetime ago.

I, too, am overwhelmed. 

Which brings me to NaNoWriMo. 

Yesterday I met with each of my students for ten-minute Zoom conferences to discuss their writing goals and to field any last minute questions, to quell any anxiety. It was a long day, sitting in front of my computer for four straight hours, but it’s an important part of what I do. Touching base, keeping connected. 

One of the last students I met with was Marie, a passionate, energetic, and totally game ninth grader who has never done NaNoWriMo. She was slow to come up with an idea and told me she didn’t even like plotting all that much, but in the last two weeks, she got an idea for a novel that featured two of her favorite things: the 80s and child actors. 

The Zoom doorbell rang as she connected to the call. I clicked Admit to move her from the waiting room. Her audio connected slowly, then her blank video feed stabilized, then opened. I fiddled with my USB port, waiting for my wireless headphones to connect.

“Hey.” Her voice was small and far away. 

“Hey Marie. What’s up?” I smiled into the webcam. 

She waved. She was sitting on her bed in her bedroom. 

And there, on the wall behind her, were rows upon rows of index cards taped above her bed. My heart caught in my throat. 

“What’s that on the wall behind you?” I said. 

“My plot.” 

Every year, my students jump into NaNoWriMo together in Room 303 on the third floor of Lafayette High school. But on Saturday night at midnight, 22 writers, separated from each other and isolated in their homes, will be sitting in their bedrooms all across Lexington. They will open their laptops and join each other and thousands of other writers all across the US to create something in spite of it all.

Survival is insufficient. 2020, we’re coming for you. 

Generating Questions That Lead to Claims: 24 Hours with a Camera Crew

My students don’t remember an entertainment landscape that didn’t include around-the-clock reality shows.  More than 750 reality shows aired on cable television in 2015, 350 of which were brand new. From talent contests to quirky families to dating hopefuls, reality shows appear to be scripted, but in fact, they aren’t written until all the footage has been shot. During the editing process, the director and editors look for patterns, storylines, opportunities for tension and arcs as they create the narrative.  All scenes that don’t support the narrative end up being cut away, which is one way I often explain writing revision to students.

For the purpose of generating writing ideas, last week I asked students to pretend they had a camera crew following them around for 24 hours. Students recorded everything they did for the previous 24 hour days by jotting down a word, a clause or a phrase.  Instead of writing just “work” or “school” or “homework,” I asked that students write a short description of what they were actually doing as if a camera crew was shooting footage.  What was the scene? Who was in the scene? What were they doing?  

The key to this activity is to ask students to look at their own life as if it were a reality show, looking for questions, patterns, significant moments, and meaning.   Watching as an audience or an outside observer allowed students to create distance and objectivity. I also asked students to use a third person pronoun to refer to themselves instead of using “I” and always write “the subject, ” as in “the subject made a tuna fish sandwich.”  Once students compiled this list, we pretended to be producers looking at 24-hours of footage for a controlling question or a claim that could be proven or challenged by the reality of this footage. 

In the documentary film “Sherman’s March,” filmmaker Ross McElwee’s burning question at the beginning of his quest was:   how did Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s military approach during the final months of the Civil War effect the South today?  But right before McElwee embarked on a road trip to follow Sherman’s footsteps, his girlfriend dumped him, and the march took on a very different pursuit, namely as Vincent Canby’s 1986 New York Times review states:   “Is romantic love possible in an age of supermarkets, fast food, nuclear arms and the sort of lightweight camera and sound equipment that allows anybody to film his own life?”

In Elizabeth Barrett’s 2000 Appalshop documentary “Stranger with a Camera,” she states her controlling questions in a voice over throughout the story of Kentuckian Hobert Ison and filmmaker Hugh O’Connor: How is a camera like a gun? Can filmmakers show poverty without shaming the people they portray? What are the responsibilities of any of us who take images of other people and put them to our own uses? What is the difference between how people see their own place and how others represent it?

After students recorded their 24-hour camera footage, I asked them to look over their scenes and extract a broad controlling question. This question could render a multitude of great starting points for informational and argumentative texts.  Wording their claim or counter claim in the form of a question helps students see the subject from various angles.  A question requires students to assume a pursuant stance in order to answer it. Documentary film makers often call this a controlling question.  It’s the question that clarifies and focuses the shooting, production, and arrangement of the film. Here are some of the questions my students extracted from their 24-hours of “footage.”

How does one’s differing forms of entertainment influence their completion of everyday tasks?	Can reading and music have a positive effect on procrastination and completion of school work?	Do certain daily activities affect the quality of sleep?
How sleep deprived are high school students?	Does high school wear down students?	Is there really a life outside school for students?
Can being antisocial be crippling?	How does one balance dreams and reality and what is the price of trying?	Does engaging with passion breed discontent for other things?
Are teens not reading books anymore?	Are teens depressed?	Are students riddled with anxiety?
Does a church community benefit a student’s overall day?	Does politics have to lack good humor across party lines?	Are messy people good at anything?
Why do we sometimes avoid things that make us happy?	Can someone be social, yet not?	Why is fiction such a great escape?
When does obsessive become too obsessive?	Can a person have a relationship with God without being religious?	Can someone talk like a prick and walk like a good friend?
Is sloth bad?	How does participating in a sport affect a high schooler’s life?	Are stereotypes about teenagers accurate?
How can you balance school with everything else you want to do?	Can a busy high school student still be content and relaxed?	How does one withstand the mind-numbing grind that is high school?
Are teens too attracted to technology and their phones?	Are we expecting too much from students?	Why do some try to replace human interactions with non-living things?

Notice there’s a disproportionate number of questions dealing with fatigue, expectations, procrastination, technology, introversion, and social anxiety, all topics that weigh heavily on teens today.  I did this activity on the first day back from Winter Break, so we were all dying a little inside which explains the dark undertones of these questions. However, these questions make great starting places for both argumentative and informational texts, writing that is pulled directly from their lives.

Writing Lessons

During the summer of 2015, I was writing what I had hoped might become a collection of short stories. One day  I took a break to write a letter to prospective students of the literary arts program where I teach.  As I wrote the letter,  I was struck by how differently I taught writing then as compared with the first half of my teaching career.

That might make a good book, I thought, and I jotted down about eight rough ideas for chapters.  The next day, I typed it up and did some research on publishing houses.  I contacted an education writer friend of mine for pointers.  Then I wrote out a more formal proposal, a fleshed out table of contents, coupled with a cover letter and shipped it all off.  That was June 30.  

On July 7, my cell phone rang. It was an acquisitions editor with Heinemann Press. They were interested in my book idea.  I was completely floored.  I thought I had just sold my first book.  

Not so.

During the next nine months, I rewrote that proposal six times.  My editor was interested in my idea, but I couldn’t frame the subject in a way that convinced the marketing department. Finally in March, I was offered a contract and started the process of writing.  

During the summer of 2016, I wrote daily,  and by the time  I was ready to go back to school in August, I had a 70,000-word draft finished. I revised that draft twice, and the final manuscript was delivered to Heinemann on January 3, 2017.  

Sometime in September, I will hold the finished book, Project-Based Writing: Teaching Writers to Manage Time and Clarify Purpose, in my hands, this book that happened while I was working on another book. This is the way life works, of course.  

I always thought my first book would be either a memoir or a collection of short stories. A teacher’s resource book just wasn’t sexy enough for my inaugural foray into the world of publishing, but here it is, and I’m so proud of it and stunned by the insights I’ve gained along the way. In no particular order, here are some of those observations:

Every teacher should write a book about her practice.  Like writing, the actual moves of teaching are enormously personal and idiosyncratic. My teaching strategies are mostly of the moment. Until I sat down to try to  articulate my practice, I had no idea what elemental steps figured into my methods. Even though I daily reflect on my teaching practice, it’s often done anecdotally with friends over BBQ nachos, and not as a serious reflective endeavor. Writing this book forced me to seriously look at what I do; some of it was nice, even fun, to look at. Some of it, I realized, didn’t work, but I got the opportunity to figure that out.  

I am a first draft disaster. I have never been a writer who thinks through a logical line or narrative arc,  then commits that to an outline. I just throw a bunch of sentences on a blank page and cry for several days.  I have to write bits and halves and parts before I recognize the whole. Once I’ve discovered that, I have to organize it in such a way that readers won’t want to toss it in the trash in disgust. Organization requires looking at big chunks of writing for patterns and commonalities, then arranging those chunks in a sequential way that helps a reader see the point. So I wish I’d learned how to outline earlier in life.   

Edu-speak makes me lazy.  There were so many times when I was writing this book I unconsciously lapsed into the convenient jargon of our ilk.  When I couldn’t find the right words to describe something real in my classroom, sentences like “Students benefit from innovative competency-based practices in a data-driven environment” were always hanging around like an old boyfriend– comfortable, willing, and only a keystroke away. Ugh.  Think about how much better those awful education classes would have been if the writers had just used regular words to describe learning. Why don’t we demand better writing from the books of our discipline?  

Keeping a source list is crucial.  In college, I hated compiling the works cited and consulted page after I finished a research paper; it just seemed so unnecessary.  I wasn’t vested in the writing I was doing and the stakes were low. (This is how, I imagine, most students feel about writing for teachers.)  But during the writing of this book, I realized the stakes were much higher.  People would be reading this book, I hoped, and I certainly didn’t want to unwittingly plagiarize someone else’s language. The problem I had was 1) I don’t typically write down the sources of cool things I find in books or online, and 2) there are books, essays, and stories I’ve read so many times, they’re ingrained in my mind to the point where I didn’t know where their words ended and my words began. Two weeks before the book was printed, I was horrified to discover I had not attributed a beautiful quote from a friend of mine.  Source list:  it’s a must.

No one really knows what you’re doing.  If I mentioned to friends I was working on a book, “that’s nice” or “how interesting” was the normal response, followed by silence.  The last thing anyone wants to ask is “what’s it about?” because then they’re on the hook to act interested while I nanner on for twenty minutes about some possibly esoteric topic.  So when you write a book, you are laboring completely alone.  You are working and creating and having bad days and good days and stonewalls and breakthroughs, yet no one knows you are doing anything at all. You might as well be lying on the couch watching SVU.  As is the case with all creative endeavors, I suppose.  As is the case with research scientists too. Only after the creation emerges can it be shared with others.