I am...

The following piece came out of a project we've been working on at my school, called "We Are Chatham." This particular project aimed to demonstrate that our strength as a community is in our diversity, so we asked students, teachers, and administrators to write "I Am" statements. We asked that they write about aspects of their identities that the average person might not know. Mine is below, and you can check out the incredible responses from our school community at the following site:

We Are Chatham

I am a blogger. Although I’ve been blogging for years, I still feel a little strange saying that sentence out loud. To call myself “a blogger” suggests that I write posts everyday or at least with some degree of regularity. I don’t. It suggests that I have a wide audience that reads what I write. I don’t. And yet, here I am, a blogger nonetheless. I post when I can, and my readers are mainly close friends and family members, but I believe that being a writer isn’t necessarily about publishing and audience; I believe that it’s mostly about the individual tapping away at the keys.

Being a blogger has made me a more observant watcher of my world. I carry around a small pink notebook in my purse at all times. In its tattered pages (some of which are smeared with the remains of a leaky lip gloss), I write down what I notice. I never write down big things; I mostly write down snippets of conversations that sound interesting or particularly moving images that I see. For example, just last week, I wrote this down: “My neighbor was sitting out on his stoop in the rain wearing his crossing guard’s uniform, with its reflective yellow vest. An older woman turned the corner and took shelter under the tree next to his stoop. She looked up at him and said, ‘Don’t know why I’m hiding from a little rain. My mother used to say, ‘You’re sweet, but you won’t melt.’ The man laughed and told her a reciprocate story, ‘My grandmother used to say that getting caught in the rain was God washing your sins away.’”

I suppose I wrote down this scene because I liked that it reminded me that the people who are secondary characters in my life, like the crossing guard I see each afternoon, actually have whole separate lives in which they are the stars, and I am only a part of the chorus dancing behind them. I also wrote it down because the day before I had told my students that my own mother used to tell me that thunder was just the angels bowling. And that’s how a blog post develops. It starts with a little thing, which, because I’ve taken the time to notice it, makes me notice another similar little thing. Before you know it, I’ve got an idea for a post because I just learned another little something about the world.

Writing helps me to sort through the complexity that is life, and it helps me to give order and sense and meaning to my life and to the lives others live around me. Sometimes these odds and ends I record develop into a blog post. More often, they don’t. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t get something out of recording the simple dailyness of life. After all, I don’t think that many people have major revelations in which they suddenly understand the meaning of life; I think that most of us accumulate big understandings through a collection of small, seemingly insignificant, maybe even momentary, experiences.

If I weren’t a blogger, I probably won’t keep a collection of these small but powerful experiences, and then I just wouldn’t be the same me. Really, I’m a world watcher, and being a blogger is just an excuse to watch a little more closely.

Preserving National Writing Project

As a teacher, I am required to complete 100 hours of "professional development" each year. For most teachers, this requirement largely consists of spending a lot of time listening to a teaching "expert" (who is likely to be something other than an actual classroom teacher) tell them how to do their jobs more effectively. As you can imagine, most teachers see right through this charade because, as any professional in any line of work knows, what works theoretically doesn't always work in reality. Many teachers feel that professional development time is so ineffective and so practically useless that it should simply be abolished, as I myself did only a few short years ago. 

Enter National Writing Project. NWP is comprised of a network of local sites that work to bring meaningful professional development to teachers -- by having teachers teach other teachers. While this concept may not seem revolutionary to those outside the field of public education, we teachers know that this kind of professional development is actually pretty revolutionary. While most teachers possess Masters degrees and other advanced education credentials, we are still too often seen as well-paid babysitters, and, I would argue, because our field is one that has traditionally been staffed by women, public perception is largely that we need oversight and guidance and regulation to show us the "right" ways to do our jobs. NWP rejects this idea outright and believes, instead, that it is classroom teachers who know what's what. And, perhaps even more impressively, NWP believes in paying teacher-experts for doing the work of sharing their knowledge with their colleagues. To the best of my knowledge, NWP is the only organization that hires full-time teachers to do all of the in-service workshops for which they are contracted, and this difference is what makes them so highly respected among those administrators who are savvy enough to hire them for professional development work in their districts.

Because NWP uses the teachers-teaching-teachers model, the work that NWP does in schools is powerful in a way I can only describe as transformative. I attended the San Diego Area Writing Project's Invitational Summer Institute (SI) in 2008, and I am not only a very different teacher, but also a very different person for it. When I entered the SI, I felt like a had some really good ideas as a teacher, but that I didn't quite know how to bring them together into a cohesive approach to teaching that would resonate with my students in ways that were really meaningful. I got feedback from students each year saying that they loved this or that writing assignment or lesson, but I could tell that the work that they did in my class was not something that would move forward with them and serve as a tool for them in future classes. Before the SI, I considered myself someone who could write. Now, after the SI, I call myself a writer. And this is the same experience my students seem to have before and after they take my class. They come in feeling they can write, but they don't see writing as a part of their identity, in spite of the fact that it is a necessity in almost every line of work and they use it every single day (every few minutes if we count texting!) for the purposes of communication and socialization. NWP taught me how to approach writing in my classroom so that students could understand its centrality in their lives and find the motivation to develop it as a skill. Years after I've had students in class, I get emails thanking me for showing them how to love writing and how to do it well.

As NWP plummets off the end of the federal budget's chopping block, I am deeply saddened by the loss of all those would-be incredible writing teachers who will never discover that they can be incredible writing teachers. I'm so sorry for all of the students who will not have the transformative experience of having an NWP teacher. Most of all, though, I'm desperately hoping that our politicians will take the time to consider NWP's record and restore its funding because the research speaks for itself. NWP has proven success in raising student achievement and building better teachers. In the meantime, I will always be an NWP teacher, whether NWP exists in its current form, in a new privately-funded form, or in no formal form at all because what I've learned through NWP is not only a set of teaching practices but a mentality about teaching that has become a part of every lesson I teach. That mentality is one that asserts that all students have knowledge to share, that all students can become better writers if we teach the right skills in clear and effective ways, and that all teachers can learn the skills necessary to be able to teach writing effectively within their disciplines if we invest in their training and provide them with on-going support. I invite our policy-makers and politicians to take an hour out of one of their days and visit an NWP teacher's classroom to see our work in action. I think they'd find what everyone who cares about education is currently searching for: teaching that consistently works for students and an approach that can be applied across grade-levels and academic disciplines to raise student achievement and engagement.

Je ne sais quoi...

As teachers, we're told early in our careers (and reminded several times each year thereafter) that we are not our students' friends -- we're they're teachers. The implication seems to be that these labels denote mutually exclusive categories of acquaintance, and to muddle them would be somehow beyond the boundaries of professionalism, if not decency. While there is certainly merit to be found within the notion of drawing a distinction between friendship and teaching, I can't help but to also find a few flaws in the logic (or at least in the words in which we express the idea) as well. 

Now, I don't really feel that "friend" is exactly the right word to describe how I feel about the students with whom I have taught and remain close, and it is definitely not the right word to describe how I feel about my current students, I also have to admit that it isn't all that far off either. By and large, encouraging meaningful relationships in the classroom has worked exceptionally well for me as a teacher. I feel connected to my students, and they feel connected to me, which I believe is the requisite solid ground on which a stable, sturdy, enduring program of study is built. Admitting that I do consider some students to be something like friends (friendish? friendesque?), I have to ask if that's such a sin after all.

As a writing teacher who believes in encouraging authenticity in writing tasks, I've read some deeply personal student writing on everything from divorce to to death to deployments to rehab to eating disorders to broken hearts to the ends of friendships and the list could go on and on. Likewise, in an attempt to model my expectations for my students and encourage and develop a sense of classroom community, I have shared my own deeply personal (age appropriate) writing with my students too. Even on days when we're not sharing anything one might consider "personal" in the traditional sense of the word, I feel like I'm always asking students to open themselves up to me and to our class. My courses are structured around questions like "How do human beings deal with atrocities?" and "How do race/gender/ ethnicity/class/sexuality/citizenship status impact one's experiences and beliefs?". If those kinds of questions aren't asking for pretty personal stuff, I don't really know what is. And beyond that, don't we tell students, beg them even sometimes, to come to us for help, to tell us when something isn't right at home, to report abuse or bullying? If we believe that we are worthy of that kind of trust, doesn't that make us something like friends? For that reason, I can't bring myself to nod knowingly when a colleague makes the old claim that "we're not their friends."

I guess I have to say that I'm ok with saying that we're not their "friends," but we're not "not their friends." It's really one of those cases where we lack a word to fully capture and describe a feeling; the feeling exists, but the word doesn't. I read a book once in which the narrator noted that Italians have a word - "campanilismo" - for which there is no English equivalent. "Campanilismo" literally translates as "for the love of one's bell tower," and it connotates a kind of patriotism for one's home village. As I read it, I thought to myself that we do have that feeling here too, even if we don't have a name for it. Maybe Italian teachers have a word for how they feel about their students, and maybe they'll let us in on it so we can put to rest that dreadful phrase "we're not their friends" and define our relationship in terms of what we are, instead of in terms of what we're not.