Eastern Michigan Writing Project

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Writing and Other Irrational Behaviors

What rational motives could be blamed for spending two weeks writing and considering the teaching of writing? You could write at home and possibly get more done. With a few e-mail queries you could probably find someone willing to read your writing and offer modest feedback. From Amazon you could order a decent book about teaching writing and mine it for a few good ideas. You could set your own goals for teaching in the fall and keep track of your progress in a moleskin notebook. You could even record the whole project for your professional development file to show how motivated you were.  Why not log the whole experience without the expense of structured time and program fees?

Because there is no free-lance summer like the Summer Institute. Although popular wisdom holds that writing and teaching are solo performances, it has not been so for more than 85,000 teachers, who have participated in summer institutes of the National Writing Project since 1974.  Teachers reflect on these summers as “transformative” and “inspirational,” while most of them persist in arguably the most demanding profession: teaching writing.  What comes of giving up precious leisure hours in the summer to write, teach, and think about teaching?

The first payoff come when a colleague responds to your tentative efforts to write with respect and even admiration.  In the Summer Institute teachers are proclaimed writers, and their writing receives the appreciation of high art.  Probably it is closer to “low art,” but no one ever got better at writing without an ally who could believe in what it might become.  And I remember the moment in the summer of 1986 when someone said she was touched by my writing, and it was someone who knew what good writing felt like.  I was not so diffident as a writer, but that affirmation made all the difference to me. And I realized that every student in my classes was hungering for a little taste of praise just like that.  I would not have learned that at home.

The next payoff comes halfway through the duration when someone starts to read about some buried hurt or frustration, and you witness healing between the lines. To be sure no one plans for this event. More likely we (especially the males) are all hoping the writing does not get too personal, and the discussion stays on the cognitive level.  But writing may sweep over rational boundaries. In 1998 I felt compelled to write a poem about the troubled home run king, Roger Maris, and in the middle of reading it out loud, began inexplicably to bawl.  Beyond the humiliation of crying about a baseball player long dead, I was also a co-leader of the Institute, and had demonstrated my fragility to colleagues I had only known for perhaps two weeks.  If I learned anything from it, it was that such outbursts should not be dreaded, but in fact welcomed for their palliative effect. I came, I cried, I survived.

Then comes the moment when you are asked to share a sample of your best teaching, so that the community may benefit from your experience. In the winter this moment could be your undoing, as colleagues find fault with your proposal or later murmur about your credibility as a teacher. Some school environments are poison to initiatives or any suggestion that the status quo is not acceptable.  And teachers are not always receptive to colleagues’ attempts to model or lead, because it apparently casts a shadow on their own teaching.

Not in the Summer Institute. Because community standards insist on constructive feedback about teaching in the same way feedback about writing is practiced. Certainly you do have to practice to get this kind of feedback right, but it is remarkable how much helpful insight can be communicated without attacking the presenter. You always feel safe in the hands of Writing Project teachers, because they have learned the most delicate ways to say how much attention your performance will need to make it ready for prime time.

Some years the Institute has run for four weeks, and some years for only two. In either case teachers insist they could have gone on for another week without complaint.  And as we are taking down the room, taking pictures, and finally gathering at a local restaurant to celebrate we are feeling the loss of friends and the daily luxury of writing, if only for a few weeks. Usually we reunite in the fall.

Everyone reads some piece or part of a piece of writing from the group’s anthology, and we savor the best moments in our own words. Another sell-out to sentimentality, but even the hard-edged among us participates in the joy of reading our lives in our best words.  The irrational wins the day.

If you stayed home, you’d get none of this.  It is hard to express what it means to our colleagues, who pity us for sacrificing our vacation to such labors. There is no rational explanation, though we struggle to explain it.  They must wonder what flaw in our recollection could make us believe it was all worthwhile, and, in fact, make us claim we would do it again.

And curiously we will do it again and again. We are writers, and there’s no accounting for what makes us happy.

 

 

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Summer of Surprises

Exactly two years ago I wrote a blog called “Not Waiting for Superman,” seizing on Rethinking Schools’ critique of that movie that was then dominating the conversation about school reform. Tonight I realize how much this conversation persists and how much the teachers of our Summer Institute continue to be the rejoinder to the claim that it will take super-heroes to change public education.

In 2011 I wrote:

I am “not waiting for Superman,” because I have spent twenty days listening to, and delighting in,  twelve amazing teachers of writing, who gave up four weeks of their summer to become better teachers of writing. And I know, from experience, that there are 200 more sites of the National Writing Project completing very similar summer institutes as I write this.  That makes about 3,000 teachers of writing becoming better writers and teachers by concentrating on their craft for six hours a day, while many of their detractors assume they are traveling or lying by the pool.

What they are doing is writing relentlessly, listening to demonstrations on teaching writing, offering feedback on the demonstrations, and setting a research agenda to investigate writing in their own classrooms.

Amazing how easily this memory translates to 2013. We again have twelve courageous teachers of all grade levels, K-college. We again have writing, teaching demonstrations, and teacher research proposals. We again share our model of professional development with nearly 200 sites of the National Writing Project. But there are amazing differences.

We have four teachers with  three years’ professional teaching experience among them, who have stepped into their profession with remarkable talent and confidence.  We have several teachers at the other end of the spectrum, one even about to retire, and they have taken inspiring risks with writing and technology. They are the ones beginning novels, mastering Prezi, demonstrating Haiku Deck and other tricks of digital writing.  We have teachers who have been abruptly shifted into new roles, when before they were math teachers, ESL teachers or Speech Therapists. They came to find out if they could teach writing, and they taught us how a professional steps up to challenges. We have teachers who came from almost a hundred miles and some who nearly lived on campus.  We have teachers who come from schools under siege, from forced consolidation to the targets of lawsuits to demoralized faculty.  You might say “a motley crew.”

I would say “an inspiring company,” who threw off their differences, their baggage, their inexperience and their despair to work together as caring teachers, trusting and supporting each other, and reclaiming their voices as writers.  And how they opened their hearts to the motley crew that began the summer together is an entirely new version of the Writing Project narrative.  Yes, it has happened before, but never like this.

Ask a Writing Project teacher about the Summer Institute, and you will hear various stories of transformation, rejuvenation, re-invention, and recovery, but they are all different.  This summer was full of surprises, from the sneaker found in the road of our Writing Marathon to the surreal rendition of Peter Elbow’s Yearbook.  We’ve been visited by Writing Project teachers from Pennsylvania and Virginia, by pre-school, middle school, and never-left-school children, by superintendents and principals and associate deans. We have been a crossroads of learning.

We are still “not waiting for Superman,”  because education is going to be saved by regular classroom teachers who understand the power of two . . .  or three or more.  The power of teachers working in concert, whether in melodic or discordant song, but working together to learn and to teach. That’s what we witnessed again in the Summer Institute, but in a completely different way.