Master Plan for a Revolution (Well...you know...we all want to change the world...)

I fully intend this year to be a revolution.  The world needs to know that, so I’m putting it in writing and publishing it here on this blog where I three or four people might read it.

I plan to pull out all of the stops this year and the kind of results a teacher really should get. If I do this right, I might teach my students something that relates to how real human beings write in the real world, and still get test scores high enough to make my bosses and their bosses happy.  

And that would be a real-life revolution.  At least, it would be for my students, and probably for their parents too.  The rest of the world will just want to know how my test scores are, and I'll be able to say, "They're great!" and mean it.  

And if I can't do it, at least I get to write about it as I establish, once and for all, that it's time to seek a career doing something else, because the last ten years have been a fascinating journey for me.  I've struggled, and I've tried things, and I've had some incredible successes and some crashing failures, and in the process, I've stumbled on a few things that seem to work. 

And this year, I'm going to do it all at once.     

First, there’s Trish Parker’s poetry unit, which I took with me from my days teaching in the city of Fredericksburg.  The unit is designed mainly as a vehicle for expression and performance and will continue as it has for years, with poetry slams at the end of each grading period leading to one big slam at year end, with incredible prizes, and the publication of a poetry book with one poem from every student. 

If nothing else, every year that unit alone generates more lifelong writers than anything else I’ve ever done in class. 

Second, there is the TMS Writing Center, which worked much, much, much better than I thought it would without me really investing a lot of thought or effort into it.  Last year, more students came to write than I ever would have expected, students proved surprisingly willing and surprisingly receptive to the idea of coaching other students, and we started a school newspaper.   This year, the goal is to expand on that success by running the Writing Center full time, bringing it into my classes, and really pushing to get students writing consistently.

The third ingredient is going to be trickier to manage, but is every bit as vital.  Last year, I began posting a lot of my assignments on Google Classroom so that my students could turn their work in electronically instead of doing everything caveman style, rubbing blackened sticks on flattened pieces of dead trees. 

The problem, of course, is that I currently don’t know where I’m going to get the computers, hence my great shortcoming in life.  I have the idea, but I don’t really have the details worked out.  Last year, though, I managed to keep a cart full of computers in my classroom for nearly the entire year.  This year, somehow, I’ll manage to do the same. 

The fourth piece is the biggest.  It’s no secret to anyone who has had a conversation with me lasting more than five minutes that I’m not a fan of the Virginia State Standards of Learning, or of Common Core, or of any language arts or reading standards that are based around content rather than practical application. 

That’s not to say the standards are entirely useless.  Actually, they do a decent job of listing the skills and concepts I need to cover this year (although no thought seems to have been put into exactly how all of it can be covered in a class that meets for only 80 minutes every other day). 

I have always maintained, though, that the standards, and the testing that goes along with them, entirely miss the point.  Reading and writing are basic skills that every student needs, but five paragraph essays and short stories chosen to engage kids by demonstrating how little we adults truly understand about adolescents aren’t getting these kids where they need to go. 

Which is, ultimately, out into the great big working world where most of the reading and writing they do will involve e-mails, internet posts, news articles, requests for help, job applications, resumes, contracts, instructions, manuals, regulations, legal documents, user agreements and other boring stuff like that.

Hopefully, they will read novels, poems, and stories too, but I know a lot of productive and intelligent adults who do very little of that kind of reading. I do want to celebrate the language and share brilliant examples of how it is used, which is something that literature does better than any other type of writing, but I also need to make my students students read all sorts of professionally written pieces and anything that smacks of quality, and write with much more directed purpose than I have in the past. 

A few of the books I plan to dig into for my
students this year.  

Part One: It all starts with purpose. 

I read and write constantly, but only a very small percentage of my reading and writing is actually for fun, and even that isn’t limited to reading books and magazines.  Most of my reading, in fact, is out of necessity.  

My students, honestly, may never do much reading for fun, but they will all read.  They have to.  The job has yet to be invented that doesn’t require at least basic comprehension.  Certainly, you won’t go very far beyond grilling burgers or sweeping floors if you can’t read and write with some competence. 

So, my plan in the classroom this year is to start off by focusing on the basics.  This year, I start with purpose and audience, trying to teach my students that they need to be able to communicate clearly.  They will list different types of writing, and different reasons to write.  We will look at training manuals and contracts. They will begin the year, in fact, by filling out a job application, which I will accept or reject. I may even have them review my teaching contract to see if there are any objections to the terms of my employment.

After that, we will get started working on computers.  I will post an announcement or assignment, and they will all post comments in response, which will have to be in complete sentences.  As the year goes on, I will hope to get responses that are a full paragraph long. 

Meanwhile, we will look at contracts, contest rules, and various excerpts from great writers, mostly focused on their craft.  Books like Stephen King’s “On Writing,” Umberto Eco’s “How to Write a Thesis,” and Bill Bryson’s “The Mother Tongue” will feature prominently here. 

We will also talk about genres and types of writing students might find themselves doing.  We may look at professional pieces like research papers on the benefits of athletics in school or a report written for a government agency on road conditions.   I might pull a portion of a grant application I submitted last year, and have them take a shot at answering the same questions I did. Submission guidelines from magazines, requests for proposal from organizations seeking contractor bids, business plans, marketing plans, brochures, blogs, advertisements, and newsletters. 

And we will read excerpts and pieces from various genres and sources.  We will read news articles, feature articles, biographical pieces, personal essays, autobiographies, travel articles, food and movie critics, or as many of those things as we can possibly squeeze in. The main goal, always, will be to have the kids respond intelligently in writing.

As this is happening, students will be doing a poetry unit during our directed study period, composing original poems and editing and reading them with their peers.  This becomes a challenge for kids at every level, because poetry, unlike other kinds of writing, isn't the kind of structured composition that only good students can pull off.  I will have a writing center in which the best and brightest of my students will be writing not for me, but for their peers and for the school newspaper. Those same students will work as coaches as well, improving their own writing by learning to edit and suggest revision to students who are struggling. 

At the end of this first unit, we will read a television screenplay from the Twilight Zone, to expose them to screenplay writing, and then have them write a brief summary of their own idea for a similar script, according to my requirements. 

At this point, it’s all about teaching them the importance of writing for an audience, with purpose, and making sure the writing is clear.  The mechanics of it all come next. 

Part Two: Words and why they matter!!

A few weeks into the school year, we will switch from looking at writing in general to looking more specifically at words.  During this part of the year, we will deal with things like vocabulary, parts of speech, and the importance of word choice.  We look at etymology and we break words down into parts to look at how the pieces of words have meaning. 

We will also look at word-level mechanics.  How, for example, we capitalize proper nouns, how we alter spelling to change verb tenses, or how we add the letter “s” to a noun to make it plural, or to a verb to make it useable in the third person, how we capitalize proper nouns. There will also be focus on how word choice can affect meaning, mood, and tone, and we will work on how to define words based on context.

Stories and poems with spooky themes will come into play here, along with the words that help develop the tension and moods, which should allow us to transition to our major undertaking prior to the winter holiday, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Part Three: How to write a coherent sentence.

Sentences come next.  It begins with analysis of figurative language.  We look at the structure and meaning of metaphors, similes, idioms, and examples of personification, alliteration, rhyme, and rhythm.   We talk about figures of speech, and speculate on their origins. 

At the same time, we begin working on sentence construction, and working on responding to questions in complete sentences.  We discuss fragments and run-ons, work on end punctuation, and get at least an overview of comma rules and the rules of including direct quotes and writing dialogue.

This leads logically to the next major development in writing, which involves learning to write a paragraph, a skill 7^th graders lack almost completely.  

Part Four: Paragraphs and why they matter.

Paragraphs are a problem, because 7^th graders don’t like to think about structure much.  They like to write whatever comes to them, and then turn it in and hope it’s okay.  Even my best students tend to turn in everything in huge blocks of prose unless I force them not to. 

At which point they revise by putting in a break after every fifth sentence, because all they ever seem to learn about paragraphs, regardless of what they are told, is that a paragraph is “five sentences.” 

So during this unit we will read a lot of paragraphs, and respond to them using paragraphs.  We will examine how paragraphs are used in a text, and speculate on why the author begins new paragraphs where he does. 

And we will, again, look at the mechanics that pertain to paragraphs, working on sentence combining and other types of revising, and discussing transition words and phrases and how they should be punctuated. 

Part Five: Back to the beginning

Which leads us full-circle to where we started.  At the end of the year, the goal will be to work on producing writing worthy of a professional, with fewer mistakes, better organization, and clear expression. 

Whatever we weren’t able to cover at the start of the year relating to genres and types of writing we will cover now, and some of what we did go over we will go over in more depth. 

By this point, the school should have begun testing, so having dedicated computers in the classroom that can’t be commandeered for tests is going to be absolutely vital.  In our directed study period, the last group of kids will be learning about poetry, and we will be preparing for the poetry slam.  Hopefully, in the writing center, we will be churning out articles for the school paper, covering everything that matters (without me having to nag anyone about it). 

And the students who have struggled or fallen behind have had other students step in, though the writing center, to help them get back on course. 

Hopefully, the intent here is crystal clear.  The goal will be to set writing up as a practical and necessary real-life pursuit, rather than as a mere academic diversion.