“Colleen.”
Colleen stood up. A quiet kid who was easily swayed off-task by more extraverted students, Colleen loved to have side conversations with me about life. She was always curious about what we were learning and why, and she was ready to share her poem.
“Okay, so this is a cento,” explained Colleen. “I borrowed lines from other poems to make this one about how some pain can never be replaced or forgotten: This is a woman’s confession:/She lived unknown, and few could/ Know when/Pain froze you, for years- and fear-leaving scars…”
It was beautiful and haunting, and I could hear her trying out techniques like hyperbole. Pain cannot freeze you forever, but it sure seems like at times. We had been reading about testimony and writing our own personal narratives, and while I know her cento was inspired by Wordsworth, in part, I couldn’t help thinking about the pain I’ve heard in so much of my students’ writing.
“Mrs. Donovan.” It was my turn. Colleen gave me an apologetic look being the one to call me out of my comfy and safe seat to share my own poem.
Every Friday, our eighth grade English classroom becomes EspressoSelf Café. We hang up white “twinkle” lights, turn down the lights, pass out cookies, and set out “the cup.” I pull the first name from the cup, and a poet comes to the front of the room to speak his or her verse to the class.
The poems tell stories or express an observation or experience. Some are poems we wrote in class to try poetic techniques such as alliteration or allusion or explore a theme such as fragile fortunes, truth and fiction, or dystopia. And some poems are inspired by heart-break, death of a pet, friendship, or even surviving abuse. The audience of poets typically respond with a collective “aw,” a “giggle,” or even a tear followed by snaps of appreciation for the art. The poet then draws the next name from the cup.
“Ah, you don’t have to, Mrs. D.,” said Jorge. “You’ve had a tough week. We don’t expect you to have a poem ready.”
“Oh, yes, we do. If we gotta do it, you gotta do it,” said Dillon.
“Thank you, Jorge. And you’re right, Dillon. It is only fair. I actually spoke a poem into my iPhone this morning while I was driving. Now don’t going telling everyone I was using my phone while driving. This just came to me, and I had to get it down.”
“You mean you just came up with it?”
“Yep. Poems can sneak up on you, ya know. I was reading this book The Things They Carry for the class I teach at UIC, right, and I was thinking about my dad. I was thinking about our parents and the “things” they carry as human beings — like their history and the experiences that made them who they are before they had us. You remember how many kids are in my family right? “
“Ten,” shouts Barbara. Barbara remembers all my stories. I was her teacher the year before, and she often asks me to re-tell stories like when I put the blueberries in the cereal cabinet instead of the refrigerator. She likes knowing that she isn’t the only absent-minded one in the world.
“Yes, I have ten siblings. Thanks, Barbara, for remembering. Imagine all those kids in one, small house. Well, anyway, here it is. I’ll just read the part about my dad, okay? ‘The things they carried./Skippy carries a baseball glove waiting for his dad to come home./He carries his paintbrush and glue to make his model airplane/In his room./Alone./He carries the loneliness of being /the only child/…’”
I finish the poem with tears in my eyes, and my students are sitting quietly. It is awkward, but they are supportive and snap for me. They hear me. They see me. And I see them.
“Barbara.”
Barbara glances my way with her big brown, pleading eyes. I smile. And she slowly shifts in her seat, stalling as she opens her notebook before finally moseying to the front of the classroom. Leaning against the white board, she begins to read slowly: “My stomach feels pain./The cabinets are empty./The children cry./They’re hungry…Rain wets me./I’m freezing./I need a house to live./Will somebody help me?”
The room is silent waiting for the next line.
*****
I began teaching middle school in 2004 in what appeared to be a middle class Chicago suburb, but I would not meet Barbara until 2011.
The demographics of the school were changing so quickly in the early 2000s that the school purchased trailers for the growing population of English Language Learners (ELLs).
In the first English department meeting of the school year, each ELA teacher was handed student rosters with the Illinois Standard Achievement Test (ISAT ) test scores from the previous school year. As I looked around the room of a dozen or so teachers furiously highlighting away, I quickly grabbed a highlighter intent to look like I knew what I was doing, but indeed I had no idea. I was told to highlight the students who were “on the bubble” –the students who did not “meet” on the ISAT but were within a few points, so we could “target” these students in our instruction.
Thinking about this now, I imagine Barbara walking out of her apartment with her backpack to get on a school bus for the first time that week in 2004. I can see her waiting at the bus stop along a busy street with cars zooming by while the local kindergartners are being walked to school by their parents. She would have been sitting in one of those trailers on her first day of kindergarten while others were in a classroom with windows. Was she finger painting, learning her numbers and letters, and loving story time?
Barbara’s parents are undocumented. Many families came to this suburb of Chicago for jobs and more affordable housing. Barbara represents all that was changing in this school, but the changes the school was experiencing did not tell Barbara’s story. To tell Barbara’s story, we would have had to listen to the stories of our students and their families, but instead we were listening to the data, and within a few years, Barbara’s file would be filled with data — home language surveys, Cogat scores, MAP results, ISAT results, and eventually ACCESS test results.
Year after year, Barbara, and students like her who did not “meet standards” on the state test, received more interventions. When goal setting did not work, Barbara was placed into a variety of specialized classes and tested more frequently than other students. The intervention classes were often expensive scripted programs devoid of teachers deciding what to teach, when to teach it and how. Such curriculum has been coined as “teacher proof” curriculum. After all, when a child is in a school for a number of years and does not pass the test, it must be the teacher.
By junior high, when Barbara still had not passed the state test, she had two math classes, three reading classes; there was no room in her schedule for music, art, a foreign language, or computer classes. So even though Barbara was no longer spending her days in the trailers outside the school, she was still segregated.
In 2011, our paths finally crossed. I met Barbara. In fact, I met Barbara in one of those reading intervention classes. I was assigned to teach an intensive reading program, RIGOR, which required a three-period block. The course was a new, highly prescriptive curriculum designed for “long term” ELLs, English language learners who have attended U.S. schools for seven years or more. Insulted by this “teacher proof” curriculum, I asked to meet with the school administrator.
“With all due respect,” I said, “ you are paying me a lot of money for my experience, judgment, and skills as a teacher. I have a master’s degree and am half way through a doctorate in English education. Please, let me do my job.”
“Will all due respect,” they said, “we’ve been paying teachers to do their job for years, and still we have these students who cannot read and write on grade level. Follow the program.”
I understood where they were coming from. There was a lot at stake, and after a long discussion, we agreed that there would be about twenty minutes a day that I could do my own curriculum, and while I contemplated resigning, I knew how fortunate I was to have a job while so many were unemployed.
Barbara was a wonderful student of this curriculum. She filled-in vocabulary blanks. She read the fluency passages with fluency. She matched sounds and letters quickly in the phonics section perfectly. And she followed the writing models well. In fact, all the students did well. They had been trained well in their intervention classes to follow the program. It seemed to me that they were learning programs rather than learning to read and write in ways that would help them make sense of the world, of their own lives – why I read, why I wrote, and why I wanted to be a teacher.
We finished the program in a few months, plenty of time for “my curriculum.” They would write the stories of their lives and to listen to countless other stories as we tried to make sense of our place in the world.
I had not anticipated the silence. When I gave them a journal for writing their own stories, it was as if the blank page was a ghost. They seemed afraid to mark it. At one point, Barbara said, “Just tell me what to write. I do good when the teacher just tells me.” Instead, I told her one of my stories.
“When I was your age,” I began, “I shared a bedroom with three of my sisters. We would roll up our blankets in the morning and store them in the closet, and at night we’d roll them out again to sleep. On some mornings before school, my mother would creep into our bedroom gently stepping between the bodies curled up on the floor looking for a few to take to work with her.”
“Huh? You had to go to work before school?” one boy, Jorge, asked.
“It’s not that strange. I help my dad at work all the time. Let her finish,” Maria said.
“I was not a good sleeper,” I continued, “so I was an easy target. We’d get dressed in the dark, pile into the car, and help her clean the bank at the local mall. I still remember the smell of the cigarette ashes as we dumped them into the garbage. Then we had to wipe out the remaining specks of ash. I can taste it in my mouth right now.”
“So that’s what you want to know,” said Barbara.
“About your everyday life. Yes, I want to know the small stories that make up your life. Stories that only you can tell.”
This was very different to the scripted lessons we had done earlier that year where almost everyone’s essay about the Kush or Objects in Motion would be the same.
“I can do that.”
And Barbara told me about how she makes coffee for herself in the morning, and how she feeds her brother breakfast. She included a poem about how her brother’s laughter makes her happy and she told me about a time her mother explained to her why she was different. I don’t have this story now, but it was something about a childhood accident that caused head trauma. Barbara told me that she has a hard time remembering what she learns.
When we began to read literature, I shared Broken Memory, a story about a Tutsi child who survived the Hutu-led genocide in Rwanda. Barbara took copious notes. Even so, she seemed upset when the test did not have multiple choice or fill-in-the blank. Instead, I asked her to write about Emma, a Tutsi, who was saved a Hutu woman. I wanted her to talk about the gacaca courts and if she thought it was an example of democracy. I wanted to hear what she thought of America’s response to the genocide. And, she told me everything.
Still, we were segregated now. We spent three class periods together while the other students moved across classrooms with a variety of teachers and students. When Barbara and her classmates finished our three-period reading class, they went on to a double math class. I can say that the writing and reading we did that year helped Barbara’s test scores, but I can’t say that she finally received a report that said “meets standards.” She did not pass the state test, and our school became a “failing school.” It was clear to everyone that NCLB indeed left some children behind.
The following August, I was moved to the very classroom where I learned to highlight “bubble kids” and informed that my assignment would be eighth grade reading and writing. I was happy to learn that the prescriptive curriculum was boxed up (as those Prentice Hall textbooks would be in 2015), but I was worried about Barbara and her classmates. I did not want her to spend her last year in our school district still segregated.
I met with my building administrators and proposed that Barbara and her classmates be integrated for eighth grade reading and writing. Co-teaching with a bilingual teacher, we were careful to differentiate instruction to meet their needs. And I designed a curriculum with the students to really look at the social forces that shape our society and how we could use literature and writing to make sense of our world.
We took the global focus of the new standards seriously. And we began with an explicit agenda to understand globalization, to make a lot of time for students to lead discussions and generate their own writing topics, to use minimal worksheets or multiple choice style assessments, to grade using a portfolio and conference-based assessments, and to avoid, as much as possible, the phrase “you have to know this for the test.”
Because I had spent the previous three years in a doctoral program on English education teaching prospective teachers, I knew a lot about the Common Core State Standards, and I knew that it was a transition year. I wanted to see how we could use the new standards to serve our purposes rather than be the purpose.
In the months that followed, this eighth grade English class studied the social, political, and economic causes and consequences of cultural intersections with dozens of first and second generation immigration stories and poetry; learned about testimony and bearing witness by writing personal narratives and listening to Loung Ung, a Cambodian-born American human rights activities and genocide survivor; considered consumerism and fragile fortunes with Steinbeck’s The Pearl and Greenfield’s documentary The Queen of Versailles; and explored the darker side of progress and climate change through contemporary young adult texts like The Carbon Diaries, The Maze Runner, Divergent, Matched, Ship Breaker, and Among the Hidden.
We read texts with the same critical eye with which we began our year reading: with deliberate attention to the rhetorical and aesthetic nature of narrative and informational texts and all with no test prep, textbooks, or purchased curriculum. We wrote about our lives, our ideas about the world, and the experiences that shape us. We learned beauty and power of language with music and poetry finding poetic technique every place we read the world. Student-led discussions captured nuances of ideas and showed how texts transact with experience.
We all learned to listen to each other’s stories and interpretations with sympathetic and critical ears, pushing interpretation and calling attention to how ideas are constructed for audience and purpose.
When we came together on Fridays to speak our lives and our learning, what seemed most evident was that the poets were showing their unique contributions the larger conversation about sharing this world, about being human, and about how language shapes our understanding of the world. And don’t we want to see and hear those unique contributions? Isn’t that was living in the twenty-first century is all about?
I don’t know if our curriculum had any impact on test scores; I suspect it did because we learned to careful, thoughtful readers and writers. My intention, however, was to use this transition period between reform eras to re-imagine what an English classroom in the twenty-first century can do, to “pop the bubble.”
I tried to be a different sort of teacher. Instead of being a data-driver, students watched me be a writer and listened to stories about my life. I wrote an argument essay about breaking up with my father, and I wrote a poem a few months later after he died suddenly about the “things he carried” as a boy and man.
I tried to give students space to be a different sort of student. I wanted them to think about what a “good” student was versus a “good” human being or citizen. Is it about conformity or making a unique contribution? One student wrote: “This [year] helped and strengthened my thinking because now I look beyond and I think beyond. I wrote more and if I don’t know what to write in my head I just let my pen think and write for me.” I like the word “beyond” and think students were developing a way of writing and reading beyond what they had before — beyond the programs. Perhaps what we did will better prepare them to participate in a global economy; I am not sure. I think students started believing that their voices matter, that what the world needs in their unique contribution, their story.
*****
“Somebody, somewhere, somehow, some when, some time,” Barbara concluded. There was a delay, but then came the snaps. She smiled at the sound of her peers snapping in appreciation of her verse, of her ideas, of her heart. Barbara was a some body, the body we almost left behind with our targets and interventions. Her vision of the world survived, and I hope it will thrive as she moves on to high school.
As the snaps subsided, she smiled and approached the cup. “Kevin.”
“Purpose. A seven letter word./But what does it mean?/What is my purpose?” he began.
References:
Michie, Greg. Holler If You Hear Me. Teachers College Press, 2009.
Dewey, John. “The Challenge of Democracy to Education.” Dewey, John. John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953: Volume 11: 1935-1937. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2008. 181-190.
Giroux. Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life: Democracy’s Promise and Education’s Challenge. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005.
Note: This title is a nod to Greg Michie’s Holler if You Hear Me. The names of students, faculty, and the school have been changed. Dialogue is a composite and approximate. The poetry is from student writing.