Making Connections in English 12

Welcome to our series of Friday Teacher Scenes where Ethical ELA features teachers’ stories from their classrooms and experiences to contribute to and shape the public narrative of what it means to be an English language arts teacher in today’s sociopolitical climate. We hope to center and uplift one another by featuring the professional, informed, intentional work that drives and makes possible inclusive-affirming critical language arts learning spaces. We welcome your stories in the comments or contact Sarah if you’d like to contribute a blog post.

Making Connections in English 12

by Wendy Everard

As my seniors were cruising around the library, picking out books for free reading, I sidled up to Kaleb.

“Can I help you find a book?” I asked.

As usual, his eyes met mine only briefly before they slid away.

“Naw.  I don’t really like reading,” he replied, stretching his arms up in the air, catlike.

“Well…what are your hobbies?  What do you like to do outside of school?”

Shrug.

Then he disappeared into the crowd of his classmates…but heard me promise:

“I’ll find you a book.”

Kaleb

Kaleb was just the most recent of many nonreaders who populate my high school English classroom.  Reluctant to communicate with me, tough to communicate with, and resistant to help, the tough armor that they wear deflects my suggestions, and they slide off like water.  

I was determined not to let this slippery fish off the hook.

Back in the classroom, a couple of days later, we sat at the front table as I tried to help him spin ideas for his first writing assignment, a personal narrative essay.  

On the first day of class, we had done, as a group, a hexagonal thinking activity.  Each student was given a hexagon, divided into six spaces.  Within these, they wrote and drew about themselves:  favorite places; the story of their name; careers they were interested in; authors, musicians, and artists they loved.  When they were done, they cut out their hexagon and found connections with others in class, taping these together at the commonalities as they circulated.  When we were done, we’d linked commonalities together in a giant web.

On one of Kaleb’s sections, he’d drawn a large Puerto Rican flag with the words “Puerto Rico” under it.  

Finding a Match

Now, as we sat side by side, I slid Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place over to him and locked eyes with him until he looked up.

“Hey, I picked this out for you.  I think you might like it.  She’s from Antigua, and she talks about how she feels about tourists coming to her home.”

A spark.

“It’s short,” he commented, surprised.  

“I really think you’ll like it,” I reaffirmed.  

Flash forward to the next few classes:  I’m conferring with individual students over their essays at the front of the room, and the body of students at their desks are working on their essay drafts or reading their free reading books.  I crane my neck to spy Kaleb, immersed in A Small Place.

We’ve chosen to read outside a few days later, a beautiful, upstate NY autumn Friday.  Some are reading, and some are chatting with friends about college applications, their futures, with excited and nervous laughs.  Kaleb sits on a bench, head down, buried in Kincaid’s island homeland.  He’s halfway through the book.

At the end of class, he makes his way over to me, Kincaid in hand.

“You know, this actually isn’t such a bad book,” he says.  His eyes catch mine, then slide away.

I smile, not too happy or eager, so as not to tip my hand.  “I’m glad you like it.”

My original assignment for this free reading book asked that students choose a fiction book, one that connected with them in some way.  Inspired by a great course on Multicultural Literature that I’d just taken with Dr. Courtney Bailey through Advancement Courses, I‘m having the kids write an autobiographical literary criticism essay at the end of the reading.  They’ll find points of comparison between their own lives and the books that they’ve chosen and synthesize their own experience with some analysis of the book, (hopefully!) creating essays with voice and style.

I bent the rules a bit for Kaleb to help him find a book that I’d hope would connect with him on some level.  As teens are faced with more and more distractions that draw their attention away from reading, it’s critical that we offer them flexibility in reading – choice books are one way – and assignments that ask them to incorporate voice and passion into their writing.  Literary Analysis is useful for English 101 or 102, but non-English majors need opportunities to nurture the life skills of enjoying reading and weighing their own experiences against those that they discover through reading fiction.  

Finding “doors, windows, and portals” for our students is essential to engaging them in class, and the encroachment of AI technology threatens to render a personal writing voice quaint.  Connecting with students, assuring them that their voices are valued in our classrooms, finding books that speak to them, and asking for writing that is both accessible and rigorous, personal and analytical, are ways to foster class community in the upper levels.

Author

Wendy Everard is a high school English teacher and writer living in central New York. Her role as mother and teacher has given her plenty to write about since she started writing personal narrative and poetry, lifelong hobbies kicked into overdrive when she joined a summer institute with the Seven Valleys branch of the National Writing Project a few years ago and began mentoring student teachers. She teaches in Cazenovia, New York.