Yesterday I left school feeling more energized than I have in a long time. And as I sat on the spin bike in my garage trying to cycle away the calories and the concerns of the day, I realized that this energy probably comes from the content of this week's lessons and the goals that I have for my students this week: writing the personal essay.
The personal essay is actually the essay that students will write next year for those all important college applications. It is also--without question--my favorite exercise to lead kids through. Not because it's simple. Actually, for them it is a giant struggle, an exercise in trust, a leap of faith, a practice in self-control during which they must stay out of the outcome and trust the writing process. They are so used to the five paragraph structure. They are so used to planning out their entire essays before even beginning to tap the keyboard that they do not understand the miracle of discovery that occurs when you allow yourself to sit down and write freely.
So, in the past few weeks, we've taken a chapter from Corbett's, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student and discussed schemes and tropes and patterns of organization. We discussed types of diction and the connotative and denotative meanings of words. We then examined exemplar texts: Virginia Woolf's Death of the Moth, Annie Dillard's Death of A Moth, Loren Eiseley's, The Brown Wasps, Annie Dillard's, Living Like Weasels, Sherman Alexei's, Superman and Me, E. B. White's, Once More to the Lake so that we might understand how writers use rhetorical tools to create an effective personal essay. Finally, after all of this analysis, we created lists of characteristics that an effective personal essay might include. I synthesized all of those lists into a "rubric" of sorts for students. You can see it here: http://mcallister470.blogspot.com/ under the entry for November 16, 2015.
And now, we've moved on to the wonderful, awful, terrifying, exhilarating part: the writing. For three days, students will sit and do nothing but try to knock out a manageable draft of a personal essay on the topic of their choice. I've given them three hours of class time, because I believe that students will be more likely to create a quality product if I give them the gift of time. When they leave school, their heads are anywhere but wrapped up in the personal essay. And I get that. There is life to deal with after school: sports, clubs, jobs, younger siblings to care for, and all that math homework. Allowing my students to write in class is an investment.
So far, and this is only day two, the payoff has been huge. When students are allowed to write about topics that matter to them and they are shown that their writing is worthy of class time, incredible things happen. Writing the personal essay is already by its very essence a set up for catharsis. Because it's personal. Yesterday, I had three kids near tears at the end of the hour as they had chosen to write about topics of great sensitivity: the struggle with eating disorders, the death of a loved one, the difficulty of relationships.
Sometimes at parent teacher conferences parents will say to me, "Why don't you teach them how to do more technical writing? In my work, I see people all the time who cannot even write an email."
My response is that students who can write essays and arguments can transfer that facility with language to any writing task. If you can write a personal essay, you can write an email. If you can effectively articulate your ideas in an attempt to answer the questions we are faced with every day as humans on this planet, you can figure out how to write a report for your boss detailing the specs of some new design you are working on. But, to have at your disposal, for the rest of your life, the ability to articulate your experience and to discover what is significant in that experience, to attach meaning and order to it and to make connections between the seemingly random, sometimes glorious or frustratingly unfair events of your life...this is what makes us human. This is what adds depth and dimension to our experience.
I know that the source of my energy comes from the way that I have chosen to teach AP Lang this year, as a course of composition and non-fiction. In years past, I have listened to the voices telling me that I was doing a disservice to kids by not including fiction from the canon. There is nothing I hate more, that is more oppressive or soul-sucking, than taking an entire class through the SAME novel all at the same time. Instead, this year, we are reading the likes of the aforementioned and many others, short non-fiction pieces that we can analyze and scrutinize and then use as models for our own writing. And as I watch kids struggle with the writing process and adapt to this new way of writing where you let the outcome happen instead of trying to force it, and after that struggle when I hear them say things like, "This essay doesn't look anything like I thought it was going to." I know I've done what I am paid to do, what I am called to do, what I love: as Lucy Calkins put it "allowing kids to weave reading and writing into the fabric of their lives."
