July 11, 2001

Dear Betty,

How's your summer going? I know you said you'd be teaching summer school until Sarah's out of college, so I guess you're having a swell time with that. I'm taking a four-week class this year, given through the Oregon affiliate of the National Writing Project. This letter will be my 4^th and final assignment for the course, and is supposed to summarize what we've learned so far.

Our first papers were personal narratives, which sounded like a lot of fun, except that we needed to bring drafts for discussion with other teachers in a response group to the first class. We were all going to be at Breitenbush for the Summer Solstice Healing Gathering the week before the class started, so I wanted to get my story finished before we left. I wrote about Dale Kegley, finally, how we were sweeties twenty years ago, and then all about the Hoedads money and then finding out that Dale was Eric's daughter's grandfather. I thought it was cute, but then at Breitenbush I worried that it was wildly inappropriate to read to teachers I didn't even know. Sue and I talked about subtitling it "Promiscuous People Can Be Nice, Too."

Nobody seemed to have trouble with my behavior, though, as revealed by "Dale and Me," but they did suggest that there were too many people in the story to keep track of, so I took out some minor characters. It was great reading the other papers in my response group and talking about them, too.

For the second paper we could re-write the first experience from another point of view or in the third person. I was amazed at how challenging that turned out to be. I hadn't realized that I'd never written narrative in the third person. I didn't even know how to start. I tried doing one of the Hoedads meetings as seen by an angry treeplanter, or even an amused treeplanter, and got nowhere. Finally I did Snake waiting for me to get to San Francisco the night before we left for Nepal, remembering how she'd talked me into coming with her, and that seemed to work. I was extraordinarily proud of it when I was finished.

The third paper was supposed to be expository, and for that one I turned in a kind of gossip column I'd written for my booth at the Fair, giving information about who everyone's camping with, who their kids are, what they do outside the Fair, and what they do in our booth, to help new workers sort everybody out when we all get there tomorrow. I'll be missing the last two days of class this week, which is why I wanted to finish the draft of this summary today, so we can talk about it in my response group when I get back Monday.

Writing and discussing papers turned out to be only one of what I see as the four strands in this course. The second has been presentations by each of us on some aspect of teaching writing. I did mine yesterday, on how reading a Thurber story can inspire us to write funny stories from our own family histories. We had a good talk about what to do with kids whose family histories aren't very funny, or are in fact awful. We have a Spanish teacher who told us it's a common practice in foreign language instruction to create "un otro yo," and write (or speak) about that person's experiences as if they were your own, which seemed as if it would work there.

All of the presentations so far have been interesting, and most of them have included material I could use next year. I especially liked one that involved creating colorful sentences by passing papers from group to group, adding, in turn, verbs and adjectives to an original noun. Not only did it reinforce names for parts of speech (I'm sure all of your 7^th graders have this down pat, but you'll be shocked to hear that mine don't) but it was a simple way to practice using vivid verbs and specific descriptive adjectives.

We're also had presentations by experts, the first by the principal of the school that's hosting the class, who is a computer nut. We usually spend half the day in the school's computer lab, and in just one morning this guy managed to make clear to me things I'd been doing with no idea why they worked on the computer I use at school, and things Forrest had given up trying to explain to me long ago. Unfortunately, my resistance to a lot of the rest of the computer instruction seems to have stiffened right up, and I'm still in a kind of fog about setting up and adding to our individual web pages, creating power point presentations, and using the Inspiration software. Can you do all these things? I did manage to set up a hotmail account here, to which I can e-mail the stuff I write at home, which is another major step forward into the world of the technologically competent for me.

Another expert who was here Monday was Bill Strong, who took us through his sentence combining curriculum. Have you heard of this? Students transform lists of kernel sentences ("Jackson builds tension. Jackson builds a sense of mystery. She describes the atmosphere of the lottery. The atmosphere is festive.") in various ways. I'd like to make room to use this next year, too.

The last strand's book reports, on books we choose from a commodious selection of the sorts of books on writing you always thought you'd get around to looking at some time. It's a pleasant motivator to be earning graduate credit for reading and writing about some of them. I read You Can Improve Your Students' Writing Skills Immediately! By David Melton, which was fun, in a bossy, informative way, and Barry Lane's Writing as Road to Self-Discovery, which was more about writing as therapy than about teaching writing to kids, but interesting. Then I read Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, which is the one I'd most strongly recommend so far. This one, too, is less about teaching writing, than it is about practicing writing, but it seemed to me to cover not only how we can write more clearly, about more important stuff, but why we would want to, even why we have to. I'm still working on Nancie Atwell's In the Middle, which I grabbed off the shelf the first week. After the Fair, I tell myself. I'll finish it next week.

Reading and talking about writing, practicing writing, and learning from other teachers who are demonstrating how they teach writing have combined to make a sort of rich soup of written expression for all of us in these last three weeks. We won a big grant in Oakridge to improve our reading instruction that we'll all be inservicing on at the end of August, and I was worried, this spring, that reading instruction would sort of expand to fill the time available, and squeeze out what I've learned here. I feel so steeped in it now, though, that I see myself not only teaching more writing to the 7^th graders, but helping support the 5^th, 6^th, and 8^th grade teachers to use some of what we've been doing too.

Forrest says hi. Love, Jain