Pamela McCarty
I feel as though one foot is resting on the shore of the ideal world and the other is on the banks of the real world?the sands are shifting and I am being split apart. The ideal world, in this case, is the world that acknowledges that writing is revision and sharing aloud and then changing one's mind. The ideal world is one in which writing is art and making books and telling stories, where writing is never graded or written upon or full of red ink or finished. The ideal world centers around the divulging of the self, developing a voice, putting the heart on paper. The real world is one of assessments and grades and test scores, where analytical writing about someone else's ideas takes place in a silent room with the clock ticking and the eyes of the world watching. In this real world writing is proving one's intelligence, validating the school and the teacher, following the formula, making the grade, getting the CIM, not being a failure.
The Oregon Writing Project experience has been a time of serious reflection for me. During these four weeks I have been able to reflect at length upon the relevance that a process/ writer's workshop approach has to the way writing is being taught and evaluated in my own high school. My conclusion is this: although my department members certainly allow time within the classroom for the writing process to evolve, the current State and National assessments do not. There seems to be a serious gap between what has been discovered about the craft of writing since the 1970's and what is being "graded" by the state and nation as a measure of competence. I have recently felt the futility of allowing my students to spend too much time on any one piece of writing, the more they revise, the more the piece improves?.however, this kind of extended re-working is not what they are expected to do on a State or National assessment. I have, therefore, shifted toward the on-demand, impromptu type of writing assignment in order to give my students the kind of preparation they need to do well. I look back with nostalgia on the days when I always read rough drafts, put together peer conferences, helped students to re-think their ideas and their use of language. Now I treat revision as a journal exercise, one that will not improve their grade, but will aid in understanding where they misread a passage or a poem, did not provide enough textual support or did not answer the question with their thesis statement. Their grade is based on that high-pressure, timed-writing experience where they must produce and it must be good the first time. They revise as they go, but they get no feedback until they are done.
The emphasis during these 4 weeks of the Writing Project has been primarily on personal writing: memoirs, family history, fantasy, fables, poetry. I have enjoyed the presentations and the teachers very much. I have also enjoyed being asked to write 3 narratives of my own. Simply writing again, for an audience of peers, has convinced me that I will continue to do so with my students. (That one resolution, in and of itself, is probably the most important thing I will take from this experience!) Mostly I have enjoyed hearing the other teachers in this group read their own stories and share their experience. My students would love the story-sharing experience that we do so little of. Quite honestly, though, by the time my students are juniors they do not write narratives or informal pieces. The kind of writing that they need to produce is formal and expository. I realize that much of writing theory maintains that there is a connection between personal writing and expository/persuasive, many believe one is a precursor to the other. I am not sure that I buy into that. Frankly, most of my students can write wonderful stories (it's just that they are no longer asked to do so). What they cannot do is write clear, logical, college-level prose with few mechanical errors. That is what I must teach them to do. I do not want them to be at a disadvantage. I don't want the scores to go down. At the same time, I do not want to continue to deprive them of the creative stimulation of writing their own narratives and their own poetry. The divided way I feel about what I ask my students to do with pen and paper is maddening.
The reality is that schools and teachers are evaluated and then praised or condemned depending on the State and National scores they earn. The community and the world at large cares deeply about CIM scores, school report cards and AP test scores. In order to meet CIM in writing, students need MANY opportunities to try to pass. That means assigning a lot of writing, quickly assessing it by the CIM rubric and getting those scores entered fast, hopefully in time for the school report cards! Those papers are not second drafts, they are first drafts, without revision. For the National AP test students have to write three strong essays on pieces of literature they have never seen before in 120 minutes. Do my students get a chance to revise those three 40-minute essays that they write one right after another? Do they get a chance to share in peer writing groups? Do they get any prewriting time or discussion at all before they dive right into interpretation? Are they permitted to use first person or write in the narrative/imaginative mode? No. The AP test scores are supposedly the measure of the best that our nation's high school writing instruction can produce. The message from the College Board is obviously that revision is not necessary and that personal writing is not college writing. Ultimately, there is a contradiction here that will not disappear simply because we clearly see the errors in thinking.
I cannot continue to stand here much longer like this, one foot on either shore, without finding some kind of balance. I must integrate the ideal with the real, I must balance what I know to be true about writing (because, of course I have always known it, daughter of a writer that I am) with the contrived and highly flawed expectations of the educational system. I have resolved that all four modes will flourish in my classroom. We will write narratives, we will write poetry, we will write lyric essays, we will use metaphors in our exposition and persuasion. The most important part of this resolve is the word "we". I will participate with them and, if they want to hear what I have written, I will read it to them. In doing this I will be my most authentic self, a self that I have hidden and repressed because, with only the best intentions, I wanted the class to be about my students, not about me. Perhaps it is time to join them. The irony is that they always asked me to write with them
but I didn't listen.