During winter and spring of 2013, I was part of the Flagship program at Hellgate High School. We met during lunch on Wednesdays and read books that we chose together. The group was small and informal. Most of our conversations revolved around what we did and did not like about the books. The three novels we read were Cather's My Antonia, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, and Brooks's World War Z. We also read two short stories of the inimitable Donald Barthelme, "The Balloon" and "Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby." We talked about narrative structures, usually using the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings trilogies for examples, since everyone in the group was familiar with both of them. The students were sophomores to seniors, mostly of a delightfully offbeat disposition and with eclectic interests.
More than anything, this reaffirmed for me the notion that the more students read, the better, and also that students are more willing to think if they're thinking about something that is interesting to them. What this means is that as a teacher, I have to be willing to leave my comfort zone and venture into post-apocalyptic zombie novels, if that's something my students want to read. It also provided me an opportunity to be a fellow reader and meaning-maker rather than a two-bit expert. I had never read World War Z, and it had been eight years since I read Vonnegut, so I was not professing this or that about those books. I was simply modeling what a good reader looks like by making margin notes and making connections within the text and without.
Another valuable thing that I learned here that I hope I can transfer to classroom teaching is that students can read controversial texts and be mature about it. Slaughterhouse-Five has been banned sporadically since published, but these couple of students were able to read it and engage in the cultural criticism that has made some despise it.
While the group was not exactly culturally diverse, it did represent a variety of backgrounds and interests, which is the type of diversity that shows up even in predominantly white areas like Missoula. Interests of the students ranged from video game programming to horseback riding, but all shared a love of stories.
Since February of 2013, I have been involved with the Writing Coaches of Missoula. This organization sends volunteers into classrooms on the request of teachers to sit down twice, one week apart, and workshop first and second drafts of major writing assignments. Our methods were rooted in Culham's 6+1 Traits of Writing, focusing mostly on organization and ideas.
Most of what I learned about teaching writing came during my experience as a Writing Coach, where I dealt with a huge variety of students and their personal challenges as writers. Part of this was being able to respond directly and on the spot to the problems that they think they have as developing writers, or to point out problems that they didn’t know they had and work towards a solution. My experiences varied from helping a student who came with almost nothing start brainstorming an answer to a prompt, to counting words within sentences of a good paragraph in the midst of an outstanding paper. In the first case the student came back for the second week with a passable response based on the ideas and organization we had worked through during the first meeting. In the second case the student left with a better understand of how to pace her sentences in future writing projects.
The diversity involved here was about as wide as one can get in Missoula in that I have workshopped papers from 7th graders through high school seniors at various schools in the Missoula area. Some students were working at an extremely high level, while others struggled initially with putting their ideas down on paper in some sort of logical order. This was really my first exposure as an educator to middle school students and their work, which planted the seed for my love of that age group.
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