This has been a busy year for me: undertaking National Board
certification, chairing my department, teaching a couple of new-to-me
courses. It may be my seventh year of
teaching, but—as always—I feel a little bit like a rookie trying to figure
things out. My family and friends
outside the profession say I’m a perfectionist, but I see myself as always
being in the midst of the very messy process of revision.
I’m always trying to get better:
· How can I get
my kids past the raw comprehension of Othello and into the
study of
Shakespeare’s language choices?
· How can I
move students from making inferences as they read to recognizing
patterns
throughout the entire text?
· How can I create student independence in the
thinking and writing process?
· Etc. Etc.
Etc.
Now, as I embark on my newest endeavor, leading the GWP’s
study group on Writing Craft, I find myself asking more and more questions:
· What books
should we study?
· With the push
towards argument and informational writing, where does
narrative writing fit
in?
· How can we
make room in our classrooms for narrative writing despite our
other time
constraints?
Narrative writing is something that English teachers have
always excelled in, but we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with
the bathwater. Over the past few months,
I’ve begun to realize that my baby might be long gone. The thing is, the rest of the community and
our administration haven’t even realized my baby is missing yet. I’m being contacted left and right about this
writing contest and that guest-poet, told second-hand of my administration’s
full commitment to our students taking advantage of these opportunities, and
left wondering how I am supposed to do it all.
As teachers, we deal in the currency of time. A mandatory assembly here and test-prep
lesson there are time spent that can never be recovered. Yes, perhaps it is an investment, but will we
ever see the return? And what about the
bills we have yet to pay: critical reading and analysis, argument writing,
informational writing, performance tasks?
Is there any time left to budget towards narrative writing?
Tough questions. I
think the answer is that we have to make time for narrative writing. So, how do we do this? And how do we convince the rest of the world
that class time working on narrative writing is time well spent? I hope these are questions our Writing Craft
Study Group will be able to answer.
