Ellen Alden and StudentsIf you’re going to contribute something, then you have to be able to write it. Writing is the record of human life, so what we are recording means something.  Maybe in a hundred years they won’t get it, but at this time it means something, and that’s worthwhile. 

 

 

We’re back!  I know it’s been a while, but I am excited to share this latest interview with you.  Prior to the winter break, I was able to sit down in December with veteran educator and my good friend, Ellen Smith Alden.  And while I’m hoping she will forgive the long overdue posting of our interview, I know you will enjoy her wit, passion and expertise about the writing practice in her classroom.  Ellen currently teaches 7th grade history and English here in Virginia, and she is a certified NVWP consultant.  We met many years ago while working at a middle school in Stafford County, and I have always admired Ellen’s tenacity, sharp intellect, and evident concern for the kids in her classroom, both as students and as future adults.  She has the utmost respect for them, as is evident in the ways she teaches and in her consistent commitment to bringing them meaningful curriculum that will serve them their entire lives.

I posed the same question to Ellen that I have asked of the other teachers on this blog: What is your philosophy of writing in your classroom?  She says, “Writing, to me, is a lot like the way I approach art.  Once I had that revelation, that an end product that was perfect and published and beautiful wasn’t the goal, I was able to write and teach writing much better.”  Ellen says it is the process, the brain activity, the planning, revisiting and revising, that have a similar functionality to creating art.  And just as she uses art as a tool for expression, writing allows her to work through complicated feelings dished out from life’s curve balls.

“For instance, recently I wrote about a figure I saw on the subway.  We were joyous.  We had just come from Rockefeller Center with the tree and the big crowds, and I for one was just exhilarated. We got onto the subway, still feeling that joy and exhilaration, and there were these two little girls singing holiday songs. It was a magic moment.  We got on the train, and I instinctively went to the corner expecting it to be empty, but then I looked and there was a person.  There was nobody in within a ten-foot radius of us.  I took a big breath and this person was foul smelling. Everyone else on the car had noses covered and were down at the other end.  This person was covered completely head to toe, you couldn’t see their face or anything, and they had a cart with them, and everything was covered, like an untouchable, and that moment stuck with me.  I knew it wouldn’t be a pleasurable thing to write about and/or read, but I knew that I had to get it down to process it.  The first thing I did when I came all the way home was write about that person.  I’m done, and that was it, and I’ve reconciled with it, sort of, with that experience; however, I don’t think it’s going to become anything publishable.  The process was enough.  I try to do the same thing with my students, to show them that just writing what you think and feel about something is a useful act. They will have a tool to use to help them cope with life.  I hope they see that sometimes sitting down and writing something out can be more useful than confronting something or doing something rash, it can be cathartic.”

Ellen describes the frustration that she and her colleagues felt when required to administer a formal writing assignment based on persuasive style and research.  She describes the scripted, dry responses that such assignments elicit from her students.  She says, “To me, it just seems laughable after what I’ve learned about writing.  They’re going to write persuasive essays, but they’re not going to systemically find research to back up their claims; they’re going to learn how to persuade me because they believe in what they are proving.  You believe in this, so persuade me, or attempt to, and be prepared to fail at it. Really, there is no failure; it’s not win or lose, pass or fail.  It’s the process.”

While Ellen strives to show students uses of writing beyond the purely scholastic, she admits that instruction in form is still important to her.  She explains, “There’s still the English teacher part of me that wants them to know how to diagram a sentence, and I still see value in figuring out complex sentences.  I get very frustrated when I have students who, because they can’t define a word, will just use it as an adjective and be very lazy with the language.  However, I recognize that with close to 90 countries represented in our county, the language itself is a problem for some of my students.  Even with instruction in the roots and origins of words, I’m not always sure it is helping them.  There’s a lot we never get to see in writing instruction, and we have to give people time to see what does and doesn’t work, but you would think that common sense would tell you that with kids who need to learn English and learn our culture, we should perhaps invest that time in them.”

Because she does believe in teaching a strong writing curriculum, and she is concerned about state standards and what her colleagues think about her students’ preparedness when they move on to 8th grade, Ellen focuses on the big picture, the universality of what writing will mean for the kids. She says, “No matter what job you’re gong to go into, no matter what you’re going to do in life, writing is going to be helpful to you, – as a tool to cope with your own personal issues, for a way to communicate ideas that you might have, especially in a job, or even to solve problems.  If you’re going to contribute something, then you have to be able to write it. Writing is the record of human life, so what we are recording means something.  Maybe in a hundred years they won’t get it, but at this time it means something, and that’s worthwhile.

Tips from Ellen:

The Progoff Model

Ellen uses a variation of the more extensive journaling experiences used in this model of self-discovery writing developed by American psychotherapist Ira Progoff.  She relies most heavily upon the “Now is a time in your life..” and “What stuck with you today…” prompts, especially when integrating writing into her history class.  She says she is surprised by the things that stick with her students, because they are never the details she expects.  For instance, she says, “When I’m teaching about WWI, I’ll want to tell them about my grandfather’s experiences.  Even though I tell them all about Americans being drafted and going over to fight in the trenches and the different weapons they used, they won’t write that.  Instead, they’ll write about my grandfather.”

Modeled Journal Writing

Ellen explains, “I always journal with my screen up, allowing students to see me write from a blank page.  They can see my struggle as I’m writing, where I backspace and fix things.  Usually, it’s the first draft, and then they’ll see me pull that up and completely remove parts and fix it.  They’ll watch me go through this whole process, and I’ll be telling them, ‘Now you’re doing this yourself.’  When I get all finished, many times they will break out in applause.  It’s funny, because to me it’s almost garbage.   Finally, I let them share in a non-critical forum.”

Creative Writing

Teachers must continually find engaging ways to reach students with instruction, and creative and novel writing assignments often do this.  I have known teachers to use obituary writing to great effect, either by having students write something about themselves, or as in an exercise for writing about a figure in popular fiction.  Ellen takes this exercise to another level in her history class.  She describes the assignment, “At first, we would write them for historical figures, like Robert E. Lee, and students would include ideas that they needed to remember about his legacy.  Then we got a little deeper into it and wrote obituaries for concepts.  We wrote obituaries for the Old West as if the Old West had died.  We wrote an obituary for the Industrial Revolution addressing the question, ‘How did America change from the Industrial Revolution to the one we have now?’  It’s a little morbid, but the 7th graders kind of like that morbidity.”

She continues, “I tried to branch it into the English classes, and it’s a more of  struggle for me to teach English than it is history.  I started with having them write obituaries for overused words, and we tried to eliminate ‘a lot’ by killing it. My goal is to  play and have fun with language, because it is fun.

Teacher Reference: The Vocabulary Teacher’s Book of Lists

On Becoming a Word Nerd

With a little input from her mother, the official “Grandma of the Classroom”, Ellen runs a blog for her classroom where she and her students become “word nerds”.  She describes it as a place where students can enter interesting words for the study of origins and uses.  She says this system has undergone a few different incarnations, beginning with words chosen by her, but transitioning into the blog where students steer the direction of their vocabulary study.  Ellen reinforces vocabulary confidence in her students this way, saying,  “I’m not the smartest person in this class.  I have the keys to help you, but trust me, there are smarter people out there in this classroom.”

With the belief that a strong vocabulary is crucial to expressive development, Ellen explains that finding the “magic key” for teaching vocabulary seems to be elusive. She says that she’s tried many of the strategies commonly used in the language learning classroom, from giving students word lists and choices for study, to quizzes, to graphic organizers. Currently, she has returned to a more methodical approach with Greek and Latin word origins, usages, and parts of speech, taking it old school.

Overall, she tries to keep it interesting, saying, “I know that I don’t like things that are laborious.  I show them my own dictionary that I had in middle school, even though I wrote a nasty word on the binding with an arrow pointing to my teacher at the time.  It’s still there, and I show them that, explaining that I’m a human being.  I show them that I’ve lost myself many times in the dictionary, and I show them the definition of the word “fart”.  That’s always popular in middle school, because in my dictionary from 7th grade it says “an explosion between one’s legs” (I have looked up the definition of the word “fart” multiple times), but in their dictionary it says something completely different, like “passing of gas from the intestines.” We have a laugh about that.  If I’m bored, they’re bored, and I don’t ever want them to be bored.

The Real Dilemma of Grading in the Writing Intensive Classroom

Ellen speaks candidly about a topic that many teachers find uncomfortable: the improbability of grading all those writing papers.  She muses, “You know what?  It took many years, but recently I decided I’m not going to bring those papers home.  I will devote a day to staying at school and grading as much as I can, maybe a few days, but the reality is some of the stuff I will flip through, and I’m not going to feel bad about it.  I’m not bringing home that ‘bag of guilt’ anymore.  That ‘bag of guilt’ once came inside my house, and I actually did devote my weekends to it, much to the detriment of my own child.  I ignored her because I needed to get all those papers done. I can remember many a weekend when I spent all of Saturday grading and finally, by Sunday evening, I was ready to do lesson plans.  I would be up until 9 or 10 p.m. doing lesson plans, but I would have yet to read a story to my own child; I had yet to do the things with her that I wanted my own students’ parents to do with them.  So, I went from that, to bringing home the ‘bag of guilt’ that would sit in the corner.  I would do things with my child and family, have a good weekend, and then that bag would come out Sunday afternoon or evening, and it would be way overwhelming.  I couldn’t get anything done.  I’d drag it back to school.  Then I would bring it home and it would sit in the car.  So, no more bag. The bag doesn’t come anywhere near us anymore.  Before I leave on a Friday, I look for what I need to reteach and what are they ready for next, and that’s what I go with.”