Expository Writing Piece

[Jessica Perez]

This piece is the beginning of a collection of reflections on my teaching practice. I use Linda Christensen's Reading, Writing, and Rising Up as inspiration for what my classroom can become in the years to come. I have been thinking of it as a "tool-book" for helping me to think about how I will approach teaching next year. Most of the writing was developed through free-write. Many of the thoughts are not yet flushed out. It is not complete.

After three years of teaching I am fairly certain that I want to focus on writing with my students. I believe that writing can be a venue towards academic success. Clear, precise, and purposeful writing not only shows cognitive ability, but tells you a lot about the academic abilities of a student. When a student employs proper grammar, includes strong argument, and has an organized essay structure he or she appears to a reader as an "educated" individual. However, I want to ask, "who made the rules that govern how we speak and write?...Who has to lean how to change the way they talk and write? Why?" (Christensen, Linda. Reading, Writing, and Rising Up, 2000). What is considered "proper" is part of the lexicon of power. It is standard not because it is the correct way, but because those at the top of the social structure speak, read, and write this way. I want to ask my students to explore these questions. I want them to be aware of what academic success looks like and why it looks the way it does. The disadvantage my students face seems overwhelming sometimes. It is hard to know where to focus my attention when I know my students are at a level of writing often way below the standards they must reach to graduate high school.

In my classroom this past year, we focused on writing for compulsory exams, such as the English Language Arts Regents exam and the New York State English as a Second Language Achievement Test (NYSESLAT). The year before that we took a look at our "home language" by collecting samples of speech from students' lives. In my first year as a teacher I was aware that students' writing was the spot in the chain that held many of my students back from achieving at levels their peers in the advanced classes reached. I started my teaching career with little vision of what I wanted to make of my classroom. Now I have three years of experience to work with. I have a drive to push myself and my students further.

My English as a Second Language classes are a source of anxiety I'd like to address before the start of the next school year. I've got deep wounds to heal. With three years' experience and three different attempts at approaching teaching, I've learned the importance of being able to write well for exams, the power of acknowledging home languages as valid, and the need for teaching the methods to succeed on standardized tests. Now I want to create a place to help students "develop the tools to understand the causes of their wounds" and the skills to heal those wounds. My students are not missing some integral ability. The wound is not what they do not have, but what is expected from them. The standard for their success is rigid. They have no say in the criteria they are measured against and this is the wound that afflicts this situation. It's not so easy for me to think of ESL as a practical place for addressing this wound. I have my biases, the ones that have been formed by working with the same students for 2-3 years. There have been moments when I have experienced significant limits in my teaching. I have the expectations of other teachers, those that don't see my students as achieving meaningful success in their classrooms. I have my students' expectations in themselves, however low or high that may be. But I have ideas and a need, a desire to bring some equality to a wounded system.

To learn how to write effectively, students must be readers. I know from my own experience that learning how to write is a process of collecting language and making it your own. By reading students are exposed to different textures and patterns of words. Distinguished authors speak in strong voices that my students can mimic to learn what their voices sound like. Finding your voice can be an exploration of other writers' voices. To learn how to write effectively, students must practice the craft of writing often. By participating in the New York City Writing Project I've learned the power of writing daily. Finding words is easy if you practice searching often. Writing becomes a habit and a comfortable way to express thoughts. My students can learn how to write effectively.

Traditionally in a classroom, teachers have taught what is right and what is wrong. Teachers run the risk of taking a very narrow view of their student work. "When more attention is paid to the way something is written or said than to what is said, students' words and thoughts become devalued." (Christensen, 2000). I fall into this trap with my students. I concentrate so fully on preparing them for exams, the ELA Regents, the NYSESLAT. I want them to succeed so badly. I thought I was "helping them develop the tools to understand the causes of their wounds," (Christensen, 2000) but I'm thinking the result was pushing their self-expression into tight boxes and modes of thinking. The message I sent was, the ELA Regents essay writing structure is the best writing format in the whole entire world! I may as well have shouted that out at the top of my lungs.

My first presentation for the New York City Writing Project I asked two questions: How can I adapt writing strategies for all levels of students? How do I continue to add sophistication to a strategy to keep pushing the students I already know to the next level? I had the presentation participants look at my students' writing samples from last year and notice what had changed from the beginning of the year to the end. One group of teacher-participants looked at a beginning ELL's work. Marie's essay in June was organized by paragraph, used more sophisticated books to analyze and had punctuation. She had more coherent analysis. Her essay in September lacked these elements, but it had a sense of Marie. She wrote about her father, grandmother and siblings. She wrote about how she loves rocks, gems, and love poems. She spoke through her first essay. Her voice was stifled in the second. Was she afraid to talk about her experience? Did she think it was wrong? Unfortunately, it is "wrong" to talk about personal experience in a Regents essay. When a student starts to describe how the prompt relates to his or her experience, the teacher-reader automatically begins to discount what the student has to say. Her omission of her voice was similar to our relationship, teacher to student. I got to know her in someways, but she was lost to me in others. We worked on cut and dry technical essay writing techniques, but we did very little creative writing. The one creative writing assignment I gave that comes to mind is a short myth my students were to write using a plot diagram. Marie seemed very reluctant to write. I don't really remember exactly what she wrote, but I remember not being to impressed with her writing.