Creating a Literate and Compassionate Community

	-photo: Jean-Claude Lejeune

A new teacher reflects on her first year of teaching and the power of poetry

Winter 2002/2003

By Tracy Wagner

I knew that after the last week of classes in Period 3, English 10, I would never see some of my students again. Michael* was leaving to live with his mom in Milwaukee; D.J. might be moving back to Chicago, and might be taking classes at an area technical college; Janet was opting to leave "regular" high school classes for a work-to-learn program.

Teaching is a strange way to mark the passing of time: students arrive at the same time every day and, together, we figure each other out. Throughout the year, I felt these students becoming a physical part of my identity.

In my first year of teaching, I felt my chest condensing with blows from the administration, other teachers, and policies that I could not control. I survived a twitch under my right eye, stressinduced hives, and endless nights of grading and writing lessons while having to stretch funds to cover my student loans. I felt guilty for not spending enough time with my partner, not doing my writing, and having to go to bed at nine o'clock.

But I also felt my heart widening with more anger and love and concern than I have ever felt before. At the end, I found myself wondering: What will happen when these students are gone?

"REMEMBER ME"

While I had enjoyed a spectrum of emotions in all of my English classes during my first year of teaching, my Period 3 class was the hardest for me to let go. Within my high school's tracking system, this class rested at the "regular" level - under the TAG (Talented and Gifted) and ACAMO (Academically Motivated) tracks, but above self-contained special education. The students in that class were an array of ethnicities; all came from middle-class to lower-income homes, and some were labeled as "at-risk." Many students received special education services.

On the last day of class, as the students chatted, I laid my own poem on one of the desks in the circle. Earlier in the week, armed with the "Remember Me" lesson plan from Linda Christensen's Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word (2000), I had placed students' names and mine in a hat. After choosing a name, students were to write a poem, praising what they remembered about this person in our class. The word had spread fast - not a small feat in a large urban school - and students had been able to explain the lesson before I even opened my mouth.

I wondered if the poems would live up to my expectations. I wanted them to be gifts, something that the recipients could take to remember our classroom community and their place in it. As I helped students brainstorm, a small part of me feared that I had not created the community that I had worked for since day one. Listening to their questions - "What if I got the name of someone I don't like?" "What if I've never talked to this person?" "What if there's really nothing good to say?"- I thought back on the year's activities and wondered if I had been overly optimistic.

CONNECTING STUDENTS AND THE WORLD

Throughout the year, I designed, collaborated on, and discovered hands-on units that use literature to help students explore their lives and connect to the larger community and world. I wanted students to become more "literate," which, to me, meant not only working on basic reading and writing skills, but becoming compassionate members of society, capable of being agents of change. With this in mind, I started the year with a poetry unit inspired by Janice Mirikitani's poem "Who Is Singing This Song." Mirikitani explains the need to honor our ancestors' work by changing the injustices of the present. She writes: "Who is singing this song?/ I am./ pulled by hands of history not to sit/ in these times, complacently,/ walkmans plugged to our ears,/ computers, soap operas lulling our passions to sleep." She then lists specific issues that have moved her and her ancestors to create change. In the end, she dares her readers "to love, to dream" enough to continue their quests. My students seemed to connect to the poem - to the richness of its language, the urgency of its message, and its rap-like flow.

After reading the poem in class, students brainstormed for their own "Who Is Singing This Song" poem by drawing a line down the middle of a sheet of paper. On one side, they named the issues important to their lives. On the other, they listed personal experiences that shaped these concerns. As this is difficult for some students, I supplied examples - racial profiling, the environment, fair treatment of people with disabilities - and told them to talk through why a person might care about each, and then write their own. On the back of the sheet, students listed the books, songs, movies, and role models that represented their beliefs. On the bottom, students filled in the sentence "I am . ." Responses ranged from "a student athlete" to "a dark poet," from "rebellious" to "macaroni and cheese." In the following days, students learned literary terms and then began the process of pre-writing, then writing a rough draft, soliciting a peer edit, and reworking it into a final poem. On the last day of the unit, students participated in a "read-around" as described in Reading, Writing, and Rising Up, listening to each poem and writing positive comments, then passing the comments to each author at the end of class.

I learned many facts about the students through this unit. I learned that I had to deal with the derogatory behavior and assumptions students had created about themselves through the reinforcement of prior classroom experiences. I learned that students could arrive in and disappear from my classes without warning. I learned that many students had not retained "the basics" - sentence structure, how to write a standardized test-ready essay, literary terms - that they would need to move ahead in their academic educations.

So, backed by a selection of 10th grade books that often felt like choosing the better of many evils, I set out to combine what already existed with resources from the library, my own books, and the collections of other English department teachers. For example, after focusing on the role of conflict in The Lord of the Flies, students watched Anna Deveare Smith's video Twilight: Los Angeles, based on interviews Smith conducted after the 1992 Rodney King beating. After conducting their own interviews about Rodney King with family members and school personnel and watching the video, my students wrote narratives about conflicts in their lives, from their perspective. Then students chose the point of view of another agent of conflict in the narrative - a person, nature, fate, society - and inserted that agent's view. Throughout, I sought to help students use writing and literature to feel compassion for people involved in conflicts in the larger world and in their lives.

Next I wanted students to see a connection between literature, writing, and others in their community. Built on a unit designed by Esmé Schwall and Tara Affolter, teachers who were also new to East High School's English department that year, my English 10 students read Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street in thematic parts, then responded by writing a personal vignette that shared each theme. At the end, students edited and designed their own books, each with cover, illustrations, and author biography. I delivered the books to Lori Nelson, whose eighth graders had also read The House on Mango Street. The middle school kids packed the high schoolers' books with letters and poems responding to what they had written. I remember the silence as the 10th graders read the responses that thanked them for sharing their stories, being brave, and being role models. Martellious, whose book featured stories of losing friends and family to violence in Chicago, told me it was one of the proudest days of his life. I knew he understood how writing about the struggles in his life could help him connect with others. While I couldn't verbalize it at the time, I now realize that giving the students opportunities to read and write for a larger audience validated them as literate, compassionate members of society.

Throughout the year, I created opportunities for students to experience literacy outside of the classroom. I wanted to take away the mystique of college, and to show them that their lives fit into an academic world. Mid-year, I coordinated with graduate student Nikola Hobbel to take a group of my ninth graders to the University of Wisconsin- Madison to be part of her teacher education young adult literature class's discussion on controversies of teaching Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. Bolstered by this experience, I took a carload of Period 3 students to hear Angie Cardamone, a pre-service teacher who spent time each week working in my classroom, give a presentation at the university about the effects of tracking in East's English 10 classes. As Michael, Janet, and Charlie listened to Angie, they recognized their voices in her recommendations. I remember Michael, a lower-income, African- American student sitting on the side of the room, surrounded by young, white, female pre-service teachers. When he participated in a discussion about how white teachers could increase "minority student achievement," I knew his confidence to speak in an academic community showed that he saw himself as a literate member of the discussion.

Near the end of the year, I wanted students to find connections between their lives and a seemingly unrelated text. So, to preface the reading of Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, students studied Nigerian folktales and performed them for our class. Then I asked an African storytelling professor from UW-Madison to speak to the students. Angie Cardamone agreed to pick the professor up on campus; a student volunteered to videotape the presentation; I organized volunteers to set up the room. When I got sick I arranged for a sub I knew to cover the class, and trusted that my students could hold the event together. Sure enough, the students raved and the professor praised the attention and maturity they showed. And though they complained about the difficulty of the reading, the tediousness of text coding (a reading strategy described in Cris Tovani's excellent book I Read It, but I Don't Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers (2000)), and the very idea of a "literary analysis" essay, my Period 3 students held on. As I look back on this unit, I realize that the students had gained enough confidence in themselves to tackle - and maybe even enjoy - a difficult read.

Sure, only a few students would routinely do work outside of class, and a lack of computer access caused many projects to be late. Sure, I had to wait for the kids to stop talking at the beginning of every class. Sometimes yelling helped, sometimes walking out, shutting the door behind me, and then walking back in with exaggerated gestures of "Good morning!" did the trick. Things were rarely easy, but by the end of the school year, I witnessed something remarkable that made it all worth the pain.

CONCLUSIONS

On the last day of class, I asked the students to read the poems they had written about each other. One by one, the students read loudly and slowly. When Brittany, a quiet, white, middleclass girl who loved the ballet, finished reading her poem about Janet, an extroverted African-American girl from a low-income family who loved Tupac Shakur, Janet gave her a hug. The students began a pattern of reading and walking the poems over to the classmates they'd written about, often wrapping their arms around each other. And when their poems were read, I was surprised to see my toughest boys cry.

After the reading, I started to stand but was shushed down by Michael. "Wait, Ms. Wagner," he said, rising, "I've got something to say." Student by student, Michael trailed his finger around the circle, saying one good thing about every one in it. Sometimes I didn't get the jokes, but it was clear that the students understood. He finished, and another student picked up the routine, often walking to the student in the spotlight, hugging, smiling, or hitting a shoulder with a fist. I remember what the students said to each other, and what they said to me.

In the last minutes of Period 3, I sat back and watched the class function as a community of caring individuals. I marveled that I didn't have to say a word.

Tracy Wagner (tjwagner@uwalumni.com) currently teaches English 9 and 10 at Madison East High School, in Madison, Wis.

*All students' names have been changed, unless permission was given.

REFERENCES

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1994.

Christensen, Linda. Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, 2000.

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York, NY: Vintage Contemporaries (1984).

Mirikitani, Janice, "Who is Singing this Song?" as published in Nam, Vickie. Yell-Oh Girls! Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001.

Smith, Anna Deveare. Twilight: Los Angeles. New York, NY: Offline Video and PBS Entertainment, 2000.

Tovani, Cris. I Read It, but I Don't Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2000.

Winter 2002/2003