A bit about me…
Welcome to Writing Speaks Volumes! I’m Kay, the creative and intellectual force of my blog. I like the sound of that! I’m a second career teacher and relatively new to the profession with a mere four years of service. After spending too many years working for an airline that must not be named, I traded my predictable, and often boring, nine to five at the electronic sweatshop for a teacher’s exhausting and seemingly interminable—but never dull or predictable—workday. My teaching odyssey began at a then brand new charter school. No English curriculum, no experience, three preps, and a class of tenth-grade “sirens” nearly killed me, but I survived to blog. From there, I moved to the convent. Literally. I currently teach Sophomore English at the Convent of --------------- School—a small, private, catholic, and blessedly serene all-girl school. I earned my undergraduate degree from the College of St. Catherine with a dual major in English and Communication Arts-Literature. I am currently working towards a Master of Science in Education at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls where I have created this blog for my Language Arts in the Elementary “Secondary” Classroom (aka Education 705) class.
My school…
-------------- is a rigorous college-preparatory high school; our writing instruction focus is to create writers that can organize and articulate ideas clearly, forcefully, and with some stylistic aplomb in the kind of academic writing that will be expected of them at the college level. The high school writing curriculum is sequenced to build skills from grade level to grade level and within each grade-level the writing curriculum is structured from simple to more complex. My students come into sophomore English having spent their freshman year focusing solely on creating strong, coherent paragraphs. We start sophomore English with a brief foray back to paragraphs; the students write four small one to two paragraph papers. But the main instructional focus in sophomore English is the five-paragraph essay. Yes, it is formulaic, but it is backbone of college-level writing. I would agree, as I have heard from detractors of this form, that it stifles voice and creativity; thus, part of my instructional focus is on stylistic concerns. Through our focus on the five-paragraph essay, students’ work on writing leads, creating thesis statements, connecting their topics to their audience, writing effective and smooth transitions within and between paragraphs, using precise words, varying sentences for effect, and writing in a variety of genres.
---------------is unique; I call it a sanctuary. And, I suppose, since it is home to the sisters of the convent it is. Articulated through the sisters’ Salesian spirituality, the school is infused with a spirit of kindness, gentleness, and quiet strength. Many of the girls at --------------- are “lifers,” meaning that they have attended ---------------- since pre-school. And those girls who are not “lifers” joined the --------------community in middle school or have fed in from other Catholic middle schools. As a result, the girls share a spiritual culture and a familiarity that is supportive, respectful, and freeing. Furthermore, the all-girl environment allows the girls the freedom to flex intellectually. Due to limited space and low seniority, I share two classrooms with two other teachers; thus, I am somewhat limited with regard to flexing group arrangements often and at a whim. In my morning sections, students are grouped in traditional rows, and in my afternoon sections students are grouped in a horseshoe fashion, which is great for discussions and partner work. I teach four sections of sophomore English, and my class sizes are relatively small, given the norm in our schools toward larger classes. My smallest section has seventeen students and my largest section has twenty-one students. Class grouping vary with the kind of writing task we are doing. Students generally free-write or respond to journal questions at their desks. If they are working on drafting and researching and we have the carts students grab a laptop and a partner and find a corner somewhere in the room. If students are peer reviewing, they generally form pods throughout the room to read and discuss.
Some literate thoughts…
Since I can remember, I have always been moved by words. I love to read, and teaching has only deepened my love affair with language. I have kept a journal—consistently, but inconsistently—since elementary school, and I have always harbored a secret desire to write. Reading and writing are the pillars of literacy. But does merely being able to read and write make one literate? No. They are the buds that make literacy flower. I think the essence of a literate person is the capacity for directed, purposeful, and reflective thought and action. Literate people use their reading and writing ability to flourish and change. Literate people possess the seeds of accessibility: accessibility to ideas, knowledge, independence, and relationships. Lucy Calkins in The Art of Teaching Writing maintains that we, human beings, need to write to understand our lives—this is literacy. Literacy permeates every aspect of my English classroom. Throughout any given class, my students are reading, writing, and discussing. I ask them to consider and connect to their lives and their world through our literary selections and their writing. While I must admit, there is a part of me that is skeptical of the constant parsing and analyzing of literature that we do at the high school level. I sometimes question if too much analysis verges on murdering the beauty of literature. If we destroy, as Macbeth does when he kills Duncan, the wholeness of our community with language.
Writing chapter one for Language Arts in the Elementary “Secondary” Classroom, I welcome your thoughts, comments, and insights. Until then…
