narrative writing

A word on writing

/ Fran Haley / 7 Comments

I love writing, teaching writing, and helping others love writing.

There was a time in my career when I designed and co-created workshops for teachers as writers so that they could channel their own positive experiences into the classroom with students, to model for them how an embryo of an idea comes to life, how it grows bones and flesh and begins breathing and crying and rejoicing and blazing trails right there on the page (or screen). I led professional development. I went into classrooms. I worked alongside teachers and kids. I witnessed powerful things…I can still see the tears, the glowing faces, the pride and awe in the eyes of kids (and their teachers) over something they’d created, that came from within.

They wanted more.

That was before changes in my district, moving away from the writing workshop model and Lucy Calkins in general. Now writing is embedded in the Language Arts curriculum, largely in response to reading. The goals are lofty and writing assignments follow a highly prescribed pattern. Neatly formulaic. Uniform.

That is not to say there’s never any creativity… for example, in a nine-week unit series of extensive reading and writing about frogs, the students get to compose poems and write pourquoi tales about frogs. The pacing and process are pretty intensive… which is why a teacher came to me: “Could you meet with some of my students to help them with the pourquoi tales? So many are struggling. Meeting with each one is taking so long.”

It was like old times, almost, these writing conferences…except with the unique challenges of writing a myth about how some true facet of frogdom came to be while describing the setting and the frogs, giving them character traits, having them talk, and ending up with a lesson learned, i.e., moral to the story. —Did I say, by the way, these kids are around eight years old?

And did I say that there’s no way to teach writing without conferring with the writers? This is, in fact, THE teaching…teachers learning about the learners and figuring out what to do for them.

For there is an English learner who understands so much more than he’s able to convey; his struggle is with grammar, as word order is different in his language. His ideas, however, are original; he incorporates what he knows about his own father’s work. There is a child who missed some critical days in the unit and didn’t understand what to write about, and therefore wrote a completely off-topic but interesting narrative. Once he understood, he went on to compose an engaging narrative with a brilliant, metaphorical moral.

One by one, the kids came, and we talked about what they were trying to accomplish with this pourquoi, and then we figured out the big “hows” and “whys” in the tale… usually by my asking “what if…” and the lights in their eyes would come on. The sparkly pink and rainbow-dotted and brown-and-blue striped frogs came to life. They had conversations. They made bad choices like cheating; they made good choices by helping each other anyway. The tales explained why frogs jump so high, why their tongues are so long, why some are so colorful, why some are poisonous. They learned a lot of lessons about being better frogs.

One resistant boy didn’t want to stop working on his draft revisions to go to specials: “This is fun!” he said.

Oh, child. Somewhere the King of Frogs nods his head in understanding. I can almost see his tiny golden crown cocked to the side of his head, by his ancient and all-knowing eye:

Ribbit.

Only I hear it as Pourquoi…

Why.

frog

Frog. Dave Huth. CC BY

with special thanks to Two Writing Teachers for all you do on behalf of student writers and their teachers…our stories matter.

Organic stuff

/ Fran Haley / Leave a comment

Blueberries

Blueberries. Audrey. CC-BY

The new Teach Write blog, dedicated to “helping teachers teach writers and grow their own writing habits,” invited teacher-writers to post on the topic of Beginnings.

Instantaneously, a dozen possibilities entered my mind, for, truly, there’s no end to beginnings.

Needing to stretch my fiction-writing muscles, I decided to share a short short story about beginnings later in life.

Thank you, Teach Write, for the challenge. 

Organic Stuff

Melva watched him ringing up the fat-free yogurt, the granola, the blueberries, wondering if he had children and why such a distinguished-looking man was cashiering at the Market. Maybe he just wanted something to do. Maybe he needed a little extra cash to supplement his retirement income. She wanted to ask, So, what brings you here to our high-class grocery?

Of course she’d never dream of really asking. That was something her sister would do. Carlice, newly-divorced, affectionately referred to as a “health nut” by the family, was fifty-seven but looked twenty years younger, thanks to the Market and a membership at the gym. Melva had never stepped foot here in the Market until Carlice dragged her along a month ago:

Carlice, checking him out in the checkout line, whispered in Melva’s ear: “Here’s the new guy. Rumor has it that he retired from a bank. He had a wife. Don’t know if she died, left him, or what, but I bet he’s lonely.”

Something in the man’s dignified posture made Melva want to put her arms around him impulsively, to shield him.

 “So,” said Carlice to the man, surveying his nametag, “Ed, is it? You’re new here.”

“Yes.” He didn’t smile, didn’t make eye contact, which pleased Melva because men always fell over themselves around Carlice. This man, Ed, simply rang up the ground turkey, tomatoes, spices, and rice noodles.

“I’m Carlice. You’ll be seeing me a couple times a week. This is my sister Melva. Don’t look for her around here much, though! She doesn’t go for all of this organic stuff, do you, Mel?”

Melva’s cheeks flared. “I, uh, I don’t know. It all depends on how your turkey lasagna turns out. If it’s any good, maybe I’ll try my hand at it.”

Carlice cackled loudly, and, in Melva’s opinion, quite unnecessarily. Ed glanced over his glasses at Melva.

His eyes were blue.

Once a week since then, Melva had gone to the Market. On the first trip she bought everything to make Carlice’s turkey lasagna – it had been delicious. At the checkout counters, she was stricken with self-consciousness. Head down, she scurried past where Ed was working. She promised herself, as she carried the groceries home, that next time she would get in his line.

She thought of him as she baked the lasagna, which turned out to be flavorless and wretched. She threw it in the garbage and called Domino’s delivery.

Now, four repulsive meals later, she finally had the nerve to stand in Ed’s queue. He was too thin. So was his brown-gray hair. She noticed faint liver spots on his hands as he scanned her berries. No wedding ring.

What’s his story?

She wanted to talk to him. Desperately.

“I’m trying to eat healthier these days, maybe lose a few pounds,” she blurted as he rang her items. Her face spontaneously combusted. Melva knew she didn’t blush prettily. She knew she looked like someone who’d misapplied sunblock and stayed out all day under the blazing sun, that she was now covered in big red and white splotches.

Melva, you idiot! You’ll always be an overweight, unattractive old maid who can’t make decent conversation.

He looked at her over the top of his glasses, bagged her groceries, tore off her receipt. It fluttered to the floor. He bent to retrieve it, then stood, tucking a loose pen into his shirt pocket.

“Here you are. Have a good afternoon.” He handed her the bag.

Were his lips turning up just the slightest bit?

She hurried out of the store with her eyes on her Naturalizers.

Tears blurred her vision as she slammed the groceries onto the counter with such force that the yogurt carton split open and the receipt whooshed into the air.

“Fool!” she shouted at herself. “You can never go back there now. Forget about ever getting to know him.” She bent to snatch up the receipt, intending to rip it into shreds, when she noticed handwriting on the backside:

You’re fine just the way you are. –E

She stared, not breathing, not blinking, disbelieving, for what seemed like years.

A slow grin crept across her face.

She knew when she put those blueberries in the cart that she’d never manage to eat them with the yogurt and granola, anyway. They’d only sit and shrivel, which would be a waste of beautiful fruit. She’d put them in a cobbler instead, with real sugar, bleached flour, and a whole stick of butter. She’d take it to Ed while it was still warm.

She’d even get in his line with vanilla ice cream.

Yes.

That would be the perfect beginning.

 

The brain and story

/ Fran Haley / 6 Comments

 

Ghosts in hall

Ghosts in the hall. Rachel Titiriga. CC BY

My mother-in-law had a stroke one week ago today.

At ninety-one, she came through emergency surgery astoundingly well. In ICU, she was happy to see her children and grandchildren, called them all by name, told everyone how shocked she was that she’d had a stroke. As I greeted her, she held out her hand to me and said, “Hey, you’ve got a birthday this weekend.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied, in wonder.

“I haven’t forgotten,” she said, holding tight to my hand.

In the hospital and rehab, she has remained lucid, talking about books, authors, politics, and traveling she wants to do.

So when she occasionally asks, “Hey, little boy, what are you doing over there?” when no little boy is present, or “Who’s that standing behind you?” when no one is, the family gets anxious.

The physician explained: “It’s her brain at work – partly because of the area affected by the stroke and partly due to her declining vision. When she doesn’t immediately understand what she sees or what’s happening, her brain supplies the story, to make sense of it.”

I hung on every word, thinking: The power of story is profound. It’s more than reading or writing. It’s who we are, how we are wired. 

Both Scientific American and Big Think explain: “The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.” Our ability to solve problems, the scientists say, is tied to our understanding of story: “Perhaps story patterns can be considered another higher layer of language.”

Fascinating, isn’t it, that story is where science and the humanities meet.

Story is the essence of being human. It’s how we make sense of the world and our place in it. Story is how we attempt to understand who we are, and how we stretch the boundaries of possibility and our humanity, by imagining more: “What if . . . .”

As an educator, the visit with my mother-in-law could not have been a more striking reminder that story is critical to student learning and growth. It’s not so much the types of texts that students read, but their interpretations, their stories, about the texts that matter – and that for students truly to be critical thinkers and problem-solvers, they must go beyond synthesizing and responding to what others have written. They must look within and generate their own stories. To not do so is to hamper human nature, to not meet an intrinsically human need – and to starve the human brain.

slice-of-life_individual