Problem Student (teacher) Post #1

I've been blessed with the greatest students. Even when I guest taught my colleague's English class, the students were fantastic. I know 10th grade is a hard year; we refer to it as the lost year in my Media department. It's the year where the hormones seem to go completely haywire, grades don't seem to matter, and the peer pressure reaches its peak. On my guest teaching, I tried to group the kids for an activiy based on random groups and there was a coup. Some kids were huddled in the corner shaking all over while others yelled at me, "we work better with our friends, you know!" In the end, I let them work with their friends.

In my creative writing class I have a student, going on two years now, who struggles with her creative writing. She recently handed in something that I looked at and felt as though I have failed her. After two years of a creative writing class, shouldn't I see more improvement? Is it that she's lazy, and just appears to be a hard-worker? Have I not given her enough feedback, enough customized attention or constructive instruction? The answer, I suspect, is that I simply don't know what to do with her.

The latest assignment is a 5 - 8 page short story. We are writing reverse dramas, that is, a short story with a dramatic twist at the end. Her story doesn't have a twist. There is no "showing," it's an entirely "told" story, "Michelle and Brian talked on the phone for an hour. Then Michelle went to bed." I asked her, "What did they talk on the phone about?" She gave me that familiar smile (the one that either means she doesn't know what I'm talking about or she's uncomfortable, she's not easy to read), and said, "maybe... um... I'll have to think about it." Ugh.

I gave her the story back the other day. I had a plan. I made sure the rest of the class was otherwise occupied, I had an hour I could focus entirely on her, and we went through the story sentence by sentence. We talked about showing and not telling - for the 1000th time. We discussed the effect of each sentence. She edited sentences to make them mean what she wanted them to say. In retrospect, it really seemed that she needed my encouragement to give her the confidence to rewrite her sentences, to take a risky leap at the complexities in meaning she was after, acknowledging that she didn't know how to craft the words to convey the meaning. Using my Nelson-English Training, I didn't give her the answers, I just gently pointed a little more this way or that until she could find her own path.

And then she said this: "Can I rewrite this in the first person using dialogue?"

After I picked myself back up off the floor, brushed myself off all casually, I nonchalantly whispered, "that is a great idea!"

Then she mused, "but won't it be boring if I just keep writing, 'she said, ...' and 'he said...'"

So I grabbed a book of short stories off the shelf and she made a list of alternatives that she liked. She said she'd finish it over the weekend.

I CANNOT WAIT to read what she wrote.

This is exactly the type of problem I hope to be able to recognize much sooner than after 2 years - how to help a student, who clearly doesn't read for pleasure, how to write. What does it mean for me as a teacher when a student says, "I can see what I want to say in my mind, I just can't seem to get it down on paper?" I know a lot of people say that you can't teach writing. I'm not sure where I come down on that argument – it's too soon for me to draw any conclusions. But given the space to write and some appropriate focused attention, a young woman can teach herself a lot and educate me in the meantime.