He calls me his superhero. I feel like I've failed him. Why is there this disconnect?
To Daniel, I might be one of the few teachers who has talked to him frankly about his learning gaps and said directly that we would work together to fill in those gaps. We followed a model presented to me last year through BAYCES' Impact 2012 initiative. In this model teachers select a group of students who fall outside of the "sphere of success." These students are called "Focal Students." Daniel was my first pick focal student because I rarely understood what he said in class because he covered up his English language skills with jokes and laughter. I also chose him because his older sister had been the previous year's Valedictorian. The gap between what she had accomplished and what he was lacking was astronomical to me.
After diagnosing his learning gaps through the Qualitative Reading Inventory (QRI), I discovered, along with the help of some BAYCES coaching, that Daniel was at a second grade reading level and his primary struggle was decoding. More specifically, Daniel didn't know all of the ways an English vowel could be pronounced, far more than the variations available to him in his native Spanish.
For the last few months, I spent 20-40 minutes a week working with David on his short and long vowels. He amazed me with his speed. Through a sorting activity he easily identified patterns. For example, ai makes the long 'a' sound but so does ay. If a week had gone by between one session and the next, he would impress me with his ability to retain and build on the patterns he had learned before. We quickly moved on to the long 'o' and the short 'o'. He gained confidence when we were together one on one.
When I retested Daniel at the end of the school year, he'd moved three grade levels to a fifth grade reader! This is fantastic news for Daniel. He is proud of his growth and so am I. On average, with no intervention, students increase one reading grade level per year. Anything more than one grade level is considered an accelerated pace, which is essential for students who are behind. Together we had accelerated his learning!
He calls me his superhero. In a focal student panel with the rest of the staff, he announced that I "saved his life." This gratitude and enthusiasm bolsters me up and makes me happy, but simultaneously saddens me.
Daniel now reads at a fifth grade level. He is about to be a tenth grader. He is still five grade levels behind. In order to close the gap between where he is now and where he will need to be to graduate, Daniel needs a lot more intervention and soon. If I follow the model I started two years ago, I will be able to impact students like Daniel for a few months at a time, give them a taste of acceleration before passing them off to the next grade, but then what? If no further intervention happens, the best case scenario is that Daniel and students like Daniel will reach an eighth grade reading level by the twelfth grade. The chances of him being able to graduate are slim. His curiosity, innate intelligence, and quick retention of new information may be depleted by lack of confidence or low self-esteem.
Daniel was the first student I was able to systemically intervene with. It took me four years of teaching, lots of professional development, intense instructional coaching, and the right learning partnership with a student for it to happen. Now that I know it is possible, I feel a moral imperative to not only continue intervening with Daniel but to intervene with the next crop of Daniels who come to me next year. I said it aloud at our staff meeting last week, and I'll repeat it here: what will we (our staff, our district, our public education system) do to systemically support the work of accelerating learning for students like Daniel?
If we can answer that question, we will be real super heroes who make sustained changes in our students' lives rather than comical renditions of ourselves, swooping in to patch up an error here or there.
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
19 May 2010
10 October 2009
There Are Lots of Alligators
In order to review literary devices with my students we read Sandra Cisneros' short story "Eleven." It's the protagonist Rachel's eleventh birthday, but her day doesn't go as planned when the teacher makes her put on an old red sweater that isn't hers. Cisneros captures the flexibility of age, how just when we believe we've arrived at a particular age we bounce back to years before. In the story Rachel reverts to about three years old when she cries in front of her class, except she is clearly mature at the same time because she is able to recognize that she is not "acting her age."
The class always enjoys this story and it allows me to become more real to my students when I tell them that every once in a while they will catch me acting like a twelve year old. Like Rachel, I can see that I've slipped and will acknowledge that mistake. For example, I have a lovely student who is extremely outgoing and always willing to volunteer. She's the first to put her hand up and call out answers. Since I'm always trying to get more voices out in the classroom and hoping that others will share too, I sometimes have to ask her to wait (not unlike the time in college when my beloved professor silenced me by saying, "We know Sylvia has the answer, but let's hear from someone else"). My student not only puts her hand way up in the air and rises from her chair but calls out, "ooh ooh, ooh ooh" and waves her fingers at me. Well, the other day I slipped back in time and said, "I think it's funny how you always say ooh ooh, like it's gross." I said this in front of the class and thought nothing of it, until I heard her say under her breath, "That was rude." Thankfully, I recognized my mistake and later I pulled her aside and apologized. From all appearances on her part, I have been forgiven.
To anyone who thinks relationships are challenging, try maintaining 90 student-teacher relationships plus 18 colleague relationships with integrity, compassion, and love. It is no wonder I often feel like a therapist, but also need to visit one.
But back to the story of "Eleven." One of the devices I had students searching for in the short story was alliteration. Many of them struggled with the pronunciation of the word alliteration, but most of them were able to identify it, especially in Cisneros' work since her stories are simply poetry in disguise. My favorite moment of the day's class, however, was when a confident young woman said, "Ms. Barrett, there are lots of alligators in this story!"
A collective pause ensued as we all pieced together what she meant.
"Alligators? Do you mean alliteration?"
We all had a good laugh, not at the expense of the student but the play of language and the alliterating alligator, as if we were all eleven together, enjoying a children's book during story time.
The class always enjoys this story and it allows me to become more real to my students when I tell them that every once in a while they will catch me acting like a twelve year old. Like Rachel, I can see that I've slipped and will acknowledge that mistake. For example, I have a lovely student who is extremely outgoing and always willing to volunteer. She's the first to put her hand up and call out answers. Since I'm always trying to get more voices out in the classroom and hoping that others will share too, I sometimes have to ask her to wait (not unlike the time in college when my beloved professor silenced me by saying, "We know Sylvia has the answer, but let's hear from someone else"). My student not only puts her hand way up in the air and rises from her chair but calls out, "ooh ooh, ooh ooh" and waves her fingers at me. Well, the other day I slipped back in time and said, "I think it's funny how you always say ooh ooh, like it's gross." I said this in front of the class and thought nothing of it, until I heard her say under her breath, "That was rude." Thankfully, I recognized my mistake and later I pulled her aside and apologized. From all appearances on her part, I have been forgiven.
To anyone who thinks relationships are challenging, try maintaining 90 student-teacher relationships plus 18 colleague relationships with integrity, compassion, and love. It is no wonder I often feel like a therapist, but also need to visit one.
But back to the story of "Eleven." One of the devices I had students searching for in the short story was alliteration. Many of them struggled with the pronunciation of the word alliteration, but most of them were able to identify it, especially in Cisneros' work since her stories are simply poetry in disguise. My favorite moment of the day's class, however, was when a confident young woman said, "Ms. Barrett, there are lots of alligators in this story!"
A collective pause ensued as we all pieced together what she meant.
"Alligators? Do you mean alliteration?"
We all had a good laugh, not at the expense of the student but the play of language and the alliterating alligator, as if we were all eleven together, enjoying a children's book during story time.
03 October 2006
Thank You, Bluford
Most people can admit to not finishing at least one book they were assigned in high school. For me it was Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” My own adventures keep me alert with eyes wide open, but action and adventure movies and books bore me for some reason. The other book I dared to skip was Nathanial Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” I couldn’t stand the puritanical language. I found it hard to follow and irritating. As a junior in Honors English, I decided not to read it until one day it occurred to me that even though I could bullshit my way through the daily comprehension questions, I could not bullshit my way through the essay we were inevitably going to have to write. So, I picked the book back up. I was always good at English, but it certainly wasn’t my favorite high school class. I preferred Physics and Spanish.
And yet, it always saddens me to learn that my students have not ever enjoyed reading. Many have never finished a complete book. We’re not talking about books by dead white guys, either. The majority of my students score at about a fifth grade reading level. For many of them, this is right where they are expected to be because they’ve only been speaking English for a few years. For others, this low reading level can be attributed to myriad causes: revolving door substitutes, under-prepared teachers, a home culture that does not include bedtime literacy or early childhood education, reading disabilities, attention deficit, etc. Whatever the cause, the result is that my room is full of ninth graders who have never finished a book. Until now…
Three weeks ago I spent a portion of a lesson showing off the books I had chosen for my students. I did mini-book talks on each of the books and talked them up as if they were my best friends. I’ve learned in the last year, that I’m responsible for holding the enthusiasm for learning. If my students don’t have that enthusiasm, I overflow with it and hopefully it will be contagious. This seems to work, despite my skepticism. Included in my book talks were paperbacks from the Bluford Series. These books are written for young adults. They contain themes that appeal to teenagers, especially urban teens, but they are written at an elementary/middle school level particularly for struggling readers. I held several of the books up and I said to the class, “Some of you have never read a book. Next week, you will read one of the books in this series in just five days!” In my mind, I was hopeful that I could carry this through rather than offer them up another academic disappointment. But in my speech, there was nothing but certainty that they could, in fact, read the paperback in one school week.
Soon thereafter, students signed up for the book they most wanted to read. I organized them into small Book Groups of between three and five students. The following Monday, the collective ninth grade was reading thirteen different books from the same series. As a second year teacher, all of this felt like a big risk on my part. I’d never tried small Book Groups, and I’d never read any of the thirteen books in the series. I simply knew they were popular and had been successful elsewhere. I borrowed the idea of a Book Journal, or Dialogue Journal from a friend who is a reading specialist at a nearby school. By the end of the first class period, students were signing up to take home the book journal and write about what they had read to their small group. Their job was to return the next day with questions, comments, and ideas about what they had read and pass them off to the next person in the group. The idea is to capitalize on ninth graders’ propensity to pass notes, and turn it academic. The results were good. Each group completed their journal. There were only a few exceptions of one student in the group not participating at all. No journals were lost at home or eaten by dogs. On the last day, the group collectively had to design the cover, thinking of a symbol to characterize the book and by pulling a representative quote from the book and rewriting it on the cover. They thought it was fun, and I thought, “Yes, they are doing literary analysis without even knowing it! I’ve tricked them!”
Some days a few students hadn’t done their homework, so they were behind on the reading. But more often than not, students were reading ahead. These books were so engaging that students wouldn’t put them down. They wanted to check out the next book in the series before finishing the first. A young woman nicknamed Danielle (for the sake of this blog) swore to me she’d never read a whole book before in her life, except the care guide for her new Chihuahua. But on the night of Back to School, I saw her in the back row with her nose in a book. I met her mom later that evening who told me she’s never seen Danielle read, ever. She was beaming. So was I. Another student, Carlos, who had made it perfectly clear to me early on that he was a “bad kid” last year with multiple suspensions and horrible grades, went out of his way every day to tell me how much he loved his book. I saw him at the taco truck one lunch period and he announced to all of the kids around him, including some of my students from last year, that English was his favorite class because it was “hella fun.” By the end of the week, every group had finished their book!
Tonight as I’m finally reading the finished Book Journals and grading their final books tests (where most students are scoring at least twenty-five out of thirty points), I’m learning from them that they loved reading in small groups because it was social but also supportive. So many reported that when they got stuck, their group members could help them out. This is from the group of ninth graders who wrote into their culture that “None of us is smarter than all of us together.” That's Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development” from the mouths of babes.
In my class reading is cool! I can hardly believe I’m lucky enough to see this happen in my class. My students have the skills to become better readers. The main thing they need to do is just read, and read, and read some more. That they have found some books they like and have learned that there are even books out there worth liking will go a long long way towards them choosing to continue reading. While the Bluford Series is far from lofty literature, it is the gateway to other reading. It’s the beginning. The bridge I’m trying to build now is to Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight Los Angeles.” I’m building the bridge on our practice of poetry in the early weeks and the urban setting of the L.A. Riots. My students understand police brutality better than me. They know racism deeper than I do. They are crossing the bridge. Duc asked last week, “When are we going to start the next book? Can’t we hurry up and read?”
**************************************************************************************
Find out more about the Bluford series by visiting www.townsendpress.com Teachers, schools, and even students can write to them and ask for a free sample of books. Teachers can buy books directly from their website for only $1 a book. Definitely worth the investment!
And yet, it always saddens me to learn that my students have not ever enjoyed reading. Many have never finished a complete book. We’re not talking about books by dead white guys, either. The majority of my students score at about a fifth grade reading level. For many of them, this is right where they are expected to be because they’ve only been speaking English for a few years. For others, this low reading level can be attributed to myriad causes: revolving door substitutes, under-prepared teachers, a home culture that does not include bedtime literacy or early childhood education, reading disabilities, attention deficit, etc. Whatever the cause, the result is that my room is full of ninth graders who have never finished a book. Until now…
Three weeks ago I spent a portion of a lesson showing off the books I had chosen for my students. I did mini-book talks on each of the books and talked them up as if they were my best friends. I’ve learned in the last year, that I’m responsible for holding the enthusiasm for learning. If my students don’t have that enthusiasm, I overflow with it and hopefully it will be contagious. This seems to work, despite my skepticism. Included in my book talks were paperbacks from the Bluford Series. These books are written for young adults. They contain themes that appeal to teenagers, especially urban teens, but they are written at an elementary/middle school level particularly for struggling readers. I held several of the books up and I said to the class, “Some of you have never read a book. Next week, you will read one of the books in this series in just five days!” In my mind, I was hopeful that I could carry this through rather than offer them up another academic disappointment. But in my speech, there was nothing but certainty that they could, in fact, read the paperback in one school week.
Soon thereafter, students signed up for the book they most wanted to read. I organized them into small Book Groups of between three and five students. The following Monday, the collective ninth grade was reading thirteen different books from the same series. As a second year teacher, all of this felt like a big risk on my part. I’d never tried small Book Groups, and I’d never read any of the thirteen books in the series. I simply knew they were popular and had been successful elsewhere. I borrowed the idea of a Book Journal, or Dialogue Journal from a friend who is a reading specialist at a nearby school. By the end of the first class period, students were signing up to take home the book journal and write about what they had read to their small group. Their job was to return the next day with questions, comments, and ideas about what they had read and pass them off to the next person in the group. The idea is to capitalize on ninth graders’ propensity to pass notes, and turn it academic. The results were good. Each group completed their journal. There were only a few exceptions of one student in the group not participating at all. No journals were lost at home or eaten by dogs. On the last day, the group collectively had to design the cover, thinking of a symbol to characterize the book and by pulling a representative quote from the book and rewriting it on the cover. They thought it was fun, and I thought, “Yes, they are doing literary analysis without even knowing it! I’ve tricked them!”
Some days a few students hadn’t done their homework, so they were behind on the reading. But more often than not, students were reading ahead. These books were so engaging that students wouldn’t put them down. They wanted to check out the next book in the series before finishing the first. A young woman nicknamed Danielle (for the sake of this blog) swore to me she’d never read a whole book before in her life, except the care guide for her new Chihuahua. But on the night of Back to School, I saw her in the back row with her nose in a book. I met her mom later that evening who told me she’s never seen Danielle read, ever. She was beaming. So was I. Another student, Carlos, who had made it perfectly clear to me early on that he was a “bad kid” last year with multiple suspensions and horrible grades, went out of his way every day to tell me how much he loved his book. I saw him at the taco truck one lunch period and he announced to all of the kids around him, including some of my students from last year, that English was his favorite class because it was “hella fun.” By the end of the week, every group had finished their book!
Tonight as I’m finally reading the finished Book Journals and grading their final books tests (where most students are scoring at least twenty-five out of thirty points), I’m learning from them that they loved reading in small groups because it was social but also supportive. So many reported that when they got stuck, their group members could help them out. This is from the group of ninth graders who wrote into their culture that “None of us is smarter than all of us together.” That's Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development” from the mouths of babes.
In my class reading is cool! I can hardly believe I’m lucky enough to see this happen in my class. My students have the skills to become better readers. The main thing they need to do is just read, and read, and read some more. That they have found some books they like and have learned that there are even books out there worth liking will go a long long way towards them choosing to continue reading. While the Bluford Series is far from lofty literature, it is the gateway to other reading. It’s the beginning. The bridge I’m trying to build now is to Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight Los Angeles.” I’m building the bridge on our practice of poetry in the early weeks and the urban setting of the L.A. Riots. My students understand police brutality better than me. They know racism deeper than I do. They are crossing the bridge. Duc asked last week, “When are we going to start the next book? Can’t we hurry up and read?”
**************************************************************************************
Find out more about the Bluford series by visiting www.townsendpress.com Teachers, schools, and even students can write to them and ask for a free sample of books. Teachers can buy books directly from their website for only $1 a book. Definitely worth the investment!
24 September 2005
Spontaneous Teaching
My morning freshmen English class is much more obedient, but less engaged. Now that I'm getting used to the energy of my afternoon class, I'm finding I prefer the talk to the silence even if I have a headache by the end. Yesterday something magical happened in the morning class. As we moved through the final vignettes of "The House on Mango Street," which traverses ambiguous scenes of rape and domestic violence, I asked my students to complete the graphic organizer I'd created which included a box for them to write what the vignette reminded them of in their own experience (activating schema) and another box for them to draw a depiction of the vignette (accessing multiple intelligences while helping students visualize what they read). I was completing a model of this on the board as we went along. Problem is that I'm a terrible drawer. Even my stick figures are pathetically disproportionate. The normal thorn in my side, the student who two days ago told me he wanted me to go to another school where I could give other students nightmares, the one who makes farting sounds every time I try to lead the P.E. students in stretches, he was absent yesterday. There was no one to make fun of me, but me. So, I did. For perhaps the first time in this class, I was laughing at myself. I was relaxed and at home in my own teaching skin and it worked in my favor. Instead of belaboring over my pathetic drawing of a clown, I put my dry erase marker down and said, "Alright. Someone has got to come up here and save me." Immediately, one of the students who rarely participates positively came up to save the day. The clown he drew was pretty close to Crusty the Clown and a much better rendition of the one I drew. Of course, I used this opportunity to walk around to all of my students and see that there were working on their own drawings. Sure enough, everyone in the class was on task, and I got to see what fabulous artists I have in my classes. For those who weren't fabulous, I could encourage them by saying, "Look at my drawing! It can't be any worse than that!" We moved through the vignettes like this for a good half hour without my losing the focus and attention of my students. It just so happened that the principal had come in and seen all of this, too. I glanced at her every once in a while to see that she had a big smile on her face. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, a female student who is a great writer and a smart cookie but who prefers to put on an edgy front and often pushes buttons, blurts out (as she usually does), "Ms. Barrett, you are so nice!"
But the best part of the whole period was still to come. At the very end of class, I passed out a poem called "Empty House" by Rosario Castellanos. The poem is a perfect extention of the book we'd just finished. I began reading the poem to the class, not really sure what I would do with it besides read it and ask them to somehow connect it to the book, but I didn't have to figure it out because by the second stanza two boys started reading the poem aloud with me. We moved through it in perfect unison, as if riding a tandem bicycle for three. Their somewhat deeper and quieter voices matched with mine had a harmonizing effect. I am not exaggerating when I say that the atmosphere in the classroom was magical. All thirty-one of my students were on the edges of their seats and several students whispered to others, "Woah, do you hear that? That's cool. That's creepy." When the three of us finished our reading, the class burst into excitement and wanted to talk about the poem and the effect of the multiple voices. My mind immediately leapt to thinking about what a great lead-in this was to the dramatic reading of Romeo & Juliet we'll begin in a week. What's most amusing to me about this is I believe the boys who joined in on the reading really were trying to get at me at first; they thought it would make me mad or derail the reading. I don't think they expected me to keep reading and certainly not to love it. When the class finished exclaiming how much they liked the poem, I said, "That was great! Who wants to do it again?" Overwhelmingly the class wanted to do it again. This time I asked anyone who wanted to to read it aloud with us. The second reading, of course, wasn't as good in sound quality as the first, but it was exciting nonetheless that the class was willing to do a spontaneous choral reading of a poem. Magical, really.
This is clearly one of the best teaching days I've had yet. What made it so good, apart from one truly disruptive student being absent, was my comfort and confidence with the class. I was having a good time and I cared about what we were doing. The night before was Back to School Night. I spent 12 hours at school and by the time I got home, I was too burned out to put much energy into my lesson plan for the next day. I knew we needed to finish the book and I knew I had a poem that worked well at the end of the reading, but I spent less than twenty minutes on my lesson plan and said to myself, "I'll just figure it out." As a teacher, I'm all about careful planning and even scripting out some of the things that I need to say, but I also value the spontaneous moments in the classroom. At the beginning of the year, and with my students the beginning of their high school career, the emphasis is on structure, routine, and the expected. It's been hard for me because despite my very organized and somewhat methodical ways, I fell in love with teaching when I taught poetry for Upward Bound. I set a daily structure for the class, but I had the students supply the class with poems. I never knew what the class topic would be. If a student brought in a poem that exceptionally modeled the use of line breaks, then I did a mini-lecture on line breaks and then spontaneously created a writing assignment for them dealing with line breaks. I loved that class because I didn't know what to expect, because my students were providing the curriculum as much as I was, and because it felt as if it served my students where they were rather than from some place of my solitary ideals for them. Yesterday reminded me of my love of this organic teaching which comes from an organized classroom. There were moments for personality, real stories, and connection in class yesterday. I even found a moment to pull back from the scheduled curriculum and tell my students about the value of applying to private universities, to tell them that they should never let a price tag keep them from applying. I wrote out numbers on the board and spelled out for them my own experience of believing I couldn't afford a private education only to find out that in reality it was the public one I couldn't afford. And even then, they listened attentively. It might sound like a tangential thing to discuss, but it fit in perfectly with the quickwrite prompt to write about what they wanted to happen in their futures and how our protagonist overcame her own poverty and position in society. Education. Writing. Poetry. If this isn't an argument against the scripted textbooks being imposed in impoverished districts across the country as an off-shoot of the Bush Administration's "No Child Left Behind," then I don't know what is. I can hear my favorite mentor whispering,"We don't teach English. We teach people."
But the best part of the whole period was still to come. At the very end of class, I passed out a poem called "Empty House" by Rosario Castellanos. The poem is a perfect extention of the book we'd just finished. I began reading the poem to the class, not really sure what I would do with it besides read it and ask them to somehow connect it to the book, but I didn't have to figure it out because by the second stanza two boys started reading the poem aloud with me. We moved through it in perfect unison, as if riding a tandem bicycle for three. Their somewhat deeper and quieter voices matched with mine had a harmonizing effect. I am not exaggerating when I say that the atmosphere in the classroom was magical. All thirty-one of my students were on the edges of their seats and several students whispered to others, "Woah, do you hear that? That's cool. That's creepy." When the three of us finished our reading, the class burst into excitement and wanted to talk about the poem and the effect of the multiple voices. My mind immediately leapt to thinking about what a great lead-in this was to the dramatic reading of Romeo & Juliet we'll begin in a week. What's most amusing to me about this is I believe the boys who joined in on the reading really were trying to get at me at first; they thought it would make me mad or derail the reading. I don't think they expected me to keep reading and certainly not to love it. When the class finished exclaiming how much they liked the poem, I said, "That was great! Who wants to do it again?" Overwhelmingly the class wanted to do it again. This time I asked anyone who wanted to to read it aloud with us. The second reading, of course, wasn't as good in sound quality as the first, but it was exciting nonetheless that the class was willing to do a spontaneous choral reading of a poem. Magical, really.
This is clearly one of the best teaching days I've had yet. What made it so good, apart from one truly disruptive student being absent, was my comfort and confidence with the class. I was having a good time and I cared about what we were doing. The night before was Back to School Night. I spent 12 hours at school and by the time I got home, I was too burned out to put much energy into my lesson plan for the next day. I knew we needed to finish the book and I knew I had a poem that worked well at the end of the reading, but I spent less than twenty minutes on my lesson plan and said to myself, "I'll just figure it out." As a teacher, I'm all about careful planning and even scripting out some of the things that I need to say, but I also value the spontaneous moments in the classroom. At the beginning of the year, and with my students the beginning of their high school career, the emphasis is on structure, routine, and the expected. It's been hard for me because despite my very organized and somewhat methodical ways, I fell in love with teaching when I taught poetry for Upward Bound. I set a daily structure for the class, but I had the students supply the class with poems. I never knew what the class topic would be. If a student brought in a poem that exceptionally modeled the use of line breaks, then I did a mini-lecture on line breaks and then spontaneously created a writing assignment for them dealing with line breaks. I loved that class because I didn't know what to expect, because my students were providing the curriculum as much as I was, and because it felt as if it served my students where they were rather than from some place of my solitary ideals for them. Yesterday reminded me of my love of this organic teaching which comes from an organized classroom. There were moments for personality, real stories, and connection in class yesterday. I even found a moment to pull back from the scheduled curriculum and tell my students about the value of applying to private universities, to tell them that they should never let a price tag keep them from applying. I wrote out numbers on the board and spelled out for them my own experience of believing I couldn't afford a private education only to find out that in reality it was the public one I couldn't afford. And even then, they listened attentively. It might sound like a tangential thing to discuss, but it fit in perfectly with the quickwrite prompt to write about what they wanted to happen in their futures and how our protagonist overcame her own poverty and position in society. Education. Writing. Poetry. If this isn't an argument against the scripted textbooks being imposed in impoverished districts across the country as an off-shoot of the Bush Administration's "No Child Left Behind," then I don't know what is. I can hear my favorite mentor whispering,"We don't teach English. We teach people."
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