How Writers Grow

grow

Here is what a sixth grade student once wrote to me on a torn-off sheet of notebook paper:

When I was younger, I wrote a poem. The poem was very good for how young it was. I remember it was when I was with my best friend and her dad. I started putting words together and it came out with a poem.

Isn't that sweet? This girl had written a poem and was proud of it. She was in the process of discovering the pleasure and power of putting words together, and she knew I would understand and be pleased. 

It was a lovely snapshot of a moment in one fledgling writer’s journey, so of course I held onto it, and I came across it yesterday while I was trying to organize and cull things in a file downstairs. There were many other odd and delightful morsels crammed into this file, most on lined loose-leaf paper, others on bits of stationery, or occasionally penned beneath the printed lines of a greeting card.

What can I say? I was a teacher for a long time, so I received a lot of notes from kids, and some of them are just too precious to discard. I have no doubt, in fact, that I got more letters than most because I was not just any teacher, but a ...(drum roll)... Language Arts teacher! Our class was very much about writing, and it was a safe place to express feelings and communicate ideas on the page.

Some of the notes I received were touching and familiar:When you were little, were you popular? Did you have many friends that did not dump you? Have you ever been making a friend but they decided to walk the road of being cool instead of being your friend?

Sometimes, there was a call for help:A girl is pushing me around at school. Some days she hits me, kicks me, calls me names, pushes me, hurts me with her fingernails. What should I do? She usually does two things or more a day. If you need to know who she is, let me know. If you reply quickly that would save me from a lot of pain.

There was plenty of humor, intentional or otherwise:

I couldn’t go to the hike or to school because I have the period. But please don’t tell nobody, please! I also have a pretty bad stomach egg.

There were reminders that many eyes are always fixed upon the teacher:

You always wear dark colors. I wish you would wear purple or magenta.A bit of image-grooming:I know I can be unaware of other people’s feelings, but please don’t take it personal…This is my weekend time that I’m putting in this letter so I hope that you appreciate that I care so much.

And there was the joy of aspirations proclaimed, such as these words written by a girl newly acquiring English, in red ink (now faded to pink) and adorned with hearts and smiles:

One thing I know I do want is to learn and study and be something in this world!

Oh, there are student poems in this file, and heart-rending confessionals, and effusive tributes that might make their authors wince a bit today, and passages that still bring tears to my eyes. I feel incredibly honored when I read this stuff, knowing that I had the trust, respect, and even the affection of so many kids over the years, and that I played a role in imparting to them the magic and power of written expression.

The following excerpt from a book I wrote called How Writers Grow summarizes my sense of the importance of the job I held then:

Maybe it is no coincidence that I now teach about letters and love and respond with ridiculous sentiment to declarations of passion and curiosity, especially from children. The act of writing is laden with meaning and memory; to teach writing is to teach life. (It occurs to me that the math teacher may feel this way about math just as the science teacher believes it of science, but this in no way diminishes my conviction.) Writing mirrors existence, changes it, invents it.

So I've been thinking about this and, well, crazy thing...I decided to re-read that book – it’s a slender book, 144 pages, but I approached it with the trepidation one often feels about revisiting one’s own work. (There's something scary and potentially embarrassing about it.)

And guess what? I enjoyed the book; it held up -- and I have decided that it is a bit more than the “guide for middle school teachers” that it claims to be, a subtitle that defined it too narrowly and relegated it to a very small market. It is far more readable and personal than a typical methods text, that’s for sure, and it is filled with ideas and suggestions that could be used not just by classroom teachers of all grades, but by parents, those home schooling or simply trying to raise children who write, and by anyone in search of some tricks for unleashing the writer within.  There are teacher-ly musings about the folly of abandoning genuine writing in order to focus on standardized tests, but there are also plenty of generic strategies for triggering creativity and in particular writing memoir.

So I am using my blog here in a way I seldom do, indulging in a bit of self-promotion and recommending my own little book to any teachers out there reading this, or parents, or aunts or uncles, or individuals simply interested in writing. Heck, why not? There was a nice brisk flurry of sales when it was first released, but these days it seems to be just sitting forgotten in the warehouse in New Hampshire, and since no one else is pushing it, I'm going to. I think it's worth it.

The title of the book is How Writers Grow: A Guide for Middle School Teachers, by me (Cynthia Carbone Ward) with a Foreword by Sheridan Blau (he’s awesome) and it was published by Heinemann press in 2006.  Now, for a limited time special deal of $8.99 per copy (that's basically half price) just order directly from me, the author, and...that's not all!... I will take it to the post office and ship it out to you free of charge if you are within the continental U.S.A.

Trust me; that's a pretty good deal. Get a copy as a resource for your own use, or as a fine gift for teachers, parents, home schoolers. I'll be setting up a regular order page soon but for now just send me an email at cynopsis7@gmail.com.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch on this rainy day, one more handwritten kid-message greets me. It is posted with magnets on my refrigerator and was given to me by a middle school student when I retired from teaching:

Cynthia, my hope for you is that you can do everything you wanted to do that teaching held back.I’ve been looking at those words for a couple of years now. That note challenges me every morning.  It calls my bluff, defies me to get busy, and reminds me that the biggest excuse is gone. Was there something specific that I wanted to do which teaching, with its sprawling, all-consuming personality, kept me from doing? But here is what I have realized: My life is not about what teaching held back but what teaching unleashed and inspired.

And it all comes down to writing…