Making Known Public: Writing Our Selves and Our Stories
What are your writing stories and those of your students? How can these stories inform our work across grade levels—middle school, high school, college, and beyond? One of my writing stories came to life when I was 17 years old. I was walking home in the rain from a local grocery store in South Carolina. An umbrella in one hand and a brown grocer’s paper bag in the other, my imagination were overtaken by a crowd of words that begged to come out, to find a home on paper. I panicked! I stumbled, fearing that I would not get home in time to retreat to a Omega Seamaster Replica corner to secretly write this yet-to-be-revealed story. My fear forced me to stand in the rain and listen to my imagination as I wrote on the exterior of that paper bag with a whittled-down pencil. I turned that story in as part of a longer assignment for a high school English class. Eventually, I gained enough confidence to perform that story on the stage of my high school auditorium.
I shared this story with my class of high school seniors in New York City. They asked: How do you learn to listen? Can you bring writing from the outside inside? Why do we separate learning in school from out of school? As I recall these questions, I turn to the stories that are written and yet to be written to encourage others to write, even if writing happens when we are walking in the rain. This way, we are making meaning of and with our writing selves,
Beginning teachers face many challenges and difficulties; as a result, one-third will leave the profession in the first three years and nearly half will be gone within their first five years in the profession. No Dream Denied: A Pledge to America’s Children, a report from the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, pointedly describes the situation this way: “It is as if we were pouring teachers into a bucket with a fist-sized hole in the bottom” (8). As this startling Tag Heuer Replica Watches image implies, teacher attrition is greatly outpacing the rate at which the system prepares new teachers and sends them into the classroom. The challenge facing university teacher education programs is to fix the hole in the bottom of the bucket and find strategic new ways to reduce the flood of good, new teachers leaving the profession.
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