Two years ago, I was awarded a Calderwood Fellowship to research writing in my classroom. I could choose any topic, any aspect of writing, and then formulate a research question that I would answer over the course of a year. This was easily the best and most useful class or professional development that I have experienced, because the work I did directly related to teaching in my own classroom, and I got to work with other teachers who were going through the same process. And, when so much of what we deal with is paperwork, teacher research is fun and empowering – who knew?
I combined two of my passions, writing and Latin, two things that don’t always get combined, but when combined usually work together seamlessly. At first, I thought about my students and their finished products, their essays turned in to me on mornings when I could see their eyes were glassed over from having stayed up late or gotten up early to finish. How could I get them to write better final drafts? How could I get them to actually utilize a writing process, you know, first draft, second draft, final draft, etc.? And then, of course, idealistically, how could I get them to care about the writing, the process, and not solely about the grade they would receive at the end? As someone who had not taught for very long, I feel that my questions were naive, trying to push an unrealistic process on them because it is something that works for me, because I am a thoughtful person who genuinely cares more for the writing than I ever did for letter grades. I had to get from this point to a point where I realized that my students needed more experience with writing. How could they know if they liked it or not if all they were assigned to write were five paragraph essays or Document Based Questions?
After much thinking and experimenting, I realized there were two much more serious problems at the heart of all this, much more serious concerns for me and my Latin class. One concern was that my students had no idea why they were taking Latin. There was a language requirement and then there were the SATs. But beyond that, not many students related Latin to other classes or to anything beyond the walls of the school building. Why does Latin matter? And how can writing help us figure out why it matters? The second concern had more to do with me directly than it did my students, and that was: while they were writing five paragraph essays in English class, and they would have to write essays in Latin class, how could I teach students to write essays for Latin? Each of us teachers can teach students how to write for our particular classes and/or our particular subjects. While I had no control over their relationship to writing in other classes, I did have control over their relationship to writing in my class.
I have journaled for most of my life. I am one of those people who has to write their thoughts down before they even say them. Whole conversations, letters to people that I’ve never sent, whole arguments one sided and silent, pages of thoughts and brainstorming for stories or formal academic papers. Writing helps me understand what I’m trying to say. In fact, it was Flannery O’Connor who said, “I write to discover what I know.”
What I began to do with students was to have them write a little bit every day. They began to reflect on the pieces of Latin that we were translating. The thing about Latin is that it’s complicated – after two years of learning the language students begin reading texts that are nearly as complicated as reading Shakespeare in high school. They are also some of the most famous pieces of literature ever. And with the added step of translating a passage from Latin to English, there’s an extra step to get to an understanding. What I found was that reflecting and thinking about each story, each section of Latin that they had to translate, in writing helped my students understand what was going on in the story. When students understood the story, they were more interested, more invested, more ready to say that they had a relationship to Latin outside the translation they were slogging through.
Their writing was not the polished kind, not the revised and final draft of an essay, their thoughts were less inhibited and looked less like the formulaic way that essays sometimes look (less like five paragraphs). And that was ok. I wasn’t grading them on grammar, syntax or how they used Latin to support their arguments. This writing was the opposite of what I had originally begun to think about, but it was the kind that helped students see that writing wasn’t as intimidating as they may have first believed. They were writing in words, in language, that were their own. Peter Elbow writes, “… our culture, like many others, has somehow come to insist on a dialect for correct writing that is different from one’s mother tongue. So, it’s writing “correctly” that’s difficult (and also, of course, writing well). So writing is not the same as writing correctly or well.” I experienced this difference with my students. Essay assignments produced a groan, but writing reflections usually produced the quiet of pencils scratching on notebook paper, sometimes even an enthusiastic and playful, “Let’s reflect, shall we?” At a time like highschool, it’s so important for students to explore their own language, to discover that writing doesn’t have to be dreaded or evil.
The more that my students wrote, the more invested they became in the stories we read in Latin. They could talk about the stories in their own words and express their ideas or opinions about them more clearly. The even more interesting thing was that when students reflected and wrote about the stories they had translated from Latin, they began to see connections between the Latin and their other classes – references to Macbeth, comparisons to coaches on their sports teams, a comparison with Science class, with history of the migration of peoples; someone even compared Latin to band and music. Elbow also writes about low stakes writing and says, “Low stakes writing helps students learn and remember and explore their thinking, and even tends to improve their high-stakes essays. It warms up their writing and gives them fluency.” My students believed that their reflections helped them to understand the Latin better.
While my students learned a little about writing, I learned a little about myself as a teacher. It’s incredible what I could think about as a teacher when I wasn’t worried about all the i’s I had to dot or t’s I had to cross. What would happen if we gave teachers the opportunity to really think about teaching, had them worry less about bureaucracy and standardized test scores? Our students worry about the things we worry about. Our students learn to value behavior that we model for them. Put your phone down. Pick up a pencil. Write with them.
(Thoughts from Peter Elbow came from his book called Vernacular Eloquence.)
Alexandra Sladky 