Frogs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Image attribution

In it there is a spaceship
and a project
for doing away with piano lessons.

And there is
Noah's ark,
which shall be first.

And there is
an entirely new bird,
and entirely new hare,
an entirely new bumble-bee.

There is a river
that flows upwards.

There is a multiplication table.

There is anti-matter.

And it just cannot be trimmed.
I believe that only what cannot be trimmed
is a head.

There is much promise in the circumstance that so many people have heads.

MIROSLAV HOLUB

Recently my middle daughter, now an adult living away from home, admitted that one summer she had an accident which she hid from us, her parents.

We live on a long straight suburban road, just below the bit where the uphill incline starts to steepen. With a group of friends, predominantly boys, she took the challenge and long-boarded down from the top.  She's always been our "Xena, Warrior Princess," taller and stronger than her sisters, and always able to beat the boys in any sporting event at primary level.

But this time she came off, knocked herself out and skinned her arm from shoulder to wrist.  With a national rowing competition coming up, she decided to hide the whole event from her family, and suffered for a number of weeks under long sleeves and from the unknowing knocks and bumps of her unsuspecting family members.

While the story was told, the other kids in the room only laughed knowingly.  And while my husband rolled his eyes, his mother too, can recount the stories of her four children on their farm, three boys, including lucky car accidents, spotlighting and running over neighbourhood roofs.

It's what kids do.  And especially boys. It's about that risk and the fellowship of risk that belongs in childhood...which goes on until the mid twenties for some.

And my reaction mirrors the reaction of many teachers of writing when they see the "blood and guts" or toilet humour in the writing of boys. Really? Did you have to do that?

Ralph Fletcher, a father of four boys and a teacher of writing, addresses my concerns in his highly readable book, "Boy Writers."

He reminds me that the life of boys is very different from the life of middle aged female teachers.  I know that my students enjoy listening to the weird and wonderful writing of authors like Paul Jennings:

Finally it is time for bed. Cynthia changes into her nightie in the bathroom and then joins me in the bedroom. 'The cat's on my bed,' she says. 'But it doesn't matter. I like cats.' She pulls back the blankets.

And screams. 'Aargh. Cat poo. Filthy cat poo on my pillow.' She yells and yells and yells.

Just then Dad bursts into the room with a silly grin on his face. He goes over and looks at the brown object on the pillow. 'Don't let a little thing like that worry you,' he says. He picks it up and pops it into his mouth. But this time he does not give a grin. His face freezes over.

'Are you looking for this?' I say.

I hold up the bit of plastic poo that Dad had hidden under the blankets earlier that night.
(from 'Funniest Stories", 2005)

Do I accept that the boys in my class might also want to write like this?

In a series of short chapters, ideal for after planning quick reads, Fletcher outlines his findings, anecdotes and reflections, ending each with a list of "What Can I Do in My Classroom?"

Ideas he covers include:

• giving boys choice
• accepting their humour
• understanding their unique voice
• the place of conversation
• handwriting and fine motor skills
• why violence has a place
• relationships
• why fun is important

He leaves us with four main points to better nurture and support struggling boy writers.

1. Just let them write

2. Take the long view - you want them to want to be writers.

3. Consider pleasure.  Is it fun?

4. Think relationships. "We're not teaching writing - we're teaching writers."

As a mother of girls, this is a book I need to put in my kete along with Celia Lashlie's excellent text, "He'll Be OK - Growing Gorgeous Boys into Good Men"(2007).

It's a text I'll be buying several more copies of for our teachers as they launch into the second year of an inquiry into improving writing for boys and "reclaiming their voices."

Related blog posts:

The Great Debate - To Type or to Hand Write? That is the Question. September, 2014

Yes, We Can Get Our Boys to Write, January 2014

Dyslexia and Loving Words, January 2014

Yes, We Can Get Our Boys to Write!

My last post was about dyslexia and why some students, who love words, did not find their school writing experiences positive. This post on being an effective teacher of writing, looks at how we can address some of the problems for writers. 

It's great when you come away from a course excited.  It's even better when you feel like that even though you should still be on holiday. And it's "fantabulous," when your colleagues feel the same way.

Like many others, we've identified that our students, as a group, are weakest in writing achievement. Our qualified hunch is that this is because our teachers could be better teachers of writing.  But how do you address this?

When I first arrived at the school three and a half years ago, the focus was writing.  Our first step was to introduce a more robust assessment tool and we chose e-asTTle.  The last three years have been about unpacking the tool and looking at how we unpack a piece of writing.  The new e-asTTle writing rubric came out, so we spent time adapting to that.  We knew moderation was important, so we hosted interschool moderation workshops and had a lot of practice and discussion within our own staff.

But we all know that testing and being better at testing, does not make a writer who is passionate about writing! I am very aware of this need.  I can see that not everyone on the staff shares my passion for crafting words into word pictures; word pictures that engage readers and take them away on a magical video in the cinema of our imaginations.

We identified and talked about this need with our change team; it was suggested that Gail Loane might be available before the school year started.  Our principal shared our needs with Gail , on the phone.  Some of us had attended her two hour seminar on Boy Writers last year. Like our students, we wanted a workshop that would be interactive.

I set myself the goal of reading "I've Got Something to Say," Gail Loane's book on writing, in collaboration with Sally Muir.  It had sat on my shelf for two years. Recommended by other colleagues, it was always superseded by the best pulp fiction I could find to take my brain on holiday over the Christmas break.

As expected, I'm embarrassed I didn't open it earlier. Gail and Sally have created a primer for effective writing practice that embraces effective pedagogy, samples of writing, how to present and unpack them and surrounds them with real experiences with students.  Interwoven is Gail's obvious passion for writing and unrelenting belief that every child can write, has a story to write and has a story he or she wants to share.

And that's how she ran the workshop.  I enjoyed recognising pieces I had discovered in the book and knowing that the ideas I wanted to revisit - and that's all of them - were all in the book.

She asked us to question whether we believed that some students' lives were not rich enough to have their own starters and bemoaned the fact that so many draft books were short on work and short on completion. We read the poem "That Was Summer" by Marci Ridlon.

We clarified meaning; not everyone comes to a piece with the same set of experiences and understandings. We used topics that students can relate to: summer, playing hide and seek, building huts and playing a sport. We unpacked and co-constructed criteria that everyone can use.

We wrote our stanza in about ten minutes. We shared and read it as a group poem. We were all writers.

(I've attached my full notes from the day on a Google doc as well as the storified tweets from teacher Kassey Downard @kasseylee11 and myself @mrs_hyde.)

Further note - I was excited when I read, at the start of the book, that Gail had attended a workshop run by Ruie Pritchard in the late 1980's. So had I. I was blown away to discover that we were on the same week-long inservice at Waikato. How marvelous that she has carried it further, so that I may again pick up the threads so many years later.