On Friday, May 16th, I went on field trip to Blue Lake Elementary, a neighboring elementary school with 8 of my Creative Writing students. What happened next was magic. Or the finale of some long-term magic. Whatever it was, it was – I think – the opposite of what is generally being encouraged or allowed in public schools these days.
Let me back up to give this event context.
For ten years, until the program director left, I taught at a program called HATS (High Achieving Talented Students) at my alma mater, Stetson University. It was summer and sometimes-Saturday program, and as part of it, every summer, assisted by my son, I taught a week of fiction writing that involved creating a group collaborative novel in a week. We got the process down to a science – and by splitting into two groups some years, we produced 13 novels in ten years!
I teach high school Creative Writing, and for several years my grades 9 – 12 students have been writing children’s books for first graders at nearby Blue Lake Elementary. This year, in addition to that project, we decided to try something new: we asked the fifth grade English teacher to get a list of 12 “items” (events, character goals, objects, settings) the students would like to see in a novel.
My Creative Writing students took that list and ran with it. It took 24 days to come up with the premise, characters, backstory, main plot, fantasy rules for ghosts and magic rings – but once we did, we divided it 31 ways and everyone wrote a chapter. In two weeks we had a 33 thousand word story on our hands. With funding from the Nina B. Hollis Institute for Education Reform at – once again – my alma mater Stetson University, we were able to publish enough paperback copies of our tale, The Mystery of Lunareth Island, to give every writer a copy, and every fifth grader.
I knew that the fifth grade teacher planned to teach the book, but didn’t know how. I delivered the books.
Everything was quiet for a bit. Everyone is busy with testing this time of year.
Then I received an email from the principal. She’d read the book over the weekend. She’d loved it!
A while after that, the fifth grade English teacher email. She had loved the book. The students had loved the book. This was…new. I had done this kind of project with students – but I had never done it for a specific audience that was actually going to read it.
On Friday, May 16th we walked through the heat to Blue Lake to present to the fifth graders. We enter their Media Center to a thunderous burst of applause. All 80 fifth graders were there with their books – and they were enthusiastic.
The students and I presented for a few minutes about what it took to create the book, and then took questions from the students. A couple of the questions were “When is the movie coming out?” and “Will there be a sequel?”
We then brainstormed five items to use in creating a new story, and broke into groups. Each group of fifth graders, led mostly by my students (and in one case by me), came up with a story outline for the five items in just 20 minutes and then we shared all the stories as we gathered back together for snacks and drinks in the media center.
When I think about the endless, joyless testing our students are subjected to throughout the year, but especially this time of year, it seems to me we are intent, as I wrote in a recent comic strip, to destroy children’s love of reading and writing.
But this was an event full of joy. There were many smiles. There was laughter. There was enthusiasm. There was learning. It was fun. Imagine that.
When I think about what my students got out of this project, I realize that we did what Parker J. Palmer calls teaching from the microcosm. Instead of teaching individual lessons in plot, character, setting, theme, irony, narration, point of view, description, and dialogue and then testing the students on those skills with multiple choice questions, the novel we wrote became a living lab for storytelling. What works? What doesn’t? What questions do we need to ask to make this character or that plot point work? How does the whole story fit together?
Even if my lessons had been fun and engaging, giving a test would have killed off all the fun and engagement – and only developed their thinking in a shallow way. Working on novel, we had to struggle with questions like point of view. First or third person? Third person it is – omniscient or limited? Okay – omniscient it is. Can we go into any characters’ head or just certain characters’? How about we see things only through the eyes of our three main characters? How would that work? So will our omniscient actually be a sort of serialized third person limited?
Joy and rigor are not mutually exclusive. In fact they go hand in hand. When you are doing something truly engaging and fun – the level of thinking goes up with anyone noticing it.
Friday the 16th was, for me, the culmination of a project that was everything school should be, but so often isn’t these days: creative, joyful, though-provoking, and yes, fun. It was everything education should be.