By: Jim Burke

At a certain point in our lives, it becomes difficult to remember how awful (and, if we stick with it, wonderful) it can feel to learn how to do anything that does not come naturally to us. I was reminded of the feelings that accompany such learning in an unexpected way and when I least expected it.

I was in Wyoming to work with teachers at a high school there over my spring break a couple years back. The teachers wanted to improve their instruction in the areas of reading and writing, a difficult conversation that not every teacher is eager to have in the presence of others. Colby and Carl, the two department heads who had invited me out, told me when I arrived that the workshop would not take place until after school the following day, then continuing on into the evening till about 8 o’clock. Before I could tell them what would happen to the three of us at my school if such demands and schedule were ever imposed, they said, “Since you don’t have to get to work till late afternoon, we thought we would take you fly fishing in the morning.”

“That is such a generous and interesting offer, guys, but I really need to spend the morning preparing for the workshop,” I told them with a smile that was meant to comfort them, assuage their disappointment.

But this was Wyoming. These two guys, who would have looked right at home in a fancy hipster juice bar sipping a wheatgrass latte back in my hometown San Francisco, were driving Ford F-250 trucks with gun racks in Caspar, Wyoming where they taught English and fed their families on the venison and fish they shot and caught throughout the year. They weren’t having my excuses.

“Just be ready when we pick you up at 7 tomorrow morning, Jim. The workshop will go fine. You know your stuff. And besides, we’ll have you back by lunch so you can have some prep time.”

The following day, Carl and Colby drove me out into the meadowlands that skirted the Platte River, a slender stream that snaked its way across the open prairie shimmering with spring green grasses. There, in the first light of the new day, Carl taught me a few quick basics about casting that were enough to allow me to flop a fly line onto the moving water. Then, having set me up, he walked up river to his own station and set to fishing his own water, leaving me to just enjoy the morning.

I caught nothing, of course. Not even a bite. But there was no shame, no embarrassment, no emotional upset. This is because I was not—yet!—trying to learn anything. Once we start down that road, we confront what Tom Newkirk, in his book Embarrassment, calls the “awkwardness principle”:

Any act of learning requires us to suspend a natural tendency to want to appear fully competent. We need to accept the fact that we will be awkward, that our first attempts at a new skill will, at best, be only partial successes. Moreover we need to allow this awkwardness to be viewed by some mentor who can offer feedback as we open ourselves up for instruction. (2017, 10)

There was no cause for embarrassment that fine Wyoming morning on that distant spring day because I was not trying to accomplish anything, did not really care whether I could do it or do it well. It was not even something I had chosen to do. Everything that would come to represent the difficulty of learning—the different knots, the types of line, the different styles of fly rods, the flies, types of water, psychology of the fish, all the different types of bugs they eat, the seasons in which they eat them—was handled by Carl and Colby that morning, thus protecting me from any feelings of incompetence, any aggravation, any anger, any shame.

Only when I returned home later that week did all those feelings begin, for while I may not have caught any fish that day, I did catch a sense of what standing in a river fishing for trout might offer me. Yet from the moment I decided to buy a fly rod, I felt overwhelmed, ignorant, stupid. Heading off to the casting ponds in Golden Gate Park with the new rod and reel I bought soon after at the local fly fishing shop, I felt ridiculous as I watched my bright line spill into a wet nest on cast after cast. What had seemed, in my head, so simple, so easy, so relaxing, so doable in Wyoming, now appeared to be impossible.

Over the course of the next year, however, after taking classes, making time to practice, reading books and watching all those YouTube videos that showed me how to cast, I improved. But it was incremental, the two-steps-forward-three-steps-back type of learning. I had to teach my wife to ask not “Did you catch any fish?” but “Did you enjoy yourself at the river?” It took me three months to catch my first fish, and even that seemed more an accident than an achievement. And when I caught that trout finally, it slipped the hook, thus leading to another lesson in the language of fishing: I had caught but not “landed” the fish as the men at the fly shop explained to me the following week when I went by to tell them of my progress.

My point in telling this story is as simple as it is important: Nothing has taught me more about learning than experiencing all over the sustained feeling of incompetence that accompanied me through my first year of fly fishing. Whether it is fly fishing or writing an academic essay, the experience made me realize that we must learn the vocabulary (of flies, lines, reels, water, and so on); develop the background knowledge (about water, insects, about  various fly fishing techniques, the fish themselves—who knew fish were so smart!?); acquire the skills themselves, typically with the guidance of someone we have been willing to be vulnerable with as they guide us through that process; and, finally, maintain the patience and persistence needed to learn to do anything of any complexity with some skill.

Even now, after two years of fairly disciplined effort in all these areas, I remain a novice at best—and I love it. There will be time enough to master the craft, but in the meantime, I am learning to be a better teacher of students, of how to read, write, and learn because fly fishing constantly reminds me how hard it is to learn anything—and how good it feels when we eventually do.

Learn more about Jim at The New English Companion Website!

Connect with Jim on Twitter @englishcomp

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By Todd Nesloney

I’m sure you’ve all heard that phrase in one variation or another. But when you genuinely take the time to pause and reflect on the idea, ask yourself, How often do you truly make every moment count?

Sometimes those moments may exist within your personal lives. Making sure you take time for yourself means: slowing down long enough to plant a flower garden; create a piece of artwork; indulge in a Netflix binge; or even just walk through the local park.  When you set aside moments to slow down and spend time with yourself, you’re making moments count.  You’re acknowledging that personal moments can fuel you with energy, creativity, and a desire to reflect.

So many of us, especially educators, find ourselves spinning our wheels constantly trying be better, working harder, taking on more projects.  And in doing that, we often allow special, quiet moments slip right by us. Unnoticed.

Taking time to nurture yourself is not a bad thing. It doesn’t mean you’re lazy, blase, self-obsessed, or unattached.  Instead, it shows how much you value your personal health and knowing that to be your best you need to be mindful of three elements: your mental, spiritual, and physical health. You will never be able to do what you’re meant to do unless you cultivate and maintain the creative fire within you.

Making every moment count also includes the students and adults you come in contact with every day. You can quickly allow the to-do list, constant stream of interruptions, and your own emotional reaction to events to distract you. Being engulfed by work can push aside those moments that fall right in front of you, waiting to be noticed–moments such as:

• That moment where the teacher across the hall is suffering through a recent cancer diagnosis. She longs for someone on her team to ask, “How are you doing?” so she feels she isn’t walking this road alone.  

• That moment where a child walks in with his head down, hating who he is, because that morning his father beat him again and spewed hateful untruths about the boy he raised.

• The single mother, who works three jobs to give her children the life she never had.  She struggles to get her kids to school on time and every morning keeps from making eye contact with the school staff fearing they’ll label her a “bad mother.”

• The high school senior who just learned of his acceptance into the college of his dreams but has no one to share the good news with.

• Or even something as simple as the little girl who passed her first test of the year and wants someone to tell her, “I’m proud of you.”

Moments like those I described exist, and they’re there for the taking.  The question though is Will you see them? There is scientific research that proves when you show gratitude to others, it increases your positive mood, more than it increases theirs. But will you understand the power of a single moment? Will you make it a priority to find ways to make moments matter for others?

“Make every moment count!”

You and I have heard it before. So today, let’s pay attention to the silent whispers of moments that are calling you to action:  moments when you reserve time to care for your mental, spiritual, and physical well being; moments when you reach out to support others crying for help. Grab and hold those moments close to your heart.  Take a deep breath and find the time to make every moment matter more than it ever has before.

Get connected with Todd Nesloney!

• Twitter @TechNinjaTodd
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• Todd’s Website for speaking engagements- his books and more!

By: Linda Rief

In my latest book The Quickwrite Handbook (Heinemann, 2018) I described how I came to do what I called “quickwrites.” Year after year I noticed several kids, frequently boys, staring into space more often than they were putting words on paper. Talking to them, trying to help them with their ideas was not a big help. I read Don Murray’s work about writing fast to outrun the censor in all of us. Sounded good. But for those kids that continued staring into space, telling them to write fast didn’t help if they still couldn’t think of anything to write. That’s when I thought, if I put a short, compelling piece of writing in front of them to show them what someone else did, and encourage them to “borrow a line” and write as fast as they can for two to three minutes off that line, that might give them something to hold onto, something from which to build their own ideas. Write fast, I told them. Don’t think too hard. Don’t plan what comes next. You are writing to find writing—the words you didn’t know you were going to write until you wrote them.

And it worked, and has continued to work, for most of my kids.

Holding on to someone else’s line has been magical in helping my students find their own words. More often than not they can get rid of that line as they continue to draft their thinking in their words.

Maybe it was the notion of holding on to someone else’s line that led me to Nikki Grimes’ book One Last Word. In this book Grimes has found inspiration from many of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance to write her own poems. The poetry she is writing takes the form of what is called the Golden Shovel. In her words “The idea of a Golden Shovel poem is to take a short poem in its entirety, or a line from that poem (called a striking line), and create a new poem, using the words from the original. Say you decide to use a single line: you would arrange that line, word by word (one word under another), in the right margin. Then you would write a new poem, each line ending in one of those words.”

This is the first year I have tried this form with my students. We had just finished reading Refugee by Alan Gratz. As we read the book I asked them to collect lines that resonated with them from the three families’ stories. I asked them to write down questions that came to mind as we read, and to look up articles and pictures that might help them answer the questions. When we were done with the book I encouraged them to share response or reaction in any form they chose. But, I did show them One Last Word as a possibility.

Although this worked especially well after reading the book Refugee, because of its emotional topic, I imagine these examples could be used at any time for any kind of writing. These were the instructions and examples I gave my students, adapted from Nikki Grimes.

Write a poem by

• using the line/s from a poem, each word of the line becomes the last word in each line of your poem, or
• using a favorite quote from Refugee or any author or book you love, each word of the quote becomes the last word in each line of your poem, or
• using a newspaper headline with a compelling lead or poignant photo attached, each word in the headline becomes the last word in each line of your poem

I gave the students several examples from Nikki Grimes book One Last Word. I showed them how she took the poem “Hope” by Georgia Johnson and used the first line of that poem to shape her poem “On Bully Patrol.” Then I showed them what I wrote.

I used the last line from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” because it is a line I use as a mantra in working with eighth graders: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

This is what I wrote, using that line:

Sometimes, in their writer-reader notebooks students tell

Truths that they are admitting to me

And so often I don’t know what

it is

That would help them cope with it

                        Whether the “it” is hunger or homelessness, self-doubt

         or bullying or even dysphoria. As a teacher you

Try your best to plan

A strategy to

Help each child do

What they need to do, with

Compassion and sensitivity. Your

Concern and helplessness make you worry that one

Day this wild

Child, who is only defending herself and

Trying to make the world work for her, will know what to do with her one precious

life.

Linda Rief

Many students found poetry by crafting their poems in this form. Sophie asked, “Do we have to stick with that form, one last word?”

“Absolutely not,” I told her. “Form should never drive what you have to say. It is only a suggestion. Let your words take the form that best fits what you want to say.”

Sophie wrote:

Tallying the Daily Dead

Line from Refugee by Alan Gratz, p.195

When you were in kindergarten

you learned how to tally.

You thought nothing of it,

nor should you have.

It was just a way

to count the numbers

that were put in front of you by a teacher.

You were always told

tallying should not be used for big numbers,

like 65.6 million people displaced at the end of 2016 or,

the 40.3 million displaced

within their own country or

perhaps not

the 22.5 million forced to flee

to another country.

In kindergarten,

you tallied numbers.

Now,

we tally lives.

Sophie M. 8^th grade

I am always looking for a variety of ways to help students get words on paper. No matter what way that might be, we need to remember: try the idea ourselves, give the students examples (ours, professionals, other students), give them choices within the framework, and let the framework go if they have other ideas. The bottom line in writing: finding every, and any way we can, to help students communicate their thinking in order to grow their voices.

References:

Gratz, Alan. 2017. Refugee. NY. Scholastic.

Grimes, Nikki. 2017. One Last Word. NY: Bloomsbury Children’s Books.

Rief, Linda. 2018. The Quickwrite Handbook. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

By: Travis Crowder

I am always entranced by the sounds of reading—the turning pages, the rhythmic breathing, the steady movements. These sounds, intoxicating and inviting, are part of the language of book love. There is no tension, no aggravation. Just kids engaged with books. My teaching philosophy rests on the belief that all students want to read and have the capacity to develop an authentic reading life. Not all students enter my classroom prepared to live and to think beside books, though. The act of joyful reading, where they have time to self-select books, talk with friends about their reading lives, exchange books recommendations, and write about their reading, has too often been absent from their experiences. Opportunities to fall in love with books, in many cases, have been scarce. But I believe a classroom rich with literacy can change that. When kids have access to books, and that access is founded on choice, they migrate from the arid land of non-reading and wade into an oasis of story.

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Authentic reading instruction, the work of real readers, is powerful. Beyond the walls of my classroom, books speak to people, and those people, moved by story and language, share their reading lives with those around them. There are no cumbersome projects or dense worksheets that accompany that type of reading experience. Instead, people read and fall in love with books and invite others to engage in joyful reading. That’s the type of environment I work hard to create for my students. Readers are complex thinkers—they analyze, synthesize, evaluate, and critique. Although I want students to think critically and to use their awareness of structure and craft moves to interpret text, I want more than that for them. I want them to read because they love books.

In thinking about my own classroom and the practices that have helped students develop a love of reading, I notice that conversations, writing, and reading are the most effective methods. There are choices I make as an educator, both pedagogically and philosophically, that give kids a stronger foundation in adopting healthy reading habits. The following ideas and routines are several of many that have helped my kids fall in love with reading. I hope you find them useful.  

Provide daily time for free choice independent reading.

Students need and deserve time to read every day. In my classroom, we begin each language arts period with 15-20 minutes of reading time. There are times when students are asked to pay attention to certain details in their reading, such as unfamiliar vocabulary or characterization, but mostly, I want them to read and to fall in love with their books. Providing a consistent time for reading establishes routine. With this time, I am telling students that reading matters, and I am willing to set time aside for this purpose. And there are no strings attached to the reading. Just enjoy.

Surround kids with lots of books.

We adopt the habits and qualities of the people and things around us. I want kids to become readers, so I surround them with books. The bookshelves, ledges, and countertops have books on them. A diverse classroom library, full of books that represent a wide range of interests, cultures, and genres, is essential. Students need to see themselves represented in books and they need to be exposed to books with characters who do not look and sound like them. Diversity matters. At the beginning of the year, students complete an interest inventory and from these, I learn a great deal about their lives, their hopes, and the things they love. The inventories, as well as conversations with students, help me stock the classroom library. Additionally, there is a poster at the front of my room where students write the titles of books they have finished as a visual display of our class reading life. I want books to be visible in my classroom, and when a child finishes a book, I want them to be surrounded with options to continue their reading habits.

A quick note on book talks: To engage kids with reading is to talk about books–a lot. Providing time to read is an essential part of a classroom, but moving kids to adopt authentic reading lives means finding books that will speak to them and sharing them. Give a brief summary, read a high-interest part, and pass it off to students. Let them hear the language of the story. This gifts them with a beautiful reason to read.    

Allow time for writing about books.

Students need opportunities to write about their reading. Students keep reader’s notebook in my class, and often, we go into our notebooks (I write with them) and record our thoughts, feelings, and reactions. Readers will have visceral reactions to characters, and they will worry, hurt, and love alongside them. A notebook is a perfect place for those feelings to land. I have found that  freewrites are powerful tools for students to examine their feelings and reactions to books. I also give students time to recommend through writing, either through adding an image and quick review on a Padlet or writing a note on a sticky and placing it in the front of a fascinating book. They solidify their reading and recommend a book to someone else. Simplicity is remarkable.

Encourage talk among students.

Reading is a social act. I ask students to write about their reading often; however, I want them to talk about their reading, too. After independent reading, I may ask kids to turn and talk to a neighbor about the section they just read, a character they are connecting with, or a word that stood out to them. Talk encourages rich thinking and deep comprehension, and it nudges us forward in our reading lives.

Discuss and share your personal reading life.

Reading and our reading lives are not static. Readers do not read with consistent vigor or engage in an academic close reading of every text they encounter. Students often assumed that was my reading life, and even when I confronted their bias with the truth (I read widely and intrepidly), they assumed that their judgment was the same. So I came up with a helpful solution—I decided to invite students into my personal reading life. And I was honest. I shared that there were books I did not like and books I abandoned because they did not speak to me. When I finished a book, I shared it with kids, even if it wasn’t one I felt they would pick up and read. I began listing my reading life on the door of my classroom so students could see that I participated in the process of reading alongside them. Sharing our reading lives with students humanizes the experience. It shows them that we do not read for school. We read read for life.

Encourage reflection.

All readers need time to think about their reading lives. Each week, I invite students to consider their reading lives and write their thinking inside their notebooks. Students are allowed to write about characters, big ideas, lessons they’ve learned, goals, and how they have grown and changed as readers. I also invite students to consider the ways that they have challenged themselves and to write about the types of books they may want to explore. Reflection provides clarity and direction for all readers, but developing readers grow beside this practice. Through writing or conversation, kids verbalize where they’ve been, and when they do, they have a better idea of where they need to go.

Sit beside kids and talk with them about their reading.

Helping kids grow as readers and thinkers means sitting beside them and talking with them about books. I have conversations with students constantly about their reading lives, asking them to describe how books make them feel, how they connect to characters, and what book(s) they want to read once they finish with their current read. Conversations foster deeper thinking.

I think about talking with students as ways to nudge them further. By sitting beside them and talking about books, I am validating their humanity. I am saying, “You matter and I want to talk to you about your reading.”

Promote reading, not books.

Esteemed librarian, author, and educator Jennifer LaGarde first brought this phrase to my attention. Since then, I have marinated in the idea that as a teacher, I am not a teacher of literature. I am a teacher of students. There are books that I have read and loved, and each year, I talk about those books with students. I read and share, brining in books that I am certain will speak to my kids’ interests. I am careful when I talk about books in my classroom because I want students to know that in my room, their reading choices are valued. I may not enjoy a genre or format that they love, but that doesn’t mean their choices are wrong or irrelevant. It just means that we are different people. We come together to read common texts often, but I try to bring it back to their independent reading lives. I am responsible for readers, not books.  

Although we are in the middle of a school year, the beginning of 2019 is alive with possibility. This is a beautiful year to fall in love with reading. I ask you to join me in guiding students to a sense of book love, of self-awareness, of joy. Join me in believing that kids want to read, and through their interests and hearts, we can open a world of language and story that will captivate them for years to come. Moving kids to adopt reading habits is not always easy, but nudging them a little each day has great power. During a mini-lesson earlier today, I noticed Mark was still lost inside his book. Part of me wanted him to pay attention, to be polite, during instruction about delivering information through the use of second person narration. But I let him read. I have watched him strive this year to find a book that will speak to him and today, he did. Those nudges–sitting beside him, talking about books, and time to read–moved him to engage with a text, and I am confident that he will find more books that will enhance his growing reading life.

I hope my suggestions give your classroom life and possibility. This work we do is important. To learn beside students is a precious thing. There are many times when kids are not willing to read or are more engaged with something else. I keep trying, though. I refuse to give up. I continue to believe that there is a book that will move them into a love of reading. I invite you to believe alongside me.  

Follow Travis on Twitter @teachermantrav

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