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New Voices Tiffany J. Hunt, Editor Poudre High School Fort Collins, Colorado [email protected]

Bud Hunt, Editor Olde Columbine High School Longmont, Colorado [email protected]

Why I Detest Nancie Atwell Sarah J. H. Brooks Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School Juneau, Alaska [email protected]

I have never met Nancie Atwell, the author of In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning, who challenged and reimagined middle school English classrooms by proposing a finetuned version of the writing workshop, but, in the way a younger sister loathes the perfect and muchadmired older sister, I hate her. Look at her on the cover of the optimistically titled Lessons That Change Writers: In her neat black skirt and black nylons, her blue sweater, her silver jewelry, she perches relaxed and confident in a rocking chair. Her thirteen middle school students surround her in a neat circle on the blue-gray

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carpet—each one with an open notebook, each one holding a pencil, each one looking entirely engaged and interested in the poetry lesson Atwell has outlined on her easel. This, her large and confident signature proclaims, is a writing workshop. I believed her. She didn’t tell me that calls from the attendance office and the nurse and the vice principal would cut into my conferencing time like a steadily rising river erodes a sandy bank.

Last summer, as I scrambled to prepare for my first teaching position at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School in Juneau, Alaska, I read In the Middle like a holy text. Nancie Atwell was my god. “When they can choose,” she writes, “middle school students will write for all the reasons literate people everywhere engage as writers” (75). And so I set up my classroom in the way she prescribed: crates filled with writing folders and reading folders for each student, a publication center, pillows in the corners, peer conference areas, shelves and shelves of books in every genre, quotations she recommended on all the walls. I read and reread her sage advice. And on August 24, the day before the students arrived, my classroom

shone like a shrine. It was perfect. It was a writing workshop. But five months later, pause a moment to witness my cover image: In my faded blue jeans and my unevenly buttoned brown sweater, I stand anxiously at the front of my classroom. My thirtyone seventh- and eighth-grade students (more than double Nancie’s class size) surround me in a haphazard semicircle of two rows of institutional desks that crowd each other on the Pepsi-stained, Cheetos-spattered, blue-gray carpet. Most of my students have their notebooks open, but one is chewing her pencil to splinters as she worries about the boy who has just dumped her, another is gazing distractedly out the window at a raven circling higher and higher in the air, and another is staring at the blue-gray carpet wishing it would swallow her and her sadness whole. Some of them look interested in the list of “Qualities of Memoirs That Work” that we are compiling on the overhead projector, but just as the energy in the room builds, the fire alarm sounds and the students throw down their pencils in a celebratory whoop and rush out into the cold January air. This, I think as I follow the students out the door, is not the writing workshop in which Atwell convinced me to believe.

January 2006

Copyright © 2006 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

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She didn’t tell me it would be so messy. Or at least I didn’t catch that part when I was straining to understand how to get them started, how to get them engaged, how to get myself organized. She didn’t tell me that a few students in every class would need me to get them started every day, or that a few students (two, in particular, who are both gifted readers) would resist the independence of the writing workshop and shut down. She didn’t tell me that calls from the attendance office and the nurse and the vice principal would cut into my conferencing time like a steadily rising river erodes a sandy bank. She didn’t tell me about the students who would write poetry all year, in spite of my explicit expectations that they write across genres. And she didn’t tell me that the orderly “writingreading handbooks” she has students create from the meticulous notes they take during minilessons would sometimes look like a hurricane had gathered all the pages and then returned them in random order. Or maybe she did. Even after reading In the Middle and Lessons That Change Writers cover to cover—twice—I have questions. I teach more than one hundred students (four classes of about thirty students each). Twenty percent of those students have significant learning disabilities, and many speak English as a second language. Is it possible to successfully run Atwell’s writing workshop in this environment? In class periods that are only fifty minutes long? When only 60 percent of my students consistently do their homework? In a school climate that mandates three standardized tests in a year? In the

midst of the hip-deep sludge of students’ complicated lives: divorce, abuse, drugs, sex, alcoholism, homelessness, poverty? Is Atwell’s shining model possible in this public school reality? I’m not sure. But look again at my attempt: It is 1:15 p.m., and all of my students but one have grabbed their writing folders and their writing-reading handbooks and have settled into their chairs. Dan is staring out the window, no doubt wishing he were skiing in the new snow, which is falling in enormous flakes that blanket the parking lot and outline the tall spruce trees. “Hey, Dan,” a classmate whispers loudly to him. “Get your stuff so Ms. B. can start reading The Odyssey to us.” Dan’s attention wanders back to the room, to the colorfully illustrated version of Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Wanderings of Odysseus: The Story of The Odyssey that I hold in my hands, and he says, “Oh! That guy’s gonna kill the suitors today!” and he jumps up to get his writing folder and his handbook. Or look at this: It is noon on another day, and my second-period class and I have just transitioned from a class discussion about qualities of effective essays to writing time. I am trying not to dwell on the fact that only 30 percent of them did their weekend homework, which was to read five essays written by teens and then list what they noticed about titles, leads, content, conclusions, and so forth. I facilitated the discussion anyway, turning the students who did their homework into small-group leaders, but right now, I am frustrated. I want every single student to benefit fully from this workshop and if they don’t . . . I stop, suddenly. The room is utterly silent. Thirty-one

heads are bent over pieces of writingin-progress—poetry, short stories, essays, book reviews, memoirs, letters, opinion columns, humorous lists. I breathe in this awareness for a moment before I move my wooden footstool next to Annie’s desk. She is working on a free-verse poem about the end of a friendship. In small glimpses, I have seen that Atwell was right in a hundred ways—about reading aloud and its benefits for readers; about the necessity of a daily, predictable writing time; about in-house publications and their motivating power.

“How’s it going?” I whisper to begin our conference, my frustration dissipating in this reverent air. And one more: It is a Friday, and the moment the bell rings, a crowd of students bursts into my classroom. “Is it here? Is it ready?” I smile at them and open the cardboard box that contains the second issue of our house literary journal. This one is eighty-nine pages long and showcases writing and original artwork from sixty-one students. I celebrate this fact, even as I dwell on the more than forty students who did not submit anything. Eagerly, they grab their copies and begin paging through them. “Cool simile, Kyle!” “I love the way you started your essay, Trish.” “Did you guys read Emily’s story? It’s like Hatchet.” The students call these comments to each other across the room, out in the hall. These are the real-world conversations about writing that I want to hear. And this is why I have begun to hate Nancie Atwell: Before I

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read In the Middle, I might have been more content to assign the genre and subject of all students’ writing, to confine poetry to one month-long unit, to control where and when students moved in class. However, in small glimpses such as the ones above, I have seen what can happen when students are given the freedom to write what they want and how. In small glimpses, I have seen that Atwell was right in a hundred ways—about reading aloud and its benefits for readers; about the necessity of a daily, predictable writing time; about in-house publications and their motivating power. Even with my questions, I cannot turn back. And, of course, what I really feel for Nancie Atwell is not hate but deep admiration. I sincerely want to create the space for my students that she creates for hers. I want my writing workshop to function with all the grace and inspiration and success that hers seems to. And some days—some hours, some brief moments—it does. Other days, I am reaching futilely for the impossible. But every day, I reach. And every day, my students write.

Afterthought: Our Love/Hate Relationships with the Experts What Sarah Brooks so articulately and craftily portrays is an excellent example of the good that can come despite our incredulity regarding best-practices texts—the ones that fill our syllabi as students and then, later, our bookshelves in our home and school offices. The names that are revered in our coursework and draw us across state lines to stand

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awed in the back of hotel ballrooms at NCTE conventions are revered for a reason: they belong to those pedagogical gods and goddesses who have discovered practices that actually work, realities that defy the conventional apathy of substandard language arts education. But who among us has not been a skeptic? I (Tiffany) have read more than one transcription of a “genuine” classroom dialogue that has elicited nothing but disbelief. All too often, the examples printed in best-practices texts seem just a little too fitting to be true. As a first-year teacher, paranoid as it may sound, I actually began to suspect that some of those examples were fabricated by the authors of such texts to instill idealistic dreams in the minds of naively optimistic first-year teachers, or perhaps to showcase for the rest of the educational world that they were truly supernatural beings sent to earth to intimidate the rest of us merely human public schoolteachers. Though I have, thankfully, overcome my best-practices conspiracy theories, I still believe that reading a best-practices text while in the wrong frame of mind can be incredibly discouraging to a struggling teacher, particularly one in the early years of his or her career with too little experience to delve into the past for reassuring memories of success in the face of adversity. During a period of my own such discouragement, I found myself seeking out the yang to the best-practices yin: problematized texts. They were more difficult to find, but they certainly provided me with what I needed at the time: examples of teachers who had tried, failed, and tried again and learned from their mistakes in manners so meaningful that they

were inspired to put those lessons into print for others. And, frankly, they just made me feel better. My internal dialogue as reader shifted from, “No way a student would ever say something like that; this author is completely making that up!” to, “Wow, was that stupid. I would never make that mistake.” Instead of feeling intimidated by the teachers so successful they must be lying, I could imagine myself as the wiser, more sensible teacher who, if not intimidating, could at least stand superior to those foolish wannabees. Insecurities aside, I still appreciate problematized texts because of the opportunity to learn along with the author through trial and error and failures that, with work, lead to success. Such reading has also encouraged me to engage more readily in reflective practices and to view perceived failures as opportunities to view my teaching practices from different and unexpected perspectives. I also find value in those examples that raise more questions than answers. Yet I cannot deny the need for solid answers when it comes to providing students with highquality educational experiences. I have heard many teachers semifacetiously lament the disadvantages of their students during that first year of teaching, and I myself have engaged in such rhetoric. But, really, I do not suppose it is all that funny. Surely we must laugh at our mistakes, perhaps even our short-sightedness, but not at the expense of students. In that regard, best-practices texts convey high expectations in the professional community for all teachers, first-year to master. And, as Sarah Brooks illustrates, they can lead to

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best practices in our classrooms despite possible tendencies toward feelings of inferiority or disbelief. Perhaps, then, these texts are less a dichotomy and more a yin and yang of our profession, each with its distinct advantages and disadvantages, and therefore neither complete without the other. And as much as Sarah found herself “hating” Nancie Atwell, we may find ourselves “hat-

ing” those who, even though they publish their shortcomings and failures in print for the world to see, ultimately find themselves succeeding where we have not. And perhaps we “hate” them because they push us beyond our comfort zones into realms that make us all that more afraid of falling short of our idealistic goals. But in a profession where we continually strive for the best for students, we

cannot help but admit that, in reality, it is a love/hate relationship. Works Cited

Atwell, Nancie. In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning. 2nd ed. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1998. ———. Lessons That Change Writers. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002. Sutcliff, Rosemary. The Wanderings of Odysseus: The Story of The Odyssey. New York: Delacorte, 1995.

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