The Escape Artist

           Brice was on the taller side. Well, as much on the taller side as you can be in first grade. He had downy blond hair and eyes like clear morning sky. His smile was easy and he’d not yet lost his first tooth.  He came to me on the first day of school, shirttails tucked into pants pulled up way too high. He beamed when I commented on the gel in his hair and the shine of his new shoes. As I came to know Brice, it became apparent that reading and writing were already a struggle.  His kindergarten teacher noted that he was behind in language arts, but proficient in math and science.  While most incoming first grade students could recall 20 or more letter sounds and read short words like "and", "the" and "can", Brice retained only 12 letter names and when encountering the written word, labored over each sound.  While others were writing words and constructing basic sentences, Brice was penning strings of letters and random symbols.  Together we began by studying letter/sound correspondence.

            By the time the leaves turned crunchy and brown, Brice had transformed into a functional reader and a lover of writing.  He was reading simple, repetitive stories with multiple sentences on each page.  During writing time, Brice used the words he'd mastered in reading to create stories of his own.  

            Each day, our class devoted an hour exclusively to the purpose of writing.  I'm not talking about handwriting practice, fill in the blank workbooks, or copying the teacher's writing.  My students viewed themselves as authors with important things to say.  

            As a beginning teacher, I was clueless on how to teach writing, so I let my students select their topics and go from there.  As they worked, I would assist and answer questions when needed.  Our class was a hive of activity.  As students worked, I would stroll around the room, often interrupting the class to reading snippets of their writing.  Despite my miniscule knowledge on teaching the craft of writing, my students bubbled with excitement at the opportunity to record their thoughts and above all, create books of their very own.  

            On Friday afternoons, my class would cluster on the carpet to read finished pieces.  Without exception, when a student climbed up into The Author's Chair and read aloud a story created by their very own hands, their face shone with pride.  The children on the carpet were rapt as they listened to and applauded story after story.  When a student would scoot down off the chair, a flurry of hands would shoot up, eager to be the next reader.  Most of my students chose to leave their books in the safe haven of the classroom.  Consequently, our classroom was brimming with their books.  There were books sandwiched on the shelves, leaning in the windowsills, stacked in cubbies, spilling out of desks, overflowing out of book boxes, and just when I thought we'd run out of space, we started tacking them up on the walls.

            Brice especially took pleasure in writing about his family. He wrote about his mom, his grandma, his sister, and his rowdy horde of cousins. His stories were predominantly retellings of exciting vacations to every place a kid could dream of.  Several times that year I’d sent notes home and left phone messages to tell Brice’s family about the tremendous progress he was making. My attempts to connect with his parents went unanswered, but hearing the stories about his close knit family set my mind at ease. Parents are busy. I understood. So, each Friday in the Author’s Chair, Brice would sit up straight, clear his throat, and read his latest adventure with his family.

            To describe what happened next as shocking is like saying the ocean is slightly damp. One day the principal asked me to escort Brice to the office during lunchtime. Brice was not a troublemaker. In fact, he befriended everyone and avoided conflict at all costs. Lost in conversation about his recess plans we walked hand in hand up the hallway, oblivious to the police cruiser in the parking lot and the possibility that it’s presence was linked to Brice. As we stepped through the office doorway, my eyes met the gaze of a police officer. A CPS caseworker stood beside her.  My heart dropped like a stone. The caseworker spoke with Brice privately while the officer filled me in on the details. Brice’s father was in prison and his mother had just been arrested for possession of methamphetamine. According to the officer, this was an ongoing case, which included prior arrests and visits to the home.  I was blindsided.  My mouth gaped as the officer succinctly informed me that Brice was to be relocated to a foster home and a new school that very day.  His little sister would be placed in a separate home.

            As he returned to the office with the caseworker, Brice cried from a deep and broken place. I held him, rocking him like a baby, feebly assuring him that he would be loved in this new home and at his new school. He was adamant about returning to his mom.

    “My mom is a GOOD mom! My mom is a GOOD mom! I want to go back to MY HOME!” he wailed, sucking in his bottom lip, struggling for breath.  After forty minutes of rocking, crying, and desperate screaming, Brice caught his breath and paused.

    “Can I do Author’s Chair today even though it’s not Friday?”  I was speechless. I would have wrapped the moon in a silver bow and placed it in his small hands had he asked.

            When the lunch bell rang, the class sat at the carpet.  Brice sat in the Author’s Chair, straightened his back, cleared his throat, and through red-rimmed eyes began to read. He read about a trip he’d recently taken with his family to Disneyland.  I knew it wasn’t true.  He knew that I knew it wasn’t true. In that moment I knew that all of his stories about his family were untrue.  He finished reading and with my heart in my throat, our class said goodbye to Brice. Our paths did not cross again.

            On that tear-streaked day, it was starkly apparent to me that writing had become a survival mechanism for Brice.  Perhaps his stories were a bundle of wishes he’d hoped would come true if he scratched them out on paper.  I’ve always known that writing has the power to whisk an author away to unknown and exciting places. What I learned from Brice is that writing can also sustain a person in places that are painfully real. His fictitious life created a safe space of normalcy. Pencil in hand, Brice scripted the life he both craved and deserved.  

            I often wonder what became of Brice. At night, between the hazy edges of dreams, I glimpse his face amongst other lost children who have come and gone too quickly.  I regret not seeing beyond his eager smile and bright eyes.  I regret not hearing Brice’s real stories, the ones that were too hard to tell.

            That day was a turning point in my life.  It changed who I am as a person, who I am as a teacher.  I pursued parents with regular phone calls and when they didn't call me back, I called them at work, flooded them with notes, and even dropped in on them at home.  Shiny new shoes, freshly gelled hair, and parents who appeared "too busy" would never again fool me into assuming a loving home existed for any of my students.

             Most of my digging into their lives produced discoveries of yards littered with bikes, parents who were eager to hear about their child's school life, and above all, families with deep love for their children.  Occasionally, I'd uncover a family without electricity, a kitchen with hollow-eyed cupboards, or a parent undone by addiction.  Knowledge is power and I did my best to use the intimate knowledge of my students’ lives to help them attain whatever resources they needed.  Digging beyond the surface allowed me to see the real stories of my students and maybe even ensure that some of those stories had happier endings.

            Eight years have crossed the calendar since my time with Brice.  Eight years and not a day has passed without his story rising to the surface of my mind.  Over the years my shock over his abrupt departure gave way to grief.  Grief was shoved aside by guilt.  And guilt became the catalyst for change.

            I recognize that some children have tumultuous lives outside of school.  Lives that I cannot always understand.  Lives that, to my dismay, I cannot always change.  The guilt I feel lies in this one lingering thought: If I’d shown Brice powerful words, words sturdy enough to bear the weight of his reality, maybe, just maybe those words would have given him the courage to write the heartbreaking truth.

            Yes, Brice demonstrated tidy handwriting.  He applied correct sentence structure, but that was not enough.  That is not enough.  I wanted Brice to have the power, or at least the choice, to write honestly.  While fiction can be a captivating vehicle, fiction under the guise of truth is hollow.  In his keynote address to the National Writers Workshop Donald Murray said “The more personal I am, the more universal I become.”  Writing that comes straight from the heart is what I want my students to strive for.

            What I did not know eight years ago, but am sure of now is that young writers need familiarity and practice writing with compelling words.  They need to roll words around in their mouths just to see what they sound like, to sandwich them side by side in unlikely metaphors, to appreciate the expression in a vivid verb.  As J. Patrick Lewis puts it, I want my students to experience the joy of  “uncovering that elusive verb or metaphor that one hopes will make a reader stop, ever so briefly, in wonder.”

            My desire to give young children access to powerful words combined with my conviction that writers need to write daily led to incorporating writers’ notebooks into my classroom.  Writers’ notebooks serve two purposes in my class.  They are a place where I guide my students in gathering vivid verbs, similes, metaphors, and other rich language.  Their notebooks are also a place to take off the training wheels and venture out on their own as writers.  Story starts, poetry, drawings, photographs from their lives, and a variety of things occupy the pages of their notebooks. 

            Let me introduce you to Marcus.  Marcus started first grade as a good student, excelling in reading and math, but he was not particularly interested in writing.  As the year progressed, he absorbed every bit of writing instruction and began playing with words.  As fall turned the corner into winter he was even calling himself a writer.  Within his first draft of a response to a prompt about the best part of his body, Marcus uses some beautiful imagery.

“My Thinking Brain

I like my forehead because it has my thinking brain in it.  My brain lets me tell stories and play.  When I am tired my brain gives me dreams of colors in the night.  In the morning my brain tells me when to get up.  And it tells me to eat breakfast.  I like my brain.

 

            In her book, Wondrous Words, Katie Wood Ray speaks to the importance of reading like writers, examining the crafting of texts for a variety of things including word choice.  To create awareness in my young writers, we do a lot of word gathering beginning in the whole group setting.  Below is Isabelle’s word gathering from Jan Brett’s book, Gingerbread Baby.  Gingerbread Baby brims with impeccable verb choice.   Faster verbs convey excitement and slower verbs create tension as well as reveal the Gingerbread Baby’s emotional state.  As a class we gathered verbs from the story and divided them into fast and slow.  Then the students picked verbs from within our list that they might want to keep in their notebook to use in place of the passive ‘went’ in later pieces.  Isabelle was the kind of kid who worried about everything from forgetting her lunch to not finishing her work in time.  Although her worries were unfounded, the fact that she was plagued by her worries was a very real thing.  Gathering words in her notebook helped Isabelle relax when it came time to draft.  Knowing she had lists of words available functioned as a safety net and allowed her to think about what she was writing, rather than worrying about not being able to come up with the just the right word.

Notes from whole class word gathering

            One of my purposes within writing instruction is to give students tools they can apply as they grow as writers.  It’s my hope that they’ll continue to use these tools long after they’ve left my class.  I foster this step towards independent work by stepping back and allowing for student led small groups.  After several whole group word gathering lessons, my class was ready to gather words within their table groups.  The entry below was in conjunction with a science unit on dragonflies.  Each table group had a tank full of nymphs (baby dragonflies) on their tables.  The nymphs grew and molted into gorgeous, emerald green adult dragonflies and the children observed each stage.  In preparing to write about all they’d observed, the table groups brainstormed lists of adjectives and verbs they might use in their report about the nymph stage.  As you can see, when left to work in groups, they came up with long and varied lists.  After the table groups were finished, we met back as a whole group for children to share out the words they’d gathered.  As they read, most of the other children added words they hadn’t thought of.  It’s wonderful seeing my students actively learning from their peers.

 

Independent Small Group Word Gathering

            While I believe great value lies in teacher and peer led activities within the writing process, the most important thing I can teach my students is that they are writers, real writers.  And writers often choose their own topics.  Teacher directed lessons on craft translate almost seamlessly in their self-selected writings.  Knowing the power of words creates a drive in my students to write freely with purpose and feeling.  Emotion spills out from the tip of their pencils onto the blank notebook pages.  Here Savannah exhibits vulnerability by expressing her fear during a storm.

“Lightning

Last night there was lightning.  I was afraid."

            I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the need for writers to write for real audiences.  In my class this takes many forms: letters to their big buddies, book reviews for the school library, reports to share with other classes, fictional stories about their classmates, apology letters, thank you notes and anything else that has an authentic audience.  Of course, the most relevant audience to young children is their parents.  After a lesson on writing small details, Maddie, a special needs student, decided to write a letter to her mom.  After that same lesson Marcus used his notebook to draft a letter to his dad for father’s day.

 

“I like my mom.  She is the best.  I love my mom.  She is cute.  We play hide and seek.  She is the best mom ever.  We go for a walk.  I love mom.”

“Dear Dad,

I love you for lots of reasons.  Sometimes you watch my brother’s baseball games with me.  Every time at dinner, you give me something I like.  Happy father’s day!

Love, Marcus”

 

            Writers’ notebooks allow space for my students to try out different genres.  After lessons on poetry and alliteration, Maiya wrote this poem about the joy of eating ice cream with her big sister.

“Ice cream

delicious, delectable, delightful

licking, freezing, melting

feeling happy with Haley

yummy”

            I wish I could say that all of my young writers are eager to bite into expressive language and play around with words, but the truth is some of my students struggle with writing.  Even at the age of six, some of my writers think that editing and writing are one in the same and that to write, you must write each word correctly the first time.  They avoid writing, hate it even.  Frankly, I would, too.  Matthew was one of those writers.  He spent months snapping his pencils in half and declaring his hatred for writing.  It just about broke my heart because Matthew was a creative, caring kid with important things to say.  I tried every trick in the book to help Matthew write and, more importantly, see himself as a writer.  Nothing worked.  I think it’s accurate to say that both Matthew and I were frustrated and at a loss of what to do next.

            Then one day, Matthew rushed in and asked if he could skip independent reading time because he had something he just had to write about.  I was over the moon.  He actually wanted to write.  Here is his notebook entry from that day.

“My Loose Tooth

I have a loose tooth.  It’s a loose tooth.  I hope it will come out in one week.”

 

            This was a turning point for Matthew.  A few months later I tasked the class with writing author’s blurbs about themselves for one of our class books.  They were to include true and interesting facts about themselves.  Formerly a reluctant writer, Matthew wrote this about himself:

“My name is Matthew.  I have a dog named Gouda.  I am a good writer.”

             Reflecting on my second year of teaching, the year Brice entered my life, I feel grateful for his impact on the way I teach my young writers today.  I feel honored to have witnessed the preserving power of writing in Brice’s life. Yet, there is a tender place in my heart that still pulses with sorrow because this was a lesson too callous for a six year old.  Even for one on the taller side.