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Agony and Ecstasy: Writing and Transformation in an Anti-School

My “career” as a non-tenured lecturer in a university rhetoric and writing studies department became even more precarious as the Great Financial Crisis unfolded in late 2008, and I decided to sniff around for something more stable.

A nearby high school was known for its exhibitions of student learning, so I attended one and spoke with dozens of students about their work, which was decidedly non-academic (in a good way), often three-dimensional, and deeply meaningful to them. They had de-mystified gravity by building a mini roller-coaster; they had investigated homelessness by interviewing homeless individuals and publishing a magazine that sought to re-humanize them. The students could speak with authority about their process, their takeaways, and their challenges. I never imagined myself teaching high school, but if it was going to be necessary, this “anti-school” was the place to do it.

The school had been open only three years, and they hired me and five others to teach the first graduating class. With no blueprint for 12th grade at such a school (and me with zero secondary teaching experience at all), my colleagues and I had lots of room to explore. Depending on the day, this was a blessing or a curse.

Over the next several years, as we tried to design meaningful learning for our students, we were beguiled and sometimes bitterly distracted by burning questions: How exactly can we make classes engaging and fun while preparing students for the reading and writing they’ll face in college? How can we make “academic writing” authentic? Should we focus more on building skills or creating beautiful final products? Is college even the right next step for all our students? 

Rather than supplying answers, the school’s leaders acknowledged that we were asking the right questions and provided us with space to discuss and collaborate and prototype, enact, and refine our own responses.

When our energy flagged, our more veteran colleagues would pose questions like these: what are you doing that feels meaningful? How can you do more of it? They also, somehow, communicated that they believed in us and that our work with students had value, even when it fell short of our own expectations.

Several years into my high school teaching, I had a fleeting moment of clarity. My students were rehearsing for their Saturday Night Live-style sketch comedy show. One of the actors paused mid-scene, turned to his peers and said, “Wait, should I say this in English or Spanish?” 

This prompted a spirited discussion about a handful of thorny questions as they examined this fictional moment from every angle. 

What would the character authentically say? Where did the situation’s true humor lie?  What would the audience think or understand? What are our moral obligations as students at a school seven miles on the US side of the international border with Mexico?  What is the relationship between the world we live in and the one we aspire to create? What is our role as artists within our community?

As they debated, students quoted lines from Richard Rodriguez’s “A Hunger for Memory,” which we had read months earlier, and passages from a Judith Ortiz Cofer essay we had read even before that. They encouraged the actors to try the scene in different ways with different gestures, to see how it landed.

The students never turned to us teachers for the answer; we all knew there was no “right” answer, only choices that we could make consciously and rigorously.

This experience didn’t answer all my questions about what school could be, but at the time I realized that this was what I had wanted all along: for my students to be invested in the power of language and in its ability to accomplish things in the world.

What made this moment possible? In large part, it was possible because we had been able to bring our students to a place where they cared about what they were doing.

As I had been discovering for the past several years, this is easier said than done, for many reasons. Many of us doing the designing of learning, myself included, did many things in school we didn’t care about, so “not caring” seems normal, and even cool. Additionally, there isn’t an obvious and perfect alignment between skill building and meaningful work. Also, teenagers are human beings, meaning they are individuals, and they don’t all inherently care about doing the same sorts of things. Etc. you get the point.

But one of the school’s founders consistently reminded us of this: teenagers are driven by two competing compulsions: the desire to reject authority and the desire to be part of something bigger than themselves.

Exploiting that second compulsion emerged for me as a necessary element of designing meaningful learning. An immediate sense of purpose is the antidote to the Kafkan charade of “doing school,” which, because this orientation can be habit-forming, becomes the nightmare of “doing life.”

We resolved the matter of the key line, and after our successful evening performance, students demanded two encores the following day, each one for a fully packed house.

I’m confident my students remember the feeling of performing and standing on stage to receive our ovation, especially because the experience of these performances became the text they would analyze over the next few weeks, taking up these questions: to what extent did we achieve our goal of entertaining and enlightening our audience? what did these sketches illuminate about life at our school? what are the implications of these illuminations?

They produced these essays through a process that included exemplar analysis, drafting, revising, and engaging in full class and peer feedback sessions. One of the practices we employed to help students with peer feedback was to specify the focus: high order concern (hoc) or low order concern (loc).

When engaging in hoc feedback sessions, the attention was turned to ideas, structure, meaning, and argument. Grammar, spelling, and diction were saved for loc sessions. 

After hoc feedback sessions, we’d come back together as a group and ask: what are a lot of us doing well, and what are we struggling with? These discussions led organically to mini-lessons that I would teach on, for example, topic sentences, argumentative logic, or the big ideas the sketches took up: contemporary ennui, the relationships between teens and their parents, conflict in the middle east, Mexican-American traditions. 

Same process with loc peer review. Due to one dreadful pattern we had noticed, we declared war on run-on sentences and became experts in how to eradicate these terrible beasts from our own writing and from that of our peers. Then back to the texts they would go to revise yet again.

This schema of separating hoc from loc forced students to grapple with one thing at a time, empowered them to identify their strengths and growth areas, and enabled them to improve their work incrementally.

Our students could wield the tools they needed to produce work of high quality and develop a sense of agency as powerful communicators: this was transformative learning, for us and for our students.