Teach Quantity Over Quality

Had he been a middle school teacher, Thomas More might have quipped, "An absolutely new idea is one of the rarest things known to man...and adolescent writers." There is no way around it. Students stare at blank paper.

Knowing what to write can feel impossible when our goal is to write something perfectly. When young writers grope for the perfect idea, few come.

This weekend, as I finished Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, I picked up my pencils to sketch the enduring ideas from the book. Adam Grant shares research by Dean Simonton "the most prolific people not only have the highest originality; they also generate their most original output during the periods in which they produce the largest volume (37)." It makes sense. We learn that of Thomas Edison's 1,093 patents only five or six stuck. Although Grant and Simonton are referencing giants in their fields (Shakespeare, Edison, Beethoven, et al.), I see these findings at play in the middle school classroom.

While Grant writes more towards commerce and industry, I can't help but see my struggling adolescent writers in this line: "Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection (37)." In my world, "originality" means the generation of ideas--arguably the most important skill we can teach young writers. Yet, my eyes return to "obsess about them refining them to perfection." How often this type of academic freeze-up infiltrates our young writers! Doubt erases more words than...well, erasers.

This is why we keep writer's notebooks.

This is why everything cannot count for a grade in the ELA classroom.

This is why we cannot possibly read everything written by our students.

This is why we need to model and value the rough work, the generation of lists, the sketches, the unfinished single lines, the returning to ideas scrawled days before....

Yet, if we do not take the time to make our classrooms a studio in the spirit of Picasso (who needed 79 sketches just for Guernica), students never see or experience a model of what this kind of work feels like.

It feels so...reckless to suggest first teaching quantity over quality because it often sounds like we skip the quantity part. But that is what we must do.

Who has the time for quantity? We do. We have that choice.

If students only come to know that the only reason to write is for an evaluation and a score, we compress the writing process to pushing a wisp of blue through a shrinking needle's eye that few kids feel prepared to thread.

Yet, if we know that the best path to quality is quantity, and if we know that our predisposition to form is really only about conforming to the standards of a test (as we try to convince ourselves "no-no, really, this form is really good for them; kids need to learn how to write like this"), and if we know that our students really aren't learning how to generate ideas or make connections on their own, and if we know--deep in our gut--because we value form over evidence of holistic growth, then haven't we taught young writers to do little but to doubt themselves as writers?

Aren't we equipping them with false positives when we hold a singular golden form over smudged reams of cobwebby, incomplete thinking?

Reclaiming Essay

Student essays hanging on walls and bulletin boards rarely get read in my classroom. Sure, some students stop to read their friend's essay. Occasionally, a colleague will stop to read a few if the essays hang in the hallway. However, for the most part, student essays hang on cork board strips like laundry.

Yesterday, we took a day (save for just under ten minutes at the end) to read our classmates freshly minted essays. I used 24 hours to sort the essays into categories as best as I could. Placards noted the topics of each pile; one pile had to be "Variety" because the topics students wrote about ranged from wondering about animals knowingly wandering off to die...

Something that I've always wondered about--ever since I heard about it--is why some animals return, at the end of their lives, to where they were born. I wonder how they find their way back home?

...to making sure we live our lives without regret...

Don't look back on life, look to the next note in your song, make it have meaning.

...to celebrating being different:

I've always been different. I've always remembered the names of all of my classmates without even trying. I've always notices the slightest difference in something even when no one else does. I've always known if someone was in a bad mood, even if no one else could tell because they were trying to hide it. I've always been what you call an old soul.

This is not literary analysis or writing about content. Writing is not an assessment tool in this case. I am not arguing against analysis. We can make room for many types of writing in our classrooms; I will argue that until the light goes out in my eye. Consider that I am sharing example of writing as discovery or self-expression as opposed to writing as way of understanding literature.

Why? Because it makes adolescents better writers. It allows students to experience the intent and the art of the essay. It perhaps sets students up to look for, and maybe even love, essay in the real world. It opens up the possibilities.

At the end of one class, I was moved to share that what they said about the experience of reading each others' essays is why I fell in love with writing as an adolescent--the voice that emerges when you allow yourself to think on the page, to be conversational. You find yourself as you find your voice. Essayists are explorers (thank you for that metaphor, Katherine Bomer) and when we make room for our students to explore their thinking and then make time for students to read the thinking of their classmates we move our community towards a community of writers.

I wish I recorded our post-reading conversations. Class after class, students said they got to know their classmates, and they appreciated the depth of thinking, and that some essays are indeed "sticky" (my habitual term) in that they are going to stick to us, stay with us...we are going to leave the room impacted by something written by someone who sits near me (and who I never really talk to).

(TxR/NM)-L=I

(Testing x Remediation/Numerical Measurement) - Learning = Inflation

Sometimes when I read, I sketch--not to be cute, but to figure out where I fit in. Where have I made these mistakes? Where have I fallen into the trap? Where have I been swayed by external expectations. And I guess this sketch (inspired by The Testing Charade by Daniel Koretz) emerged as I kept thinking about the low-scoring students we try to help or remediate. The image of patching a leaky balloon just kind of emerged as I sketched what troubled me.

We say that we are helping students...now, I'm not so sure. At the very least I am questioning how helpful remediation is in the long run or in the trajectory of student learning. Maybe remediation isn't about learning. Maybe it is just about testing.

In my imagination, I see more, smaller, balloons with "skill" written on them than what I drew here. I see a whole room of listless, ignored balloons. Some on the floor. Some barely floating a few inches from the ground. I find myself thinking about everything I do not emphasize today and how my actions may, indeed, be helping students raise their scores (a.k.a inflating the scores).

But am I helping students learn anything that they can use (other than on a test)? Maybe. Maybe not. Although. at least on this page, the thinking in my sketch may be more certain of the truth than the thinking in my words.