Teaching Teens to Write

My Re Education

I should begin with me.
I’m a playwright.

I’m currently pursuing an MFA in my field. Someday I’d like to be a full-fledged teacher. Somewhere. My ideal writing life would include a continuing education in both my own craft and molding young writers. I don’t think that the two can be mutually exclusive. One feeds the other. One cannot properly exist without the other, and any writer out there who hasn’t tried teaching writing is seriously missing out on something amazing.

Despite my passion, I recently resigned my position teaching high school creative writing courses to pursue my MFA. I wanted to take some time to mold me, and if I’m being honest, I wanted one more degree to ensure that somebody out there might pay me a livable wage for doing what I love. I don’t regret this decision. In fact, I think that getting this MFA will only make me a better teacher who sees the big picture when reviewing my student’s work.

Mostly, it means typing the nights away, alone, in my apartment.

I miss my students.

I miss their energy, the way they saw every problem as a puzzle to solve.

How when I wrote words like theme, character, and love on the board, it meant more to them than my syllabus suggested. Writing was a way of life for them in a way that I’m not sure I’ll ever emulate.

There is something to be said for writing while adolescent. Anyone plagued by that many hormones and minor neuroses is in need of a major creative outlet.

I dared my kids to write something that mattered.

They did so with a raw honesty that astounded me. One female student wrote a tale of a girl on a train clinging so desperately to the mangled remains of her relationship with her mother, that she reaches out to a woman she might never have noticed otherwise. The two women form a bond that quieted me. I still read that story when I feel alone. It gives me hope.

Another student wrote a story of three siblings on the eve of being evicted from their home. The older brother holds it together just long enough to make sure his younger siblings are fed and emotionally cared for, only to break down alone at the top of the stairs. What did this student know about public strength and private vulnerability? If you read her story, you’d see that she’s knows quite a lot. She knew enough to move me.

Not every student met the task of writing so naturally.

Some could open themselves up like clocks — ticking motors exposed — unabashed.

Other students awkwardly flirted with substance through their work. The crying girl on the bus couldn’t really be her. She was too needy. Too alone. She was a character completely foreign to them, though her heart bled so earnestly from the tip of the pen.

With these students, my job was less about developing their craft, and more about developing their character.

What makes someone a writer?

Years of attempting to answer this question for myself yielded easy answers: a creative voice, a body of work, a unique thematic interest, etc. I found that none of these answers were relevant. My students ranged from 14–18 years old. They didn’t know what their chief thematic concerns were. Many of them hadn’t had their hearts broken yet, or driven a car, or even detached from their parents long enough to see who they were when no one was watching.

I was working in a privately funded public school serving the Washington, DC community.

I had some students well-versed in the mechanics of grammar and composition.

Other students were missing some of those building blocks of writing. They were students of color and white kids. They were middle class and poor. They had disparate experiences, different ideas of what stories were, and sometimes, quite a bit of antagonism for one another. If I wanted to teach these kids to write effectively as a group, I had to start by instilling a uniform set of values for their work.

I developed a new approach.

I based my curriculum on articulating what writing was really about. I thought back to the first time I ever wrote a story. To figure out what was essential about that act. Why did I write it? And what did I think would happen once I had? The answers I drew became the basis for my entire teaching methodology.

The first story I remember writing was a response to external stimuli.

It was the year 2008.

It was around 3 AM when my mother returned from her night shift at a gas station with a glaring headache. I didn’t know she was in pain at the time. I greeted her as I opened the door. She retired to her room. I climbed back onto the sofa with my eldest brother ready for some serious sleep. A few moments later, I heard my mother cry out in a small, strained voice. I got up, careful not to wake my brother, and went to her.

I found my mother flat on her back, her eyes open and terrified, begging me to call for help.

My mother suffered a stroke, and although television advises every child to simply call 9–1–1, I called my grandmother. I panicked when she didn’t pick up and ran the block to my uncle’s. He told me to run another block to wake my grandma, and that he would meet us both back at my house. We lifted my mother into the back of my uncle’s car, who took her to the hospital.

My big brother and I stared out into the night.

My mother is alive and well today. Yet, I was changed after that night. I was so jolted that it seemed my days were longer. Every time my mother looked tired I was afraid she might fall. I worried about how my siblings and I would survive without our singular protector. She was young and vivacious, after all. The toughest mom on the block despite the fact that she did it alone, and at an age most women were still dating, finishing college, and deciding on careers. My mother was my whole world.

I set pencil to paper and wrote about it.

The story was only a page long.

It began with a clock reading the time and ended with my mother’s recovery, but it was populated with my fear. From the first to last terrible sentence, it was a story about incomprehension. It was my attempt to work through my own mortality. If my mother could simply die one day without warning, than what did that mean for the rest of us? This impulse in writing, to beg the question and explore what we don’t understand became the basis for the first tenet of my pedagogy.

Bravery

Great writers take risks.

They pinpoint what puzzles, scares, or angers them, and they explore it on the page.

Arthur Miller had to have been brave enough to question masculinity and success. Otherwise, Death of Salesman might have been a pointless play about men whining and yelling for no good reason.

I encouraged my students to think of writing less as a skill that they needed to master, and to instead approach each story with a little bit of personal bravery. Let plot and mechanics fall away, and ask themselves:

What am I afraid of in this story? Am I brave enough to follow this through to the end?

Hammering this idea into all of our creative projects always made for more inspired work. Teenagers have the rest of their lives to tackle form and style. First, they had to find their voice.

Becoming a working writer is also all about the moment of transference.

When I finished that story, I could have tucked it away inside a journal never to be seen again.

Yet, I dotted that last i, printed it out, and handed it to my mother. I wanted her to know how I felt, and in doing so, presumed that she would actually care. This moment of showing one’s work is the second tenet.

Insanity

I’ve always tried to keep it real with my kids.

Every human being on the planet goes through their lives experiencing moments and revisiting them in our heads.

It’s safe to assume that we all have questions that puzzle us. Every man, woman, and child has wondered about death, or family, or love.

What makes a writer different is that they have the audacity to force their questions upon others.

As you may gather from my posts on this site, I am a huge fan of ego in artistry. You have to think that your take on things would matter.

Even if you’re not sure anyone will read your work, when you submit it to a journal or hand it off to a close friend, you at least hope that they will. Writers want their work to have meaning, and that’s impossible if no one reads it. When a student wrote or read an assignment aloud, I always posed my second question:

Why should I care?

If they didn’t know, then they weren’t insane enough.

Any teacher will tell you that our craft involves encouraging students while demanding more from them.

I encouraged bravery in my students’ work, and demanded insanity in their execution.

Honesty and tenacity is what sets the most talented writers apart. Once I arrived at these two theories, I can admit that I felt accomplished. I walked into my classroom with a big smile on my face, happy to educate the masses with my great wisdom.

This folly of my own positivity led to the third and final tenet.

Humility

A word we’ve all heard before.

The definition…

“The act or posture of lowering oneself in relation to others, or conversely, having a clear perspective and respect for one’s place in context.”

…is a complex one. It asks the subject to lower themselves in relation to peers. Yet, it conversely argues for a clear sense of one’s place within a given context.

When teaching young writers, one must encourage both of these ideas simultaneously. Many writing classes are taught in workshop mode. Every writer has equal footing to comment upon the work of others. The openness of this shared space often presented a number of problems for me.

Some students saw the writing workshop as a peer group of sorts. They shared writing with hope that their classmates could respect and uplift their work. For these students, giving that same respect to their classmates was often a given.

Yet there were many other students who hated feedback. Sometimes a student might be simply insecure. Other times they weren’t accustomed to regular constructive criticism, or anyone telling them their ideas weren’t perfect. And more often than not, kids had put their real fears on the page and therefore didn’t believe anyone outside their psyche could really understand what they were going for.

These dynamics exists in every writing group.

I set a tone for what any peer writing community requires:

The willingness to fail and try again.

My students followed suit. This often took the form of an introductory exercise where we all responded to a writing prompt. I completed this assignment real-time with my students, and then we all shared our work. I opened the room up to any and all constructive criticism, taking care to ensure my students didn’t back down from commenting on my work as equally as each other’s.

Once students observed this give and take, they often ran with it. They understood I was just as responsible for my behavior as they were and took our rules more seriously moving forward. This opened doors for establishing the parameters for creative critique in my classes, or what I like to call bowing.

This method was actually taught to me by a writing mentor from my high school years.

His rule was simple.

While being critiqued, the writer could not speak.

This act of bowing to the opposition, often helps writers learn to bend to a room of peers and editors without feeling victimized. We cannot write in a vacuum without the rest of the world seeing. Bowing also encourages writers to parse through what criticism feels right, and what feels wrong, on their own terms.

I never demanded a note be followed, only that it be heard. After the criticism period was over, I permitted my students to ask follow-up questions. They could ask that a peer repeat or clarify a note. They could ask if anyone caught an idea they were going for? And they could ask if something they tried felt right to their peers, but they were never allowed to refute the points made by the room. If they wanted to prove someone wrong, they could do so on the page.

The writing room was no place for ego.

This tension between the insanity I request of my students and the necessity of burying their own ego, is where humility lives. It is a practice more than an idea. I encourage students to embrace criticism, digest it, and then use or not use it as their own pride guides them.

What they change on the page is always their own choice. How they treat their peers and friends must be with respect for their bravery, and the humility to face when their own writing needs strengthening.

All of these thoughts on teaching are still the seeds of a pedagogy I’m cultivating.

I hope to link specific exercises to these tenets and to build a workshop method that can be replicated in the classroom.

That method would include developing a cultural lens for the work my students produce. Not only embracing their voices, but also encouraging them to let their backgrounds and identities inform how and what they write.

I know that writing helps mold young minds in more than one way. We’re not just teaching them to write. We are teaching them to be the best version of themselves through writing. We are teaching them to build diverse communities that force no one to apologize for who they are.

These skills have many applications beyond the basic creative writing course. They are the seeds of community organizations, after school programs, and educational institutions. They are the building blocks of teamwork, respect, and kindness.

They embrace the spectrum of experience.

I think I knew all of this before I ever stood in front of a classroom, but I didn’t practice it. It wasn’t a part of me.

Until we wrote together.

C.A. Johnson

Playwright
Educator
Thinker

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