It’s Been 7 Hours and 42 Classes and Then Some
Navigating the school code and helping students write in their own accents
It’s January 2024. Hot tea at my side, I’m settling into the luxury of a snow day. My laptop holds the mountain of student writing I must read, respond to, and evaluate, so I am thankful to have this break in teaching to catch up. But I’m especially eager to check in on my 9th graders who have been revising their writing from our unit focussed on The Odyssey by Homer.
I open Jordan’s document and read:
I ingeniously first talked to my grandpa who is horrible at saying no to me. When I got home with the small 110cc Honda, I paid the price of a lecture with my mom about how she needs to be a part of these decisions. Totally worth it.
There’s more to the minibike story, but so far I’m drawn to Jordan’s wit and how she’s captured the reality of her own manipulative powers. Great voice. It’s a win. Let’s check Antonio’s:
I was taking a walk on some train tracks (before you question it they get used like twice a month so i would never get run over) and I saw my friend’s younger brothers and his friend group. I thought and still think that they’re annoying so I attempted to ignore them, but they ask me “what’s good” in a way that’s like their covering something up. I didn’t care because their like 8–10 their probably covering for something irrelevant, but i was still curious because while they might have been 8–10 year olds they weren’t regular.
I laugh out loud as I picture Antonio telling the story, his facial expressions dripping with sarcasm. Sure, he needs to work on punctuation and proofreading, but he’s demonstrated a strong voice all the way. My mountain climbing is off to a great start.
Wait a minute, you think. What do these writings have to do with The Odyssey?
Fair question. Let’s back up. With the previous summer’s panicky discussions about the impact of AI on education, I figured helping English 9 students develop their writer’s voices was the most human thing I could do. I suppose it was a way to make writing assignments AI-resistant.
Through a lot of fun (and frustrating) trial and error, my freshmen and I have been focussing on voice the entire semester. This work, however, has become more about centering students than about AI resisting. So our final unit, The Odyssey and Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, has been inspired by Sinéad O’Connor.
You scratch your head. Sinéad O’Connor? You ask. “Nothing Compares 2 U”? The one who tore up the Pope’s picture on Saturday Night Live all those years ago?*
Yes, but stay with me. I promise this will come together. In her autobiography, Rememberings, O’Connor describes the music industry’s continual insistence that she change her look and behavior to be more marketable–perhaps more exploitable–and the struggle to know when to agree with or rebel against these demands. But in 1993, she begins working with Frank Merriman, a “freer of voices,” who insists O’Connor sing in her natural, Irish accent. Like many artists outside of the U. S. at the time, she has been singing with an American accent. This shift is monumental for her. Singing in her own voice, O’Connor says she is “able to say things that [are] really on my mind without having to code them as much as I [have] coded them in earlier albums” (209).
When I read that in November, I thought about my freshmen and wondered how much “coding” they had been doing during their student lives. They needed opportunities to write about what was on their minds. I had slivered out small writings here and there to attempt this, but it felt ancillary to the “real” or required work.
Instead of limiting my students to merely identifying those stages as Odysseus takes a ridiculously long time to get home from the Trojan War, they would write about their own journeys–their own calls to adventures and challenges and transformations. As Joseph Campbell himself said, “You are the hero of our own story.”
As luck has it, our Odyssey unit has no “required” writing, presenting an opportunity to center student experiences. A key feature of this unit is learning about the stages of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Instead of limiting my students to merely identifying those stages as Odysseus takes a ridiculously long time to get home from the Trojan War, they would write about their own journeys–their own calls to adventures and challenges and transformations. As Joseph Campbell himself said, “You are the hero of our own story.”
Just as Sinéad O’Connor became freer to be herself in her singing, I hope my students feel freer to be themselves in their writing.
Oh, okay. So your students aren’t writing a literary analysis or summary?
No. Not this time. This time I’ve put my students at the center instead of the literature as a way to continue developing their writer’s voice as explained in this assignment. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to check out more of their work. Let’s see Wynn’s piece:
Christmas break was approaching and I was anticipating the break so I could play on my PS5 without the government forcing me to go to school. But at the same time I was dreading the first day of break because it meant I had less time to make My Academic Comeback.
“…the government forcing me.” That’s funny. And I like the capitalization of “My Academic Comeback.” We haven’t even talked about creative uses of capitalization. A great example to share with the class.
But can they only show voice in personal writing? What’s wrong with writing literary analysis or reports or —
Can’t you let me enjoy this? These students are starting to get a concept we’ve been working on all semester. Just give me a moment. Cassie’s turn.
“What if I fall and disappoint my parents and coach?” Even though I knew no one would be disappointed in me, that thought stubbornly stuck to my brain. I had to let my body take control because I knew that I had done the routine so many times and that this time would be no different.
Oh Cassie…so much pressure you put on yourself. I hope writing through this is helpful. Internal dialogue. Nice touch. They are getting the hang of it, I think, as I smile into my laptop screen.
As I was asking, what about those other “academic” types of writing, the ones where voice–
Isn’t as natural, needed, or prominent?
And that are more difficult to–
Make AI resistant? Yes. Of course these thoughts have been swirling in my brain throughout the semester. And have continued to stick around in the months between now and that lovely January snow day of breakthrough for my 9th graders.
It’s why I didn’t publish this post back then, when I could have presented an easily digestible success story, tied with a cute bow. The important stuff is rarely easy to present or to digest.
My 1st semester English 9 class was successful in so many ways. Our focus on voice helped center students within the instruction, create a greater sense of community, and strengthen students’ confidence in their writing. By the end of the semester, I saw them resist the superficials of an assignment (points, word requirements, etc) to embrace its spirit–to express meaningful ideas meaningfully. They had shaken off the code and were writing as themselves. I needed to celebrate that in January.
But there were those pesky other learnings and buzz-killing epiphanies I also needed to process. Like for Cassie, those thoughts stubbornly stuck to my brain as I continued teaching second semester and transitioned into the deep-dive curriculum revisions of the summer. I ended up with three take-aways that I envision myself braiding into my teaching practicing during the upcoming school year:
- Maintain Student-Centered Practices
- Don’t Either-Or the Writing
- Shift to AI-Compatible Assignments
I don’t see this as some magical trifecta that will solve all our AI woes; rather, it’s merely a product of summer thinking, when teachers everywhere have space to reflect on the previous school year in order to plan paths into the next. A bit more about my summer thinking below.
Maintain Student-Centered Practices. Centering students within instruction is not a new concept, as the term student-centered has been around for decades, but it can be challenging to maintain. With a mandate to get students “caught up” to pre-pandemic test scores, I’ve felt the pressure to prioritize required academic reading and writing that is often far removed from students’ interests and experiences. This type of mandate values some
skills, undervalues others, limits student choice, and does little to develop student agency. While teaching my first semester English 9 class, I had to find creative ways to squeeze in our work with writing voice, and student choice was rather limited until our final unit of the semester. With so much required content to “cover,” I also had to deliberately schedule time to meet with each student (often outside of class) to check in with them, conduct writing conferences, etc, and I kept notes on each student to make sure I wouldn’t forget to follow up on specific needs.
This sounds unsustainable.
It’s challenging and messy and imperfect, but I can’t successfully teach any class without understanding what is going on with each student, beyond just looking at the work they submit. Knowing their personalities, what they’ve experienced, what they value, what’s easy and what’s confusing…that affects how I structure next week’s lessons. The more I know about my students, the more I understand their “accents”, and the less likely they are to turn to AI to complete their work for them.
This summer I picked up Kass Minor’s Teaching Fiercely, a resource that beautifully supports teachers in their efforts to create student-centered and culturally sustaining classrooms and curriculum, and I know it will make its mark this school year.
Don’t “Either-Or” the Writing. In helping students develop confidence and voice in their writing, it feels more natural to do so in personal essays and narrative writing. This sort of writing is more approachable to students, and for pure writing quality, working with language, etc, it’s where I’ve seen the most writing growth. Academic writing (traditional research papers, literary analysis, reports, etc) is also important, for that type of writing addresses a particular set of skills as well. It’s also the hallmark of standardized and AP tests. That said, students need both types of writing all the time. I didn’t hold my first semester 9th grade students accountable for their writer’s voice in their literary analysis essays. They were so worried about interpreting the themes “correctly” that I didn’t want to add to their stress, especially since I hadn’t done any personal or creative writing by then. As a result, they wrote boring but accurate, proofread, five-paragraph essays. The only thing they revealed about themselves in those essays were their names in their headings.
Why does it even matter to have voice or creative style in more formal writing?
I’d like to see students take more stylistic risks within academic essays. Not only does it help develop deeper writing skills and the language processing that goes along with it, it can also demonstrate a more sophisticated understanding of the content. To know when to inject personal commentary or to put a humorous or sarcastic spin on an academic topic requires a strong knowledge of it. But in order to achieve that, I need to make the forms of academic writing more accessible.
Even though I didn’t push that with my 1st semester freshmen, I workshopped a few ways to incorporate voice into research papers with my 2nd semester freshmen (a completely different set of students). In order to help bolster their confidence and voice before the research unit, however, they wrote daily journal responses and shared them in small groups. The prompts invited students to describe experiences, opinions, and observations in a low-risk way. I also gave them written feedback (not points or grades) in their notebooks about great word choice or interesting sentence structures. Many of the research topics directly connected to student experiences (cell phone restrictions, impact of social media, effectiveness of online schools, etc), so when I asked them to include personal anecdotes throughout their research papers, our previous journal writing had given them the confidence to navigate–and adjust–the code of academic writing.
While I’ve been working on making academic writing more accessible to students for a while and have consulted many resources throughout the years, this summer, I’m digging 180 Days and 4 Essential Studies, both by Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle along with periodic dives into blog posts from Moving Writers.
Shift to AI-Compatible Assignments. Realizing that creating AI-proof assignments was neither prudent nor possible, I began the semester focussed on AI-resistant work. So I doubled down on student-centered practices, focussing on the process of our work and conferencing with students often, rather than sitting back waiting for the final products to roll in. That’s when students cheat, right? In a product-centered assignment, I can see the temptation. I imagine a student-centered and AI-resistant mentality could serve me well for the remaining years I have in the classroom until I retire.
But have you tried Chat GPT lately?
I know! It’s got me wondering if I’m missing a potential game-changer for student thinking. I understand the worry that if you let students use AI for something, they’ll use it for everything. If I let my worries run amok, I could also see AI taking away all our teaching jobs, so any further AI step I take is with careful consideration. If I maintain a student-centered classroom, however, and position AI not as a thinking substitute but as a thinking prompter, it could up the level of student thinking and engagement. I credit A.J. Juliani for framing AI in this way. As an example, I could ask students to have an academic conversation with Chat GPT (or similar AI tool) that would yield a transcript of their conversation the student would share with me and use as preparation for a writing assignment, class discussion, or other subsequent assignment. In his blog post “7 AI-Compatible Practices for the Classroom” (June 27, 2024), Juliani calls this a “guided bot conversation” and provides helpful examples of how to embed this activity within assignments.
Might a process like that help students think through their ideas in order to bolster their confidence and find their voices? To think beyond five-paragraph ideas? It’s a concept among other AI-compatible ideas I’m weighing as we approach the new school year.
None of these three strands are entirely new to me, but positioning them as a guiding trio is both comforting and exciting and makes me want to dive into the possibilities for next school year.
It’s only July…
This is what we do with our summers, isn’t it, teacher friends. We resist the easy path of ignoring what’s happening around us, refusing to reduce the classroom experience to a series of top-down teacher-student transactions. Instead we think about how to better support our students. To help them learn and grow. To help them think and write in their own accents.
*A final note about Sinéad O’Connor: There is so much more to her than those infamous 90 seconds on the SNL stage. I highly recommend checking out her autobiography, Rememberings (2021), and her decades of music before and after her ever popular “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Her experiences, thoughts, and actions outside that moment are complex and compelling.
