By Maureen Purcell

Teaching language arts to middle schoolers, I had my fair share of papers to correct that were full of run-ons, sentence fragments, comma splices, and various sundry mistakes. Typical "conventions errors" for their age, to use current jargon.

Sometimes though, moments of clarity illuminated a piece of writing that was breathtaking in its simplicity. Moments like sunlight beaming through the 6-foot-tall windows of my second-story Chicago classroom. The above poems are examples of that kind of illumination. Nicole’s poem strikes me as a perfect snapshot encompassing one small moment. Nicole always seemed to me like an old well, boundless depths below, but you couldn’t reach them because there was so much resistance from the top. This poem felt like the first trickle of water.

The second poem, hopeful but also delightful for its unique rhyme structure, was Jeremy’s moment of clarity. Jeremy was a disciplined student who loved sports, but also was a first-class ham, so his earnest poem not only surprised me with its yearning, but with its sincerity too. Finally, the happy-go-lucky persona dropped, and we all learned what Jeremy was secretly wishing for at night: height.

When I taught writing, I tried to model my own writing process. I loved the hush in a class when I shared one of my poems. Usually there is a low-level hum even in an engaged class, only detectable by adult ears, but when I shared a piece of my writing to my class, even that hum disappeared. It was as if I could see my students’ ears visibly perk up, their eyebrows go up a little bit too, as if to say, “She wrote that? Reeeaaally? This is new.”

I also loved the focused hush of writing time. I started every class with five minutes of journal time: a response to a quote or question. I loved peering over students’ shoulders to read what they were writing. It was a privileged time to physically see what they were thinking about, especially the quieter students who wouldn’t necessarily share in class.

I understood the power early on of sharing myself with my students, whether it was through my own writing or in sharing stories from my life. It makes sense pedagogically to model thinking to students when teaching writing: to model a brainstorming session or to outline the thought process in editing. I’d often tell my students, trying to demystify writing for them, “Writing is a series of choices. What word fits best here? Does this sentence flow? Editing is about making choices too. You don’t always have to take your editor’s suggestions. You do, however, have to be able to defend your editing choices.”

It makes sense, too, to model thinking about choices in life as well. I would tell my students how I decided to become a teacher—a story every student loves to hear about their teacher, especially when it involves changing majors, as mine did:

“You mean you didn’t always want to be a teacher?” as incredulous looks passed around the room.

“No, I had no idea when I went to college what I wanted to do, but you try things out. You decide what you don’t like first usually, then you find out what you like.”

I tried to connect writing to life—as a series of choices too. And, although you receive a lot of advice, like editing suggestions, you don’t always have to take that advice. Sometimes, defining yourself through a unique choice, like in life or writing, is more important than always doing the exact right thing. I know I hated it when my teachers said, in explaining why an author could break a grammar rule, “Once you earn money for writing books, you can break that rule too” as if being an author meant holding a patent on creativity. So, if a student had a stylistically sound reason for breaking a rule, I usually let them.

This past year, when I taught a language arts class for gifted and talented students, I found that they especially liked the stories from a category I called, “A time when Ms. Purcell wasn’t smart." These stories revolved around my childhood before I developed this thing called “common sense,” a quality that my parents believed was quite important, a summer I spent in Montana hiking in grizzly country (sometimes ill-prepared), and college. Just all of college.

My students probably liked these stories because they were usually funny. But now, thinking back, I realized that my overachieving students probably also liked these stories for different reasons. These stories showed how their teacher made dumb decisions and what she learned from them, showed that even smart people can screw up, learn from their choices, and move on. These minor setbacks happen to all of us, but for my gifted students I think it was especially reassuring to them to hear that minor failures are not the end of the world.

I understood on one level that I was sharing my life with these stories, but I now realize I was sharing my resilience with my students too. When I talked about what I learned from my missteps, I was also modeling how to mentally pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and choose a different direction. I also extended this to our classroom. If a student made a mistake, we’d strategize together how to make better choices next time.

By sharing myself in this way, even by informally telling stories to fill two minutes at the end of class, I’m always giving my students more of me, as a teacher and a person. When we model our thinking and share our lives with our students they gain insight from our wisdom. We, in turn, gain their trust and move toward a deeper relationship with them.

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Posted August 16, 2007