And then they all looked at me like I was crazier than they had originally thought. It wasn't the first time I had received such looks during my sometimes-unusual methods and strategies to get students to think differently about writing. (During the first week of class we do an activity with Play-Doh designed to get them to understand the importance of the writing process and the difference between their creative and critical brains. Some of their creations are pretty amazing.) My College Comp course starts with a brief narrative unit designed to get our writing legs under us. With mini-lessons from Barry Lane and Penny Kittle and mentor texts from Sherman Alexie, George Orwell, and David Sedaris, we work on descriptive snapshots and exploding a moment. Eventually we have a story. And then I introduce the importance of an impressive first line. We talk about dramatic leads and misleading leads. We discuss introducing the narrator and even (gasp!) starting in the middle of a story. Then my students bring in completed drafts, and I bring out the scissors, pulling on an experience I had as part of the Ozarks Writing Project at Missouri State University. The you've-lost-your-mind faces came this semester when I had them cut up their essays. Literally. My students are familiar with the language of revision. Early in the semester we talk about the definition of the word: to see again. This activity enables them to do just that. I modeled with a memoir I've been working on about my first year of teaching. My original first line was this: "From the early age of five, I knew that I would be a teacher." "What questions does that make you ask?" I challenge my students. "Um, nothing, really." I hadn't captured them, so obviously my first line needed some work. I took out the scissors and cut my narrative into strips across the page, attempting to keep my cuts at sentence breaks. Then without thinking, I shuffled the strips and taped them randomly together. "Your teacher is telling you not to think. I bet that doesn't happen very often," I joked. At this point Sophie muttered, "I don't know what you're doing, but you have a degree, so I guess I'll trust you." After cutting and taping my narrative together, my new first line was this: "In all of my college classes on learning and classroom management, I never imagined a scenario like this." "Now what questions do you have?" I asked. "Ooooh, what happened?" one girl blurted out. "This sounds like a good story. Tell us," another demanded. And just like that, I had a lead that drew in my audience. This line was from the middle of my original narrative, so now I had to work at flowing things together, but I knew that I would have a much more powerful piece of writing. This strategy doesn't work for every student. Some of them end up with crazy new leads that don't make sense, but it does give a handful of students from each class a new beginning. And the rest of the students still see the value. Sometimes in our learning, we have to look beyond the chronological narrative because sometimes not every story starts at the beginning. And that might involve a bit of blind trust. There's truth there for me as a teacher, too. Sometimes I have to let high school juniors and seniors play with Play-Doh and allow my classroom become a flurry of scissors and strips of massacred narratives. Sometimes, no, often, that is where the magic happens.
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September 2020
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