Bad Kids in the News

Bad kids get all the attention.

When I was a teenager, I used to cringe at the evening news. Undoubtedly, there would be some report about a kid who snuck a knife into school or who beat up a cop or made an ass of himself drinking in public or, in one terrible example, a kid who killed a classmate.

Sadly, not much has changed.

I’ve spent two weeks trying to get press attention for my little writers, to no avail. I tried last summer, too. I have a room full of teenagers who, of their own accord, have decided to spend their hard-earned breaks dong something really cool, really positive, and really unusual. Call me crazy, but I think its newsworthy.

Unfortunately, the media doesn’t think it’s such a big deal. Why should we waste our time lavishing praise on kids who go above and beyond their summer reading lists to create their own novels when there are perfectly good stories of young people running amok?

I’ll tell you exactly why: fear sells.

America could be a place where the most industrious among us are showered with attention. Instead, it’s easier to scare the crap out of people in order to convince them to watch your tv show, buy your product, or like you. In fact, this blog will get more hits because of the negative title than it would have if I’d named it, “Why America Should Care About High-Achievers.”

And I don’t say this half-cocked from some anecdotal place of naivety. In a former life, I was a news producer at WKRN News 2 in Nashville. I spent my working hours reading the AP wire, listening to the police scanner, and deciding which news was worthy enough for broadcast. Every day, I overlooked interesting, motivational, and truly amazing stories in favor of one-alarm fires that were easily contained, nearly harmful assaults, and other non-news. I’m lucky to live in a relatively safe city, but safety doesn’t make for thrilling promotional bumps.

Based on the following promos, which newscast would you be more inclined to watch: “A man is rushed to the emergency room after a neighbor’s dog escapes, tonight at 10,” or, “Forty teenagers aren’t just reading books this summer, they’re writing them!”

You may be thinking, “Oh, man, I wonder if they’ll show pictures of a dog attack?” or you’re wondering if the escaped dog is a poodle or a Pitt-bull. Or if the two events – the emergency room visit and the missing mutt – are even related.

Or, if you’re like me, you may think, “who cares about someone’s minor injury? If it was major, they would have said “Dog kills local man, tonight after our latest irrelevant reality show.”

Tell me about these kids who live right here in my town and who are doing something to change the world. Give me something I can aspire to myself, teach me how to be a better version of myself, and give me a reason to keep on improving.

And don’t tell me inspiration doesn’t sell. Don’t we watch American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and Project Runway in record numbers?

If one of my students leapt out of her seat right now and threatened to stab me with her mechanical pencil, that would make the news for sure. Maybe the solution is staring me in the face. Perhaps I should unleash my students’ brilliantly creative minds on the problem and see what they propose!

And we wonder why kids feel ignored. At some point, our culture has to agree that there are better ways to get attention than being drunk and from New Jersey, or being rich, married, and staying home in Atlanta. We need to stop paying lip-service to education, and start paying attention to kids who are actually using their brains to some productive end.

Are You a Novelist?

“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.”
Brenda Ueland

Every morning when I wake up, I lie in bed reading my email on my iPhone.  It’s a gentle way for me to take stock of what’s on my schedule, put out any immediate fires, and get a chuckle from the silly things my friends and students send to me in the middle of the night. 

This morning, I woke up to a really uncomfortable email.  A parent of an ANI alumna asked to be removed from my mailing list and told me that she wouldn’t be recommending the program because she didn’t think that everyone who puts a volume of words on a page should be called a novelist. 

My heart wrenched and my stomach twisted into a knot. 

I was offended, hurt, angry: a festering boil of emotion.  Immediately, I thought of all the painting classes, piano lessons, baseball leagues, swimming lessons, dance classes, and any number of enrichment activities that kids participate in.  Do we not call our little painters artists?  Our little sluggers baseball players?  Our little dancers ballerinas?  My students didn’t write 50,000 word grocery lists, they wrote stories with beginnings, middles and ends.  They wrote novels and so deserve the title novelist.  They’re not professionals, sure, but who cares?  And does that really matter?

And then I started thinking of all the novelists whose books weren’t published before they died.  Was John Kennedy Toole not a novelist?  What about Steig Larssen?  Anne Frank?  Just schmucks with pens, I guess, because they were just writing a volume of words. And on that note, I suppose Emily Dickenson wasn’t a poet, either.  I had to take a deep breath and walk away from the computer so I wouldn’t reply in true hot-tempered, redheaded fashion.

ANI is not only my business, it’s my passion.  And I believe so whole-heartedly in what I’m doing – in what my students are doing – that I’ve bet my life on it.  I quit my job, invested my savings, and I devote more time than I probably should teaching kids the value of the written word.  Of THEIR written words.

Throughout my journey as an educator, I’ve come up against many people who think my ideas and practices are too hard on kids.  I ask too much, I expect too much, I prod too much.  I’m a too-much person.  And I don’t disagree with them.  But my kids, they rise to the occasion.  And even the parents of students who don’t finish their novels tell me their kids’ confidence with words is better, their grades improve, and they stress less about assignments.

But what most of my detractors don’t realize about what I do in the classroom is how I support my students outside the classroom.  I make myself 100% available to them all day, every day.  Even when I was teaching composition to college freshmen and juniors, I gave out my personal phone number and email address.  These days, I respond to 3:00am text messages from overwhelmed kids, plot and plan their novels with them, I give them challenges, pep-talks, moral support, high-fives, stern looks, and hugs every single day.  I love them like I love my own children, and I make myself just as available to them after the program ends as I did during their time with me in the classroom.  I even listen to them when they need a safe place to talk about a divorce or a death or a difficult decision.  How many teachers can say that?

I think the personal attention I pay each student is why my feelings were so hurt by this parent’s email today.  In fact, this particular student was someone for whom I went above and beyond my usual role of muse-mentor-coach-friend-teacher-guide-confessor.  I just can’t imagine not wanting to celebrate the achievements of young writers, especially a young writer who happens to be your child. 

When I was in the sixth grade, I went to an awards ceremony for a program called Writers’ Showcase.  It was a personal project of a wealthy Nashvillian who created a writing competition open to all Nashville students and awarded cash prizes for the best examples of writing in many categories and age levels.  I participated every year, and worked at winning like I now work at making a living.

This particular year, an author handed out the awards.  He asked us all to stand and repeat together, “I am a writer.”  He called us peers.  He said our words were now published in the little Writers’ Showcase anthology and that we had been paid for our work.  We were professional writers, and we should be proud of ourselves.  I cried. My mom cried.  It changed my life.

From that experience, and others like it, I developed my curriculum.  I spent years teaching college students, I spent summers teaching reading and writing development to preschoolers, grade-school students, and adults.  I honed my people skills, earned advanced degrees in creative writing and kept current on educational best practices. 

What I found in the process was astounding.

Each year in my classroom, students’ test scores went up, but their ability to express themselves in writing deteriorated.  Their confidence with the written word was damaged because their exposure to writing was limited to short projects that got shorter and fewer each year.  The last year I taught, one of my best writers told me he’d never written anything longer than 1,000 words during his entire career in school. 

My anecdotal observations were backed up by science, too.  While nationally, SAT scores are on the rise, SAT Writing scores are suffering a decline.  I wondered if perhaps I could apply the theory of immersion language-learning to writing.  If I gave students an opportunity to write volumes and volumes of words, would they start to self-correct their errors?  Would they seek out rule of grammar they may not have ever encountered?  Could I teach them how to write first and edit later?  And would their fear of writing start to wither and die without the constant pressure of grades, anxiety of red-pen mark-ups, and comparative forms of achievement that our test-obsessed culture imposes?

The short answer is yes.

Yes, they do write better at the end of a month-long writing-intensive program.  Yes, they do ask many questions about grammar, usage, and punctuation.  Yes, they do increase their vocabularies.  And more importantly, they gain a confidence with their own use of language.  They become fluent communicators.

And beyond the tangible academic achievement, my students learn to reach out for help.  They learn to make an allies of their teachers.  They learn to ask questions, to research, to manage a big project and see it through to the end.  They learn to be self-starters and self-motivators and self-congratulators.  They also start to see school writing assignments as opportunities to flex their writing muscles.  And instead of writing the minimum required number of words, they write until the project, assignment, or paper has reached its logical ending, wherever that may be.

This is the real Novel Idea: my students learn to trust themselves.  They learn to trust each other.  And they learn that they’re not alone out there in the world, in a cabin in the woods, scribbling in the dark.  The world is full of awkward teenagers struggling to make sense of their adolescence, and writing about those struggles has to be one of the healthiest ways a person can cope with their life. 

Last summer, one parent raced toward me with open arms and hugged me just a little bit too long.  She told me her daughter had struggled with self-mutilation, but since learning to write long-form fiction and giving herself permission to call herself a novelist, she’d stopped cutting.

That’s enough for me. 

Sporty kids have a million opportunities to be part of a group and develop their athleticism.  Social kids have even more opportunities to get together and share experiences.  Arty kids can find classes galore where they can try out pottery and sculpture and painting and photography and mixed media or whatever their arty hearts desire.  But nerdy writer-types, we get the shaft.  We’re the oddballs in class, the weirdoes in the hallways, and the geeks waiting for the next ComicCon.  I’m not apologetic about creating a program where kids who love words can learn to turn those ideas into a novel.  Because watching them learn the parts of a book, and then using those lessons to create the structure, the outline, the shape of their own stories is like watching children discover lightning bugs.  Their wonder is overwhelming.

Giving kids permission to see their struggles as part of a story – part of their story – is a gift I’m happy to give over and over again.  Even if you don’t like what I call them.

 

What would you say to this parent?  Do you agree with her assessment that calling everybody who “writes a volume of words should not be called a novelist?”

Anxiety: The American Crisis

ANI Authors Olivia Laskowski and Blake Bouza with novels written by ANI students in 2011.

I’ve been out of commission lately as an educator and a writer.  Life took over with a tough pregnancy and an early baby, and some delayed marketing efforts made my summer teaching load a lot smaller than I had hoped it would be.  And generally, all this upheaval and disarray would lead me to a state of unequivocal anxiety, set to reach a fevered pitch about a week before my July classes begin.  I know this because I know myself, and I know how I operate.

But I’m not anxious.  I’m shockingly calm.  Almost zen about the situation in fact.  Call it new-mama-bliss or the confidence of finally knowing what I’m doing with my life, but I’m not on a path to self-destruction.

This morning, however, I was met with two  major challenges of the anxious type.  The first was an email from a dear and precious student of mine who was struggling with his own self-effacing guilt over being plagued with writer’s block.  He was ashamed of himself, felt boxed in by his lack of ideas, and was generally desperate for relief.  The second was a phone call from a mother whose son, new to ANI, was facing a similar roadblock.  He was so wrapped up in creating the perfect character that he hadn’t written a word.  He was worried that he had let me down, that I would be angry with him, and the paralyzing fear kept him from being able to break free from his anxiety.

When I got to school this morning, neither boy had arrived yet.  And I thought about those anxious years of my life – indeed, most of my life – and what managed to help.  The only thing – besides writing furiously – that ever pushed the anxiety from my body was a complete and total meltdown.  And I sure didn’t want that to happen.

When my anxious alumni showed up, he was already calmed down.  He’d stayed up until 2:30 writing like a maniac and had over 6,000 words to show for it.  He plugged in his computer and got right to work, banging out another 1,200 words before he took a break.

Shortly thereafter, my anxious newbie arrived.  He was literally knotted with anxiety.  His brow furrowed and he was shaking tapping his pen against his leg while he paced outside the classroom door.  He didn’t show any signs of coming in and sitting down next to the others who were happily typing away at tables and in corners of the room.  Lucky for me, Abintra’s campus has acres of gardens and walking trails. I grabbed my water bottle and went for a little walk with him.

I talked and he listened but his body language didn’t change.  I stopped to smell a particularly impressive rose bush, and he paced back and forth waiting for me.  Twenty minutes later he was still wound just as tightly.  Even introducing him to my alumnus didn’t help.

And then, I thought perhaps a task would do the trick.  “Okay, who’s ready for a word-count challenge?” Many hands shot into the air, but he hid  his face in his crossed arms.  “Okay, everybody decide what your character’s favorite color is.  Got it?  Okay, now he or she sees something that color.  Describe it.  Write 350 words in 20 minutes.  Go!”

And I guess that’s what he needed.  Because for twenty precious minutes he let go and he wrote.  He left the apprehension and guilt and self-doubt in the dust and he embraced the excitement of a new story, a new person, a new discovery.  He allowed himself to escape himself, and in the process, he stopped fretting.

But after 20 minutes was up and he’d finished the challenge, I saw the worry start to creep in again.  He sat quietly by himself and ate a turkey sandwich and looked at the clock while he folded his arms and shook his foot.  His character had hit a quiet place.  And he didn’t know what would happen next.

And that’s the crisis I see in my students and in Americans in general.  The biggest problem they face isn’t the writing or the imagining – all children have creativity in spades – it’s being alone with themselves.  They’re so used to being entertained, posting on Facebook, tweeting, texting, studying for tests, checking tasks off their lists, and being graded that they’ve forgotten how to just be.  Be still.  Be alone with their thoughts without reality tv creeping in or feeling the urge to tweet.

I assign all of my students at least two hours of thinking homework each week.  I ask them to just be quiet.  Stare into space.  Think about stuff.  And stay awake to the world around them.  It’s often the hardest homework they have to do, even harder than writing 1,000, 2,000, or 7,000 words a day.

Being quiet and alert is a problem I never worried about as a child.  I spent hours in my tree-house, swinging on a tire swing, or hiding in the forest.  The thinking was the thing – being alone with my own thoughts has been a central and important part of my intellectual development.  And when I haven’t had enough alone time, I can feel my skin starting to crawl.  I feel like a radio antenna receiving too many signals at once and I have to run away, clear the clutter from my head, and find the quiet.  I usually do that by clicking the keys on my computer.  Or having a complete and total meltdown.  Both are physical releases, the purging of thoughts either by writing or by crying.

As I write this, my anxious newbie is outside, writing about the trees in the upper garden.  He’s working on another 20-minute challenge, and I’m hoping for another 20-minute escape from the anxiety for him.  And for the rest of the anxiety-riddled youth in this country, I wish I could find a way to lay a calming hand on their shoulders and say, “it is enough to just be.  Enough to just breathe.”  And maybe, if they have a pen handy, enough just to write.