Accounting for knowledge gained is a stumbling block we face in education, as well as in real life, which we all recognize as being separate from one another. Learning is so incremental that it usually doesn’t show up on the books, as it were, until there’s been a sizable accumulation, or until some contingency demands an application of it that we hadn’t thought possible.

I’m thinking now, about what I should look for in my students’ writing that shows they are getting it as writers. In my previous post I said that I wanted them to engage in conversations that matter. More specifically, I’d like to see them responding to conversations, events, books, movies, web pages, or ideas from wherever they find them, rather than simply Expressing Themselves, which is how their writing looks to me, since it never references any context.

This leads me to my next puzzle, which is to figure out how to help students become New Media Virtuosos in the space and time we have available during the school day with the resources that we have on hand, and the personnel I’ve been assigned. Already we are strapped for time to perform all our normal curricular duties. Some might suggest the solution lies in longer school days, year ’round school, or some other official manipulation of the schedule. Others might lobby for more access to resources. Others, more cynical than I, might suggest I try different students. I don’t see it that way, as a rule. Fewer, or different curricular duties, however, is a consideration.

Teachers won’t go for for more hours of school unless there’s more pay. And since paying teachers to teach longer will cost a heap of money, as will buying everyone computers, the school administration helps us stay on top of the workload by producing Time Management Guidelines and Pacing Guides. They spell out how long each thing we have to teach should take so we can do what we need to be doing, for the right amount of time.

To the teacher who points out some of the practical difficulties of cramming the required information into the heads of kids who won’t listen, who have to go to the bathroom or get a drink, or who want to know if it’s snack time, the curriculum coordinators recommend “cross-curricular” lessons. We should apply multiple objectives to a lesson, and thereby “cover” all the curriculum goals, they say.

This always sounds like encouragement to do a little creative bookkeeping. In the real world, it makes me think about what what would happen if I tried to pack more things into my vacation luggage than it would hold. My solution, if I thought I needed all of it, would be to see how many clothes I could wear at once. I might look a bit odd and overstuffed getting onto the plane. I might also be rather uncomfortable, and although I wouldn’t be outfitted to do anything useful, I could still say, “Hey, I made it all fit!”

Still, even without cross-curricular lessons, we have to be mindful of what’s actually happening. Much of the school day is frittered away on non-curricular activities like Going to the Bathroom, Sharpening Pencils, Lining Up, and my favorite - Making People Listen. I agree with the belt-tighteners and the budget streamliners who say that eliminating waste pays dividends, so I regularly campaign for more rigorous classroom norms. I tighten up on discipline. I emphasize getting things done. I clamp down on unnecessary talk. I refine routines. I strive for efficiency, which lasts for about 15 minutes, after each of my spirited 5 minute speeches.

The crux of the matter is one and the same as what politicians and policy makers bent on reform face every day. I have to distinguish the necessary from the extraneous, which is really a question of values. I’m thinking about the allocation of time for various kinds of talk, which is a kind of resource. What talk, I wonder, should be encouraged as necessary and vital for my students’ development as writers and readers and thinkers, and what should be discouraged as superfluous and trivial?

For students to participate in conversations that matter, they need to (a) say things that are important to them, which are (b) also recognizable as academic speech. This doesn’t have so much to do with technology as it does with norms for the oral text of the classroom. And how does that happen? How can classroom discourse be engineered so that it (c) produces the kinds of talk we want to hear, from the kinds of people we work with, who will do the kinds of things we want them to do, and learn the things we value? Scripted curricula are a top-down solution to this problem in many elementary schools, and the tasks they define do (d) None of the Above.

I find myself doing a little back and forth shuffle with the classroom writing project. It’s not exactly process writing, but there’s a process that wobbles back and forth between the skills and self-expression, as I look for the balance point in teaching kids to think creatively, strategically, and still to become fluent in the academic disciplines, which require structured knowledge. Marco Polo, who teaches in Japan, is wrestling with this question. What interested me is that he cited James Herndon, whose work I’ve also been reading.

Marco referenced Lisa Delpit, as well. Her book, Other People’s Children, criticized certain interpretations of process writing as disadvantaging for black students. Delpit wasn’t critical of process writing per se. She attempted to make her position clear by saying

I certainly do not suggest that the writing process to literacy development is wrong or that a completely skills-oriented program is right. I suggest, instead, that there is much to be gained from the interaction the of the two orientations and that advocates of both approaches have something to say to each other.

In my searching for James Herndon references, I found this 1972 excerpt from a book by Jonathan Kozol in which he shares a similar insight about literacy instruction for minority students.

It is not necessary, in speaking about reading, to adhere to either of two irresponsible positions. It is as much an error to say that learning is never the consequence of conscious teaching as it is to imagine that it always is.

It comes down to the fact that kids need to be taught the skills they need to join the conversations that matter. Some of those skills are practical, and some are more indefinite. The teacher has to lead the way in this effort. We can tinker with time and pace, but task is the real issue. Controlling the pace does nothing to alter the course. When students appropriate literacy practices, it’s their choice as to how and when. That’s what appropriation means. The teacher has to show them how to use the tools, and also familiarize them with the discourse.

We need to invite more talk, more stories about more things that matter, into the classroom, because talk is the text that all academic discourse springs from. Conversations with kids begin in the classroom, in face-to-face dialog, and they spiral out from there. These days they can circle the globe in an instant.

I talk about talk every day. The kids learn what is mine, what is theirs, and what is coming from somewhere else. We should make time for all of it. It’s a task that is constantly at hand.