I have a student who comes in early every morning because she takes the city bus to school. This morning as we stapled handouts for class she asked, “Why don’t we ever do anything fun in social studies?” I didn’t tell her to move to the desk near the mouse hole and asked her instead, “What do you mean?”
“Well, last year we made these awesome posters all the time, and cut up magazines, and made presentations. Can’t we do that?”
“I’m trying to get you ready for high school.” I was thinking fast now, “I’m supposed to go over hundreds of years of American history before June and teach you how to take notes and outline chapters and write a decent essay and practice the CAPT.”
“It’s mad boring.”
I looked around my classroom later that day; it’s full of student work -- posters, charts, projects, Civil War folders, and student drawn maps of all sorts. It doesn’t look boring to me. A math classroom might look dull to me, but not history. As I looked more closely though, I didn’t see any essays. I had told Denise I was teaching the class to write essays, yet I didn’t see any examples on display in the room. There is not one single essay stapled to the door or stuck to the long back wall or taped to the area below the chalkboard.
I wasn’t worried about a ‘boring’ classroom anymore; I was wondering why although I gave essay assignments, I wasn’t displaying any finished writing samples. And then I knew the answer. I wasn’t pasting essays up around the room because the writing that the students produced didn’t match their ability, and I didn’t want to expose them. I realized that I didn’t want to expose my teaching either -- I wasn’t helping them become good writers.
All year long the students work on expository and persuasive writing -- write a letter to President Jefferson about the Louisiana Purchase, send a message to your frontier sister about your journey across America on the train, summarize some of the values of the North and South before the Civil War. The lined paper is handed out and the rubric is written on the board. “Look for details, use your notes, add your own thoughts and conclusions, stretch and stretch your thinking to relate past to present -- take a critical stance.” I urge the students to write something fantastic, but fantastic writing doesn’t happen.
The intentions are good (mine and theirs), the students work for fifty minutes (they watch the clock), the paragraphs are handed in. I glance at a few opening sentences and wonder, “what grade am I teaching and where did I go wrong?” My 8
th
graders cannot write a paragraph, let alone an essay, that addresses a theme or supports a point of view. And yet in great contrast, during class discussions, the students show wit and wisdom and an ability to play with the facts and make connections. Somewhere between speaking and writing down the ideas, their thinking gets strangled. Responses become generalizations (“The president did a good job.”), pat answers (“It’s interesting.” “I like it.”), or constricted (“My first reason is…my second reason is…”) Other projects on display around the room show their flare for the creative and their understanding of the material. Shouldn’t their essays reflect the same?
The unit
Improving Writing Skills in an American History Classroom
addresses this phenomenon of students choking up when faced with writing assignments that require them to develop a point of view. Students become motivated to express their ideas if they are interested in the material -- I have not yet met an 8
th
grader who didn’t want to argue about some idea in history -- and so this unit will channel those debated if not debatable topics into writing assignments. In addition to working on writing with a theme in mind and a point of view, the students will practice creating good topic sentences, detailed paragraphs, and strong conclusions. Students also will review grammar, parts of speech and sentence structure using sentence diagramming. The unit, although adaptable to any historical period, incorporates social studies content beginning with the Louisiana Purchase and ending with the settlement of the frontier just prior to the Gold Rush in 1848. Internet resources, including specific web sites related to our themes and a class web page will be used, as will tools such as word processing, Inspiration® software and PowerPoint®.