The thing that is both known and unknown, the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go towards the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written it: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly with words. — Stigmata; Escaping Texts, Hélène Cixous
Every time I write with my students I take the risk of not knowing in front of them. I chip away at the teacher who knows all, to reveal the teacher as a curious student. It is an accident of timing, age, and circumstance that I have one title and they have another. I think about this a lot. I think about the setup of authority. I think about the assumption of knowledge. I think about assumed roles in the classroom. And then I bow my head and write with my students.
I thought about removing the line “bow my head” in the above sentence. But I included it because the classroom for me has always been a sacred space, and with the recent shootings in Florida, classrooms are once again hallowed ground. It is good to honor this space of learning, this space of growing, and, more recently, this space of mourning. It is good to feel the power and urgency of classroom work.
The first thing that happens in my classroom is silence. We gather together, “good mornings” are exchanged, and then we all write in silence together. It is liturgical, and it is also practical. We gather our thoughts in writing. We shape ourselves into a writing room. We create a space different from the hallway, sidewalk, or bus we have left behind. We write, and in that writing we grow closer together. We literally all hover over the table, we are not in chairs pushed away; we are leaning forward, working on paper or laptops together—all of us. And then I say, “Find a sentence or a thought to complete,” and we look up; and I pose questions from last night’s reading: “Have you ever felt like Joan Didion when she writes ‘I have stayed too long at the fair’?” “What does Kenko mean when he writes that the cherry blossoms on the ground should be just as cherished as the blossoms on the tree?” “How does a summer lake in Maine lead E. B. White to think about death?” “Have you ever experienced being a stranger the way that Baldwin experiences being a stranger?” I tell them we will share this writing; we write for five minutes, and then one by one we go around the table and read our responses out loud.
I read, too. Sometimes I write something on purpose to throw a wrench into the class. Sometimes I model getting the question wrong. Sometimes I write what I know needs to be said. But most of the time, I write in an authentic voice to show that I also can care deeply about a question, that I need to search for words, that I also can feel and reveal. I sometimes risk a great deal in my writing.
Writing is serious work. I want my students to feel that I take the work as seriously as they do. I have led writing workshops across the country, and I have seen teachers adopt writing practices as a way of creating a writing workshop in their room. I have seen teachers mimic the call and response of “Now write for five minutes.” “Now put your pens down and share.” And the teacher just waits. The teacher watches while the students write. Then the students read, and the teacher says something like, “OK, well, now let’s turn to page 52”—as if the writing and the sharing were an interruption, necessary but not purpose driven. These are not bad teachers, but they are walking through a lesson rather than embodying a lesson. To watch and wait as a teacher is to miss great opportunities. To watch and wait while students write is to tell the students that they need to work, but you don’t, that writing isn’t that important, and that while you are sharing space you have different obligations—yours is to watch, theirs is to work. That is a crazy setup for any successful relationship. And we want this to be a successful relationship. We want this to be a relationship built on trust.
It may seem when teachers are writing with their students that they are modeling writing, but we are really modeling working. Teachers are in the ditch along with their students; they are doing the heavy lifting not just suggesting how and when to hoist the load. This is so important for our students. For them to see a teacher struggle with a sentence, complete an idea, and finish an assignment lets the students know that they are not alone in the work of writing. The old model of asking a student to write alone at night with a focused concentration to create an inspired and original essay or piece of writing has (hopefully) been put to rest. I am not sure if that assumption of how students work at home was much more than a myth, but we know today it is impossible to assume that a student has privacy, a single-minded focus, and the discipline to sit and compose for hours on end. The world of young people is too distracting, exciting, worrying, and the access to indulge the just-mentioned adjectives is a pull that is nearly impossible to resist. And so it is even more imperative that in our classrooms we provide the space to teach how to focus with the intention of answering a question through writing. It is that simple, but it is so complicated. As teachers, we need to share the discomfort of sitting and writing without distraction. Three minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes . . . how long can we stay with our students and write together? How long can we stay in the work with them?
The goal is not to show off as the one who can maintain composure and ease through the hard work of writing but as one who also wrestles with the frustration, boredom, and fatigue of writing. This is where “process writing” comes in. I first learned this at Bard College when I taught in the Learning and Thinking summer program for incoming students to the college. We were instructed to write in response to the text we were studying together, but we were also asked to “process write” and give students a chance to write about their writing, to describe how writing helped them learn, how writing was challenging, and how writing led them somewhere. Twenty years later, I still do this today with my students. After we write and share, we write about the process of writing and the role that writing played in our learning. I write, too, and I share how the writing opened up something new to me or how the writing revealed gaps in my knowledge or how the writing made me a sharper reader. Whatever it is, the act of writing about writing almost always leads us into a wonderful discussion of how we learn, what we have learned, and our next steps.
It would be irresponsible not to address the time it takes to make a writing-based classroom. It is time-consuming work to write together and share, and, depending on class size, students can read every time they write or maybe just have a turn once a week. Time spent writing means that choices are going to have to be made and some lessons are going to have to be discarded. That is simply the truth. But writing together, especially if it is unexpected, can truly change a class and class dynamics. Everyone writes, all voices are heard, the loud do not dominate, and a record is kept for further exploration.
Years ago, I taught in California’s Central Valley, and the first time I wrote with my ninth-grade students, Manuel looked up and said, “The teacher is writing, too!” and they all looked up and crowded around to watch me write. It was funny and we laughed, but it was also very revealing about the school culture. For my students, writing had been something they were asked to do at home, something private, something that was necessary but not valued as shared work. To write together, to share out loud was brand new to them. They had never seen a teacher write. What had once been a personal struggle became a shared struggle. “How do we think through our writing?” became a question we puzzled through together. They were shocked and surprised the first time I shared my writing. “The teacher is going to read, too!” We turned an expected teacher/student model upside-down, and the whole class changed. Now I have 12 students in an upper-level class in an independent school in Berkeley, and the books are different, the questions are different, and the writing is different. But the intention is the same. We write because we are curious together. We are students together. We are in the space of not-knowing together. We are working together. We are sharing the space of creation.