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I Am a Pencil by Sam Swope |
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 Reviewed by Kimberly Popovich Pushing the Pencil: Reaching
Students through Creative Writing As
a future teacher, I often wonder how I will grasp and hold the attention
of my students. I have heard nothing but negative dissuasions from
people when I say that I want to work in the inner city public schools.
Some responses I receive are, “Aren’t you scared? Those kids can’t
learn. Why would you waste all your education somewhere like that?” Or,
my favorite, “You say that now, but after you start working there for
awhile, you’ll quit.” I usually smile sweetly at people who say
these things, because while I may be idealistic in my expectations of
students, I am not ignorant in my understanding of life… you can’t
reach everyone. But the few small gifts that I have, which I believe
separates me from people that harbor such negative attitudes towards inner
city students, is that I have spent my life using writing, reading, and my
amoebic imagination to stay sane and to keep on track (to succeed and
reach my goals). The universality and importance of reading and
writing is undeniable, even in the technological ipod, dvd, xbox, laptop
world of today. There are few professions, or even general labor
positions, that don’t require some form of reading or writing, but how
do we get students to realize this and participate whole heartedly in
their attainment of a successful future? My thought has always been that
to let students read materials that interest them and to push creative
writing, which allows students to express themselves without inhibitions,
is level starting ground where teacher and student can meet, collaborate,
and progress. Sam
Swope didn’t start out as a teacher. He is a children’s author
who lives alone in a small apartment with his cat. He was asked by
Teachers and Writers Collaborative to run a ten-day writing workshop with
a third-grade class. The students in Mr. Swope’s class were the
children of immigrants from 21 countries who spoke 11 different languages.
Together, they all gathered together in a classroom in Mrs.
Duncan was the first teacher that Swope worked with. She was the
student’s English teacher, but Swope did the writing portion of the
class. Mrs. Duncan had a huge impact on Swope; he dedicated the book
to her “To all the Mrs. Duncan’s.” This might not initially
seem important, but it is when the kids move to the fourth grade and get a
new teacher, Mrs. Melvern. Swope does not like her! She is mean,
dislikes the kids and speaks lowly of them, and she is pregnant with her
first child. Without the aid of Mrs. Duncan, Swope is forced into
lesson plans, something he didn’t use the year before. Mrs. Duncan
had a good reputation with her students: she was firm but kind, and
willing to help. She was the same with Swope, helping him discipline
while giving him outside advice on his lessons. I thought this
teacher transition was important because it shows that when an adult
changes classes with students, the adult is able to see how difficult the
transition can be, and how the change isn’t always for the best.
Swope ponders this a great deal. He is so attached to the students,
he can’t understand why an uncaring teacher would be allowed…well, to
teach! Swope is clear in his accounts of difficulties also: he makes note
of how large the class gets as it moves from grade to grade, and how
trying it is to give each student the attention they need; he write
honestly when he writes of his frustrations with students not being
creative enough or not writing what he “expected” them to write, but
of course he realizes that he is in the wrong for trying to steer a
child’s mind to mimic his own. I Am a Pencil is useful for teachers because it provides an “outsider’s” perspective of what it is like to be a teacher, if only for one class for three years. I’m sure we’ve all heard a teacher or two say, “Oh, if only people could be in my shoes for a day; they would see how hard it is to get across to these kids and their parents!” Swope did this, and it is useful to read how he handled having to become more than an author doing a writing workshop, he had to become a teacher by: disciplining the students he cared so much for, accepting that some students just would not like him no matter how hard he tried, he had to write lesson plans, and Swope had to conference with parents not only about student progress, but why some of his creative writing assignments (like the one to write about an obsession) interfered with family cultural and religious beliefs. This doesn’t mean that Swope thinks or speaks ill of these families though, he works with them. An example of this occurrence can be seen with the example of Miguel. “Mrs.
Santiago gathered her arms around her son and he collapsed against her
chest. “Fight the devil Junior, cast him out!” Shaken and
disturbed I grabbed my things, nodded good-bye, and let myself out the
door. On the subway home though, I decided to be hopeful.
There’s more than one way to reach a child. Who knows? Given
Miguel’s world, maybe what I’d just witnessed was a breakthrough.
Maybe something had cracked, and now he would do his homework (p.137).” The
most important step that Swope takes in the direction of becoming a true
teacher, is that he visits his students' neighborhoods and families.
He keeps open contact with parents, even though many of them don’t even
speak English. I believe this gesture is especially important for
teachers to note because it was not something Swope had to do; he
did it because he knew that the student’s home life was connected to
their school performance, and some of his students benefited from his
interactions with their parents. In her book, “Other People’s
Children,” Lisa Delpit writes, “I have come to believe that the
“open-classroom movement,” despite its progressive intentions, faded
in large part because it was not able to come to terms with the concerns
of poor and minority communities (p. 20).” I agree. If real,
professional teachers cannot or will not take the time and
emotional energy it takes to build open bonds of communication with
teachers, then they are not fit to teach. Does a teacher’s job
start at Swope
makes no more than a paragraph’s mention of student’s grammar or
speech errors. They don’t interest him, not because they aren’t
important, but because they are secondary to engaging students in texts
and activities. Lisa Delpit says that, “Forcing speakers to
monitor their language for rules while speaking, typically produces
silence (p. 51).” Swope is aware of this and since his aim is to
get students to open up and write, the students must feel like their
culture and their families are respected. And the students do feel
this way; they adore Swope (well until a few of the girls get to the 5th
grade that is, then some tensions arise). The mention of grammar and
speech is an important one though. All Language Arts teachers need
to keep in mind what Walt Wolfram wrote in “Linguistic and
Sociolinguistic Requisites,” “Myths about the structure of language,
the basis of language variation, and the socioeducational implications of
language variation, are rooted deeply in language arts education, and they
need to be confronted as openly and honestly as any other unjustified set
of beliefs in any other discipline (p. 81).” Beyond
Swope’s open and imaginative attitude, which is everywhere apparent
throughout the book, he has some unique ideas for engaging students in
creative writing and publication. He drills the essence of writing
into the students: drafts, collaboration, revisions, details, finals, and
publication. In “Prior to Publishing,” Tom Romano said,
“Publication is a must, especially first-blurt publication: the quick
write, journal entry, initial draft. We publish the spontaneous,
unpolished, by often surprising writing by reading it aloud so everyone
can hear the human voice give breath to words on paper (p. 17).”
The first assignment Swope gives the students is to write any story that
they want, so long as it is surprising and new. One of the kids
raises his hand and asks Swope where he gets his ideas from. Swope
goes on to pretend that there is something growing out of this boy’s
ear. As he eases closer Swope decided there may be a family in this
boy’s ear crying for help. Then Noelia, another student, chimes in
that she too can see the family. It’s amazing how something so
simple can get a kid’s mind going. Aaron calls Mr. Swope over and
asks him to read his story. It is called “Summer Santa” and is
about Santa being caught skateboarding in the summer, and then the kids
all knew he wasn’t real. Swope called attention to Aaron’s story
and suggest they act it out immediately. The kids were ecstatic.
Everyone wanted to be in the four person, six sentence story. It was
such a great, impulsive idea. I think more teachers should have
bouts of passion like that. For homework, Swope told the kids notice
something new, something they had never seen before, on their way to
school in the morning, “some little thing you’ll be glad you saw.”
The
assignments Swope gives range from small, detailed ones: observations
written in a journal, teaching about metaphor by using Wallace Stevens’
“13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” having students make lists and
write list poems, having them write similes, creating quirky titles by
listing nouns and pairing them up with other odd nouns, and he has
students write him letters, telling Swope something about them that the
students think he would like to know (the students had to write the
letters on their own and actually put it in an envelope and send the
letter to his home), to larger ones such as, “the Island Project,”
“the Box Project,” and the “Tree Project.” Lee
Odell says that a good visual should have aesthetic properties, but it
should also function in some way. It should engage the reader, it
should elaborate the text, and it should address something the text
can’t address by itself in an adequate way (p. 3). Granted, this
sort of third grade illustration of a story may not be what Odell is
talking about, but nonetheless, the use of visuals, especially those
handmade by the students, is an integral part of reading and writing.
For each of his large projects, Swope has the students create a hands-on
illustration. However, before I address Swope’s large projects, I
must talk of his “collaborations.” Swope
has this wonderfully amazing idea of taking time out to “collaborate”
with each student on their stories. As the years went on, he was
less and less able to do this with all of the students, because of the
amount of students, but when he started with the third graders, everyone
had a chance. The student would come to Swope’s “office,”
which was an old janitor’s closet that he fixed up. He would
merely talk to the student about ideas for their story; he wrote down
everything, and the student just talked. When the student was too
vague, Swope would prompt for more detail by asking lots of questions.
Why does he or she do this? What does this place look like? He really
helped students break their ideas down and get detailed, by taking away
the task of putting it on paper, which he himself did, and just asking the
student to think and speak. The accounts of these collaborations
where one of the most helpful and unique techniques in this book.
For
the Box Project Swope asked students to build a box, any kind of box they
want, and then to write a story about it. Then the story will be put
in the box for them to keep forever. Swope took the kids to a museum
so that they could gather ideas for their boxes. They looked at
stationary boxes, music boxes, snuff boxes, sarcophaguses, tribal boxes,
and jewelry boxes. The Island Project required that students arrange
themselves on a large sheet of paper and have a classmate outline their
body for the shape of the island. The students were then to color in
their maps with all sorts of people, places, and things that they would
like on their personal island. Then, they were to write the story of
the island and those that inhabit it. The
last and largest project took place in the fifth grade, “the Tree
Project.” This project was sponsored by a paper company, and so at
the end of the year each student’s work was published in a collaborative
book. Swope gave several small assignments that added up to the one
larger assignment. He first had student’s write a poem, starting
with the line (and recalling their lessons on metaphor) “A tree is…”
Each student wrote a poem. Next, students were to “adopt a tree”
in For
the hands on, visual aspect of this project, Swope asked the art teacher
to come to class and give the students a lesson on drawing trees; a
nice example of incorporating other teachers from different content areas.
She gave her lesson and then the class went outdoors to make observations
on shape, size, branch and leaf type. The students also wrote
stories about buds (little treasure chests of faeries, one student called
them). At the end of the year, students chose their best writing and
illustrations and they were put into “The Tree Book.” In
the book “Introspections: American poets on one of their own poems,”
poet Dave Smith writes, “I knew my excuse about a lack of time was
baloney. Being diligent was all I needed to get words on the page.
William Stafford told me he had never had writer’s block because he was
not afraid. He gave himself permission to fail everyday.
I gave myself an assignment: to write a short poem everyday. I would
repeat the “form” until it bored me (p. 249).” In the
same way, I get the sense that Swope tries to instill the same idea into
his students. Over and over he has them write: new ideas, old ideas,
revised ideas. And to be honest, these young students seem to have
less inhibitions about letting go than older ones. If we, as
teachers, cultivate this honest flood of thought emerging onto paper, then
perhaps as our students grow older they will become inclined to write,
write more, and to try new forms. Swope really covers all of the
ground for the writing process. He has students brainstorm and
observe, they write first and second drafts, they collaborate and
conference, they illustrate their stories and poems, and then, in some
form, they publish. I imagine having a well rounded out plan like
that gives students a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction; this is
how all students should feel after completing a project. To say this book had any weaknesses doesn’t seem applicable to me. Swope was asked to do a workshop and he documented his experiences with eloquence and useful insight. When I finished the book I wasn’t left wanting for anything else. That’s how I know the book is good. I hear a little “the end” go off in my head as I read the last sentence. Swope’s writing is impressive, but I am not surprised, he is formally an author. The greatest strength is the way Swope is able to write in such as casual, conversational style. I feel like he’s talking to me, telling me his story over coffee and biscotti. But at the same time, I can stop and note, ah!, that this or that was a great idea for an assignment, or I can sympathize with how he felt when Fatma told Swope she hated him, or to be in awe that he was able to pull off taking thirty-some public school students to Central Park on a regular basis. This book is personal, and I enjoy the privilege of that intimate insight; it is honest and real.
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