TO mark the anniversary of 9/11, I'm not going to dispense college essay advice. I'm going to let the teens in this story speak for me. And to my teen writers and applicants, remember that how you reflect on your memories now will change over the years, and that we love you, and we need you to be you. What The Teens Taught Me As a First-Year Teacher on 9/11/01 When I worked in a prestigious NYC private school as a Latin teacher, my first hour of my first day teaching, as a total newbie, was September 11th 2001. The Sept 11th. I was 21 years old, barely out of college, a mere four years older than my oldest students, at the same school I had attended 6th-12th grades. I had been a teacher officially for all of 10 minutes when the first plane hit. That bright morning, the workmen on the roof across the street went berserk, shouting and cursing fantastically and pointing at something our view obstructed. My classroom was on the 9th floor, and the high school students ran to the window excitedly to look for the cause of the fracas. ”No matter what is happening outside the window, what’s happening in here is always more important,” I chided them--because of course it doesn’t get more exciting than the opening spiel to a Latin Language course. They ignored me. I didn’t know then that the ending of verbs would not be the most important thing, or that certain verbs--crashed--could grind everything, including our world as we understood it, to a halt. Continue Reading …
Teachers
Power of mixing
When stakes are high in writing (like, say, is true for the college essay) we can forget how much joy there is in mixing unlikely things together. This is a form of play young children know well, and shed reluctantly. Only after enough adults have said, "You can't do X with Y!" a la "You can't put a POTATO on the TRAIN TRACK!" does the kid eventually "get it" = the adult world is full of arbitrary rules, and really missing out on the power of mixing up. We need our poets to keep our language lively This morning, the power of mixing tackled me from the first lines of Terence Hayes's poem "When James Baldwin & Audre Lorde each lend Stevie Wonder an eyeball/ he immediately contends with gravity, falling either to his knees/or flat on His luminous face." I mean, lend an eyeball? Thanks, guys. We know right away we're in the presence of a player. In mixing surprise with pragmatism, absurdity with serious verbs (lend...contends...falling), Terence says: get in on this, it's going to be good. I'm not going to give you what you expect, because you don't want me to. And did you notice the rock stars in my poem? Be the kind of player who mixes meanings Speaking of players; There were plenty of the other kind of player in my high school and college (both elite institutions, GULP!), the sort who slept with girls and then thought nothing of ranking those experiences on a scale of crap to Cardi B the next morning in public lounges. The only reason those guys were fun to be around was the same reason anyone wound up the topic of their conversation: they kept it light, everything, even themselves, was a joke. I mention them because they were mean: but the player of words is not mean, though perhaps slicing. The poet players are truth-chasers. When Terence plays, we have to play along. The poem is full of nouns, and potential white-people repellent. Nods at lyrics and artistic endeavors, "inner visions" of Wonder are now populated (purpled!) with Continue Reading …
Student Essay: Books Are Bombs
Celine Lubin, whose personal essay "Books Are Bombs" appears here, is one of my 7th grade students in my "Word Up" class at the TEAK Fellowship. She chose to write this personal essay responding to my prompt, "What is something you learned that you were never supposed to know?" We had just read Sherman Alexie's essay, "Superman and Me," on his subversive literacy and literary journey. (I also explained his fall from grace for mistreatment of women and abuse of power--perhaps also something we, his readers, were never supposed to know.) Celine always has her hand up and her sharing motor on, but her learning curve was sharper in acquiring craft and polish. This essay, "Books are Bombs," is one of her true composition accomplishments, and also the product of a deeply creative and funny mind. Celine Lubin-- Books Are Bombs My mother has been telling me my entire life, “Education is power.” The first time she brought it up I was but a short little second grader who was scared of her own shadow. Whenever I heard the saying “Books are bombs,” which was ever so often from my reading teacher Ms. Brown, it would send me ducking and heading for cover, sheltering myself under the desk. She explained to me that they weren’t literal bombs, but figurative ones. This only added to my suspicions, that books were bombs that came in many shapes and sizes and were dangerous and could never be trusted. Somewhere along the line within the course of the next two years, I became quite fond of books. Each time I had looked in one’s direction or became daring enough to peek through its pages, I thought how organized, how smooth, how refined, how interesting. With these brave ideas exploding in thought, I became fascinated with how to read. Soon I learned how to read with the help of Ms. Brown and two other reading teachers. Not just how to read, but how hard it was. Unconsciously I felt how lucky I was to receive that opportunity. With each page, I became more enlightened and my Continue Reading …
Caught Between Identities
Helping Teens Explore Identities Every week, I teach personal essay writing to middle schoolers at The TEAK Fellowship, and I think a lot about how identities are formed. This week, I wanted to find an essay by a trans author for them to read. This is an identity marker many students--and many adults--still feel confused about. Confusion is not unhealthy; ignorance is. One job of a writer, and a teacher, and maybe just a decent person, is to do the work to clear ignorance cobwebs from our eyes. It can be messy. We need to see them I spend a lot of time with teens, listening to them, thinking about them and what they need. Whenever possible, I laugh with them, allowing them to poke fun at adults, myself included, our hypocrisies and short-comings. There's lots of material there. I read great essays from them on the ways we've not stacked up, everything from leaving water running while we brush our teeth (though we ask them not to) to insulting their weight (when they weren't upset about it) to berating them for getting F's without asking about their days. Their criticism is for a purpose, not superfluous. They are in the process of deciding which adult identities are worth growing into. That said, I believe more than ever, our teens need to see their teachers (and, frankly, as many adults in their world as possible) stand up against erasure and misbegotten hatred of individuals and groups. Our teens need to know, if it was them at risk, that their identity, their selves, would be protected, too. Seen. Celebrated, especially. Art for all our identities That's what art, and in particular the art of the personal essay, is for (or one of the things, anyway). When we write, we look into identity closely, to understand how a person comes to be themselves, what has shaped them. To share that through style and craft. To open yourself up to others. To transmute pain. No matter who teens are in the process of becoming, each needs to know they belong--somewhere Continue Reading …
Mainstream English, or Is That Voice “Mines”?
College Essay, Your Voice? College essays are supposed to represent the applicant's personality; as their paper doppelgänger, if anything should "center" the student voice, that's it. Personal essay teachers are tasked with "preserving" student voice. As your guide, my style should be invisible behind yours. No ventriloquism here. But sometimes, easier said than done. And the issue is not just aesthetic, but moral. 826NYC & Voice Justice This week I attended the interactive workshop "Justice & Equity Dialogues: Centering Student Voice" 826NYC, an organization I've had a crush on for some time. They host their writing magic in a "secret library" behind a superhero supply storefront (I mean, you checked their site, right?). So, enough said. Their workspace has warm wood tables, exposed brick, and two clocks, for "Brooklyn Time" and "Manhattan Time." The latter is an hour ahead of the former because, well, you people in Manhattan rush a tad too much. Their library, airy and light, is filled with self-published student work side by side with destined to be classics like, ahem, that new ballsy Bunny Book by John Oliver. Language Unicorn The facilitator, Rebecca Darugar, 826NYC's Director of Education, began the workshop by asking us to draw a unicorn together in our small groups on chart paper with markers, no further instructions. There was no model unicorn for us to study. And yet, when we compared the four drawings, they all had...what? You guessed it: a prominent horn, a more-or-less horse's physique, a mane (but a rainbow mane, m'kay?). Darugar pointed out: See? A unicorn doesn't exist. But still, we all follow these rules, which we've created and agreed upon at some point, that the unicorn looks a certain way. And only that way. No one's unicorn had a giraffe's body, none a lizard's. An imaginary beast, it nonetheless cohered to a relatively limited set of features. And (the main point of the workshop) language is just like that: language is an Continue Reading …
Ask Dr. Mae Sakharov about the College Essay
Conversations with Experts Giving Context to College Essay: Dr. Mae Sakharov I've spent time this winter interviewing my mentors and other smart folks-- like Dr. Mae Sakharov-- about the difficulties and pleasures of the college essay writing process and working with teens. I do as I tell my students: if you keep showing up in the world-as-classroom with your pencils sharpened, and a sincere wish to do better than BS, life will keep giving you material, and teaching you what you need to know. I always want to know more. That's also why I love teaching students to tell their stories well! Here are some highlights from my conversation with Dr. Mae Sakharov, Ed.D, College, Graduate School and Career Counselor. Technically, we're competitors, but I'd tell you to go see her in a heartbeat for full-spectrum counseling and a wise, good-humored perspective. We were introduced by a freak media relations fairy who connected us on impulse and then disappeared; both of us care deeply about teens, authentic learning, and no BS compassion. She has a great beat on the college counseling industry- be not fooled, it's an industry!-- and has the creds, sweat hours, and lived experience to see every life in context. In our conversation over Google Hangouts, , the frame cut out the lower half her face, so I spent most of the time with a view of just her classy glasses and warm eyes. She looked like a hibernant checking to see if Winter was over-- no, no it's not. Talking to Dr. Mae Sakharov EI: What is the college essay really...for? Sakharov: First, I call myself more of a writing psychologist than a writing teacher. I don’t teach writing-- My background is in theater and literature, children’s literature and storytelling, and years and years of improvisational theater. When I started working on personal statements with kids it was not in structural way-- like an English essay, but more about finding out who a person was-- and bringing that out. Writing the college Continue Reading …