What I Didn't Know Page 3

  Write about yourself, I tell them, explain who you are.

  Introduce a topic clearly, previewing what’s to come…

  Tell people what you’re gonna say, say it, then tell them what you said. Hopefully you can do this before they, or you, fall asleep.

  Develop the topic with relevant facts…

  It’s not enough to love basketball. What position do you like to play? What’s your favorite team?

  Use appropriate transitions…

  For example, next, also, in addition, ad nauseam.

  Establish and maintain a formal style…

  Other ways to say awesome? Amazing, remarkable, awe inspiring, astounding. Give seventh graders a thesaurus, and Call of Duty: Black Ops II becomes “transcendent.”

  Provide a concluding statement…that follows from and supports the information presented…

  For Stephen and his classmates, I make it painfully, achievably simple. Repeat one important thing from your beginning, preceded with In conclusion.

  Administrators walk into my classroom weekly for a ten-minute “snapshot” to see how well I’m bludgeoning my students with the standards. They want to see a “learning goal” posted and a dutiful student regurgitating some edu-speak. I’ll look up from a student’s desk and see a stone-faced man poking his index finger onto an iPad, checking off the “Observe4Success” teacher evaluation form: Student Engagement–Compliant 100%; Learning Goal Posted–Observed; Expectations Posted and Enforced–Limited. One earnest administrator asked when was I going to post my classroom expectations, so he could check me off. Like a student who had failed to complete her homework assignment, I lied: Oh yeah, okay. I’ll get to that. He wants me to care about my grade. He also wants what the English sentence wants: an explicit statement declaring something that is otherwise perfectly evident. Somehow writing down and posting on the wall that students should come to class prepared, do their work, and be respectful will legitimize my respectful, quietly hardworking classroom.

  My first teaching job landed me—literally, in a twin-engine Piper Navajo—in the tiny Koyukon Athabascan village of Huslia. Population just under three hundred, Huslia sits on the banks of the Koyukuk River, deep in the interior of Alaska’s boreal forest. I rented a comfortable two-room log cabin that was walking distance from the school where I was a generalist teacher for eight students grades six through eight. I’d spent the prior year in an intensive post-baccalaureate teacher-certification program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “You’re in Indian Country now,” a resident elder said to me on the runway when I stepped off the plane.

  I had moved from the East Coast to Alaska with an ex-boyfriend in the late nineties, on somewhat of a whim. I liked it enough to stay and for several years pieced together seasonal work while living in a dry cabin far from the nearest town. The searing subzero cold and darkness of winter, the blizzards, the limited groceries, the lack of entertainment or a social life, that part of Alaska was familiar to me when I moved to Huslia to teach. Despite the coursework in cross-cultural communication, and the few days I’d spent in a village school for my rural practicum, and the district-sponsored culture camp where we listened to stories, it became clear soon after my arrival how utterly unprepared and foreign I was. How few decent curriculum materials there were. How many hours I’d have to work each day, each weekend, each month. How the loss of the Native language, silenced with an assimilationist educational policy enacted at the turn of the twentieth century when the first schools were established in the territory, had created an undercurrent of hostility in the current generation. How becoming “a part of the community,” as we were told to do, was a daunting task given my job demands. How I’d be perceived, despite seeing myself as a progressive and an Alaskan of some years, as just another white lady from outside.

  The sentence. The sentence embodies the English language’s complete unit of thought. As an English teacher, I accept the fundamental rightness of the sentence as a given. Subject and predicate married into their world of action or concept or state of being. The subject does, thinks, feels, or is. But children learning to write carve their thoughts and ideas onto the paper with little concern for subjects and predicates. They repeat, ramble, and join endless streams of consciousness with conjunctions.

  I can and do directly teach sentence construction to Stephen and his classmates. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that direct grammar instruction does not usually translate into student competency in writing. Children need to talk and read and write and mess with language on their own. Identifying subjects and predicates on worksheets? Anyone can get kids to figure that out in a lesson or two. Making students compose sentences from the nebulous world of memory and experience, shaping thought into ideas and words, requires relationship, excitement, interest, and talk.

  Stephen’s English and my English hail from two different worlds. His English, also his first language, resonates with the rhythm, volume, and tone of his ancestral tongue, Inupiaq. Sometimes referred to as village English, it possesses an economy and straightforwardness I admire: I go store. Why? Pop. So much less explanation, so much less blah, blah, blah. In the classroom Stephen might simply say to me, bathroom, while holding the pass and standing at the door. Most likely his grandparents learned English as a second language, and I don’t know about his parents. Given the history of public and Bureau of Indian Affairs schooling in Alaska, there’s a good chance Stephen’s parents were shipped off to a boarding school and punished for speaking Inupiaq. Is his reticence at talking a generational consequence of this linguistic violence? Or perhaps it’s a natural, cultural trait of a people whose ways of living on the land embodied other methods of communicating that go beyond the Western dependence on verbal and written exchange.

  In the treeless, white, monochrome world of the tundra in winter, I’m coldly aware of how different is my perspective of the world compared to the Alaska Native students I teach. The landscape of my New Jersey youth featured suburban streets, shopping malls, and racially mixed neighborhoods. Hot summers at the shore, three months of winter, April showers to bring May flowers, and crimson maple leaves in autumn.

  Here, I sometimes feel disembodied, utterly powerless in this vast and rugged wild place, a nagging sense that I don’t belong. Shushing wind. A croaking raven. I try to imagine a father and a son, an uncle and his nephew, in the hills or on the sea ice. Maybe they’re hunting for a seal, searching the black water of an open lead—a fracture in the sea ice. The boy watches as the man performs some action: aiming his gun, hoisting a boat. Traditional Alaska Native teaching and learning emphasize close observation. I too watched and learned skills and crafts from my parents and grandparents: rolling out and cutting pasta dough, sewing a hem, crocheting a hat. But the majority of my formal education was in mainstream American schools. My students learn how to live on their land by watching adults, performing a task when confident of their ability to do so. This makes sense if you’re using precious resources that mustn’t be wasted, or if the hunter whose clothing you sew relies on your craft for his survival.

  It took me years to realize that some of my students spent considerable time thoughtfully composing sentences prior to committing their words to paper. I’d watch students sit for a long time in class, paper blank, and think they were confused or simply refusing to write their rough drafts. In reality, they were taking their time, thinking, crafting sentences and not just scribbling their thoughts unheeded. Their process demanded more time than I usually gave. But consequently, their writing required less revision. In my educational world, free-form talking and quick verbosity are too often valued at the expense of depth and deliberation.

  In Eskimo and Aleut linguistics class I learned that Inupiaq words can be lengthened with a variety of suffixes and prefixes to provide syntax, meaning, and tense, expanding a single word into sentence-like complexity. Prior to contact with white colonizers and the introduction of written language, what need had they for punctuated sentences? Oral language histories demanded an excellent memory and the ability to listen closely and pay attention. Information given in the form of stories and songs, as well as direct advice, were woven into the fabric of lives, I imagine, and not discretely chunked into separate parts, as currently modeled in our schools: science, math, history, reading, writing, art.

  As a teacher, I’ve had to learn over the years to moderate my fast-talking, often sarcastic, sometimes ironic, and frequently argumentative verbal speech patterns so as not to offend people. Alaskans, both Native and white, don’t usually jump in on conversations and fight vigorously and loudly for their point of view. Instead, one must wait and say nothing while another person finishes their complete idea. Waiting for people to stop talking is an exercise of extreme endurance for me, coming as I do from the Land of Interrupters, otherwise known as New Jersey, where being loud and animated means people like you, or at the least are having a good time. Had I grown up here, the timbre of my voice would naturally be lower, the speed of my speech slower, and my verbal approach more polite. If I spoke in my natural, East Coast volume while working with Stephen, I’D BE YELLING at him.

  After students write an introduction paragraph or sentences for their essays, we embark on the body. Details, I reinforce. You like to hang out with your friends? What do you do? You like basketball? Are you on the team? How long have you played? Most boys in Stephen’s class have a paragraph devoted to video games, with random forays into sports, snow-machining, dirt bikes, and hunting. One student’s favorite president is John F. Kennedy because “he looks nice and he’s on Black Ops Zombies.” That’s right, President John F. Kennedy, zombie slayer.

  After fleshing out the requisite video game and basketball paragraphs with compelling details, we embark o
n the Conclusion, a concept some seventh graders require almost a year to grasp. Many simply stop writing, and conclude with “The End.” I’ve told you everything, and now I’m done. No need to tie it into a bow, or refer back to the beginning, or reach an epiphany. But school wants a conclusion, and tests require it. To that end, I’ve perfected a color-coded method of teaching conclusions. I project student work onto the whiteboard and mark with pink, blue, and orange highlighters sentences, ideas, and fragments from the intro and body paragraphs destined for repetition. Finally. In conclusion. To sum up. All in all. Pick one, I say. Link back to your intro. Just a few sentences, I plead. What do you want the reader to remember about you, I coax.

  Conclusion or not, now comes the word processing. If the high school teachers only knew the pain involved in teaching these budding humans to type their writing in a Word document, double-spaced, with a centered title, name in the upper left corner (or any corner for that matter), and spell-checked. Despite their weekly practice on keyboarding programs, Stephen’s class resists the wisdom of the home row. They want to look at their fingers picking out each letter. O n e. B y. O n e.

  Typed rough drafts in hand, students begin to edit, or pretend to. They must read their writing out loud, twice. Once to themselves for the self-edit, then once again with a friend for the peer edit. Red pens and editing checklists in hand, they scan for spelling mistakes, check capitals, periods at the end of sentences, and any grammar skill we’re practicing: commas placed correctly in their lists, the use of transition words, simple tense verbs. Lots of kids don’t really use the checklist because either they don’t understand it, or they think I don’t check.

  The miracle of Stephen’s typed rough draft lies before us: a correctly formatted document in sixteen-point font. I feel a triumph, a sense of satisfaction at his accomplishment. He has been patiently waiting for me to work with him this class period. He even possesses an editing checklist. Instead of using periods, he’s chosen the comma. And why not? The comma signals a pause, a breath in his story of himself. Now at least he identifies and separates complete, written thoughts. Earlier in the year his writing was one long stream of thought detailing in a repetitive stream of consciousness his detailed long stream of thinking. To hear him speak in his low, whispery voice I must sit right next to him: My name is Stephen, I was born on November 24, 1996, in Nome, Alaska, I’m fourteen years old. Who am I to bemoan his lack of artistry? I am happy with this exhibition of correct sentence structure because it is one crucial measure of his success or failure in this school: facility with standard, written English.

  Among Stephen’s classmates, many will not graduate with their peers in five years. In 2010–11, only 55 percent of the Alaska Native students in Nome graduated from the high school. When Stephen’s cohorts were sophomores in 2013–14, the last year for which public data is available, that number had climbed to 62 percent. A class that had entered seventh grade with thirty-eight students was down to nineteen rising sophomores. A few had probably moved away, and a handful had enrolled in the state’s boarding school, Mount Edgecumbe in Sitka, where rural students have greater opportunities for elective classes and advanced placement. Still, the hard truth remains: by tenth grade, when they turn sixteen, many Alaska Natives drop out.

  Some fail their freshman English class and have to retake it. Sophomores bogged down with two English courses lose an elective space in their schedule. A student like Stephen, who longs to get his hands dirty in small engines, will instead be slogging through English twice a day. Tired of the boredom and the failure, many simply stop coming to school. I’m afraid Stephen will be one of these students. Or maybe he’ll stay the course, taking an extra one or two years to graduate, his high school career marked by class repetitions, remedial reading, and computer-based tutorials all attempting, and often failing, to deliver on the promise of a public education.

  Paul Ongtooguk, an Inupiaq from Northwest Alaska, attended Nome Beltz in the early 1970s, when it was a regional boarding school. Until 1976, if they wanted a high school education, Alaska Native students living in the villages had to leave their homes to attend boarding schools in other parts of the state or outside in the lower forty-eight, because schools only taught up to the eighth grade. In many larger communities, including Nome, the local high school taught only white students or those Natives of “mixed blood” who were considered “civilized” enough to be in the same classroom as their white counterparts. Tobeluk v. Lind, a class-action suit more commonly known as the Molly Hootch case, after an Eskimo girl whose name headed the original list of plaintiffs, forced the state to build high schools in any rural village that wanted one, and most did.

  In his essay “Their Silence About Us: Why We Need an Alaskan Native Curriculum,” Ongtooguk writes: “The curriculum at my high school in Nome was virtually silent about us, our society, and the many issues and challenges we faced as a people caught between two worlds. In fact, educational policy since the turn of the century had been to suppress Native culture and ‘assimilate’ us into the broader society. Everything that was required—everything that had status—in the curriculum was centered on white people and was remarkably like what might have been found anywhere in the US.”

  Yes, some things have changed. Local communities have more control over their schools, the State of Alaska has adopted cultural standards to guide districts, and Native language programs in the schools are springing up across the state. But a lot remains the same. Ninety percent of all teachers hired in Alaska are white, with the majority coming from outside the state. There is no formalized Alaska Native curriculum adopted at a statewide level, and with the current climate of testing regimes and newly adopted Common Core–like state standards, more and more districts are purchasing corporate curriculums designed to be taught anywhere in America. And what is that if not assimilation?

  My classroom, like many in Alaska, exists in a kind of purgatory, a place where I must somehow bridge cultures: the daily lives of children who do not see themselves reflected in our school’s culture, student needs versus state and district requirements, administrative demands versus classroom reality.

  As a teacher, I’m lucky in some respects. Small classes allow me the frequent opportunity to work one-on-one with my charges. Together we read their work out loud and review every word, every period, every sentence. At first, many children are scared of me, of this “teacher edit” process. Their writing, however banal and repetitive and convoluted, or however brilliant and funny, is a tender thing to them, and I am not often a tender person. I am direct and my pen wields power.

  Come sit here, I command. Get me your checklist. They sit and we correct misspellings, capitalize, de-capitalize, insert commas, answer questions. What do you mean by this? This is a run-on sentence. Can you show me where the period goes? I’ll read it and you tell me when to stop and put in a period. This is a fragment. Can you make a whole sentence for me? This paragraph only has two sentences. You need more. Should this sentence go somewhere else? Where?

  I also say, Awesome intro! That really drew me in. Wow, your writing has really improved since September. You’ve got periods and capitals in all the right places. This is an excellent organized paragraph. Cool, you go hunting with your dad? What for? Tell me and I’ll write the sentence for you. If we can speak it, we can write it.

  Much to their chagrin, I bust them on their checklists. Here you checked off that you had four to six detail sentences in each paragraph, but you don’t. Sorry, I can’t give you credit for that. You haven’t capitalized any names! Wow, a whole paragraph here and only one period at the very end? Hmmm, you checked off that you looked for periods. Can you redo this please? They return to their desks with a sheepish look.

  Written sentences necessitate a distance from the world. The English sentence individuates, separates, raises the tactile, the real, the sensual, into a thing apart. Does the experience of being a human living in this arctic place lend itself to the kind of written sentences, paragraphs, and essays that I demand in the classroom? How often, out in this country, dwarfed by the omniscient sky and horizon, mesmerized by darkened water clouds above an open section of otherwise frozen ocean, have I been at a loss for words? What sentences contain this world? The human words that first arose from this earth here—different from the ones I now possess—must be perfect for expressing this reality.