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by
Patrick A. Velardi
I learn a lot from watching my children. I have two sons who become walking, talking, breathing statistics books every spring. They study the backs of hundreds of baseball cards and assimilate vast amounts of knowledge that they are able to spout, chapter and verse, at the drop of a fly ball. Would that they could remember algebraic functions with such ease and relish. Why one set of facts and figures and not another is the question I ask myself. As a teacher, I have often wondered what great things could be accomplished if I could inspire the same fervor when teaching parts of speech, or when reading a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Young people, and many adults, are totally fascinated with the lives of the famous. How can I capture some of this energy and direct it toward other areas of literature? This is the question that I hope to answer in my unit.
By reading excerpts from the autobiography of Dave Winfield I hope to open up an avenue of self-expression for my students. As a public school teacher, I have learned that the hardest part of the struggle to open minds is grabbing and holding the attention of students. I must do the first if I want to accomplish my goal of teaching students how to writs about themselves in an effective and satisfying manner. I want to use the universal appeal of sports personalities to get where I want to go. While the initial emphasis will be on reading autobiographies, I want to progress to teaching students how they, too, have valuable experiences that are gratifying to write about.
As I sit and think, and observe my sons and my students, I gain confidence that a unit of the type I propose will be a useful tool in getting the young people in my class to write about themselves in a way they haven’t done before. But I can’t leave it there. After my class has had a taste of the “rich and famous,” I want to move them to reading about the not so rich and famous who write powerfully about their lives, and then have my class progress to gaining the satisfaction and pleasure of writing about their own experiences. Two books I plan to use are Sister, by Eloise Greenfield, and A Gathering of Days by Joan W. Blos. Both books are marvelous examples of young people coping with experiences that students in my class will have also experienced. These books will help develop a sense of empathy that I feel will be most productive in eliciting personal writing from my students. From 1830, A Gathering of Days, to 1988, Winfield, with Sister in between, covers a lot of ground, but together all three works will provide valuable insights into my students’ own lives, and provide the inspiration they need to write more freely about themselves.
Autobiography is a natural approach to overcoming this uncomfortable situation of where ideas come from. We as teachers do similar things in the teaching of reading by having our students recognize main ideas and topic sentences, but we do much less in getting students to originate them. Leo Ruth (1987) talks about this in an interesting and informative article. He says that children must have the opportunity to share their own life experiences, to write about personal knowledge and to recognize themselves as the author if they are to develop their own thinking abilities. In the same article, Ruth makes a point that all of us teachers need to remember. Children need to see us as “a helpful collaborator, rather than as a stern evaluator.” The teacher’s efforts need to be spent during the writing, not after, in the correcting process. Ruth continues by suggesting that children need to learn to “plan ahead over a sequence of sentences rather than think just one clause at a time.” Finally Ruth tells us that students should develop a “sense of authorship” both as a writer creating meaning and as a reader creating meanings within the realm of his own life.
My own security about using more autobiography in my classroom was strengthened by an article by Roni Natov (1986). The author talks about recent autobiographical fiction for children. The selections are realistic and adhere to the truth, but shape it into a “vision that can inspire others.” These stories can help children affirm their own sense of reality by finding similarities and differences between their own lives and the lives of the stories’ protagonists. Children can begin to find their own uniqueness and separate themselves from family and society without totally and permanently disavowing either. They begin to realize more clearly that they are part of a network of people, but also unique individuals. Thus, by reading autobiographies written by extraordinary people, (in my unit, a famous sports personality), students can recognize their own individuality. Further, by reading a book such as Sister, students can observe how they, too, have experienced similar events, and can recognize qualities they share with characters, or qualities they have but characters don’t, and have their identity more clearly defined. Once the students understand themselves more clearly, then writing about themselves should come more easily.
What may be the most important quality about reading autobiography and about writing autobiographically is that it allows us teachers to make writing personal for our students. In her book, The Art of Teaching Writing, Lucy Calkins reminds us all of this critical point. We as teachers need to listen to our students and teach them to listen to themselves. By reading autobiography we help students understand “self” more clearly. They begin to value their uniqueness more highly. Hopefully we can transfer the more clearly defined sense of self into a greater sense of value for their own life experiences and have them see their own lives as worth writing about. In turn we give them a valuable tool to use to get them started writing, not just for the length of a class period, or a homework assignment, but for life. As Calkins says in her book, “we give them ownership and responsibility for their writing.” When this truly occurs, we teachers can serve as guides, and writing becomes an enjoyable experience for children.
There are several sections of the Winfield autobiography that I want to use as inspiration to build a succession of writing exercises. In the section titled “Family,” Winfield gives information about his background. It’s fairly basic, and there aren’t many value judgments made. The straightforwardness of the writing serves as encouragement for a young writer to open the door to his personality. The passage from the book presents a fairly ordinary childhood that should not intimidate a young reader/writer. After we read the excerpt in class, we will model our own autobiographies from it.
Another section, labeled “Fears” has Winfield talking about memories of early events in his life that left longlasting impressions on him. Arguments among siblings are usually fertile ground from which to elicit vivid descriptions from adolescents. Early in Winfield’s book there is depicted a disagreement between Dave and his brother Steve. The scene sounds like any that would occur in a family, particularly a family that has two boys fairly close in age. Sibling rivalries often escalate from insignificant words or actions to emotional tugs of war and even physical confrontation. Reading about a scene such as this will cause the students to recall similar situations in their own lives, and from there they will write about them.
O’Sullivan is using group journals for college students, but I believe I can adapt the idea for middle school students. As previously stated, I find it usual to have students want to share their journal writing. The group journal seems an ideal vehicle for allowing entries that are meant to be shared and reacted to in writing. The open journal idea speaks for itself as a means of getting students involved in writing. For middle school students parameters of good taste would have to be firmly set and clearly understood before embarking on the project. Once begun, the open journal, with its page for entries and its page for responses, should generate energetic writing by a class. A single spiral notebook, kept where students have easy access would facilitate the writing. Time set aside in class for the open journal may be necessary, but ideally a student should feel free to write in the notebook when other classroom assignments are completed.
The group project journal can be used as a means of getting additional feedback from students as we are reading the selections from this unit. Here I speculate, but after reading a section of Dave Winfield’s book that talks about a childhood trauma, students will want to write about accidents or close calls they have had, and that they want to share. The students will have their private journals for anything that they would prefer to keep private, the open journal for anything they want to share and the group project to react specifically about the reading going on in class at that time. The open journal and the group project give a different slant to an excellent idea, journal writing, that may lose some of its appeal through overuse.
In this unit I hope to develop the interviewing skills of my students, and develop a sense of autobiography that arises from interviewing. With this in mind, and in keeping with my initial emphasis on baseball, I want to have the students read an interview taken from the book, Me and DiMaggio, A Baseball Fan Goes in Search of His Gods by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (Pages 66-72). In this excerpt the writer, Lehmann-Haupt, is interviewing the baseball player, Rod Carew. Initially, Lehmann-Haupt is nervous and tense about approaching the star and we, the readers, get a feeling of Lehmann-Haupt’s personality, fears and uncertainties about what he is doing. It is a very insightful piece of writing which is then followed by the actual question and answer segment in which Lehmann-Haupt blunders along seeming to antagonize Carew, more than to draw him out. What follows the interview is what I found, (and I hope to get my students to also find), to be the most revealing about the interviewing process, even on a professional level. Lehmann-Haupt analyzes his own interviewing techniques, pointing out where he feels he made mistakes. Slowly we, the readers, see Lehmann-Haupt come around from the position of feeling inept because the interview didn’t go well, to recognizing the shortcomings in Rod Carew’s attitude that made the interview less than it should have been. We see the initial lack of confidence on Lehmann-Haupt’s part develop into a newly found certainty that he had done the interview well. The whole incident becomes a wonderful autobiographical insight into the interviewer himself, Students should be able to see that we can learn something about ourselves from interviewing, as well as learning about the person being interviewed, The kinds of questions asked reveal something about the person asking the questions, and in this sense interviewing becomes an exercise in autobiography as well as biography.
Students must learn some of the basics of interviewing in order to make this exercise beneficial. They must first learn that preparation is an essential ingredient to the successful interview. I usually begin by reviewing some stock questions such as the following:
From this point the interviewer can ask questions that he feels would be important to him to know about the interviewee. As a follow-up writing activity students would then compose the data from the interview into a story, newspaper article or even a fictionalized account using the facts of the interview as the basis. They should begin with what they feel is the most important part of the interviewee’s story, and develop their writing from there. Sharing each other’s final product, and trying to match stories to the person in the classroom will emphasize the autobiographical flavor of the entire exercise.
1. Where did you live as a child? 2. What was your neighborhood like? 3. Who were the most important people to you in your childhood? 4. What are your hobbies? 5. What do you hope to accomplish?
To begin, the teacher would set up the situation with an introductory talk, lecture, or written paragraph that would say something along the lines of, “You are now 80 years old and you are writing a letter to your great-grandson/ daughter. What are your favorite memories? What did you do that you are proud of? What would you have liked to have done, but never did? What happened to your family and friends? What are happy and sad things that have happened to you?” If I can be allowed the liberty of anticipating student responses, I foresee sentences written in answer to the lead questions, and as a first draft, this will be an excellent start. Following up, the students can then revise and edit their initial responses and develop the information into a story about themselves. This next writing will help students recognize what is important to them, and hopefully help to develop a sense of self, and a sense of family, which is the aim of our autobiographical reading and writing exercises. The retrospective autobiography will also emphasize why journal writing is so essential in helping us remember what is important in our lives, not only events, but emotions and feelings, reactions to people, and relationships among people. Many of the retrospective autobiographies will likely be very general, and might even be responses that students think that the teacher wants to hear. For this reason the need to keep an account becomes more apparent. As we read the book, and see the generalities of the initial letter fill out in beautiful detail, the value of journals becomes clear. In the end, a retrospective autobiography will have served two very beneficial lessons.
How to use the book, Sister in this unit is the question. Besides the previously mentioned value the book has as a reaffirmation of all the good things a journal does for its writer, and other than the intrinsic value of the book as good literature, what kind of writing can a book like Sister help students learn? After reading excerpts from Winfield, an example of an “I was born . . .” autobiography, and A Gathering of Days, a journal, Sister demonstrates perfectly in the next step for my students. Not all of us will become famous, but all of us have a story to tell. The writing I want to work on with students after our journals, autobiographies, and interviews have been practiced is the creative story-writing using their own experiences as fodder. The book Sister would be read and discussed in class, and since the book is neatly divided into sections that are short stories in and of themselves, students will practice writing stories based on sections of journals, whether the source is their private journals, the open journals or the group, journals. In these student stories we will work on third person narrative and dialogue in the mode of Sister. The students’ sense of self will transform into a creative process with a source that has a rich past, a continuing present and an endless future.
Greenfield, Eloise. Sister. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1974.
Winfield, Dave with Tom Parker. Winfield, A Player’s Life. New York: WW Norton, 1988.
Calkins, Lucy McCormick. The Art of Teaching Writing. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1983.
Davis, Mary. “Becoming: A Course in Autobiography.” English Journal, 1985, vol. 74, no. 3, 34-36.
Grumet, Madeleine R. “The Politics of Personal Knowledge.” Curriculum Inquiry, 1987, vol. 17, no, 3, 317-327.
Jensen, Marrin D. “Memoirs and Journals as Maps of Intrapersonal Communication.” Communication Education, 1984, vol. 33, no. 3, 237-241.
King, Kim M. “Retrospective Autobiographies as a Teaching Tool.” Teaching Sociology, 1987, vol. 15, 410-413.
Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. Me and DiMaggio, A Baseball Fan Goes in Search of His Gods. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.
Natov, Roni. “The Truth of Ordinary Lives: Autobiographical Fiction for Children.” Children’s Literature in Education, 1986, vol. 17, no. 2, 112-125.
O’Sullivan, Maurice J. “The Group Journal.” Journal of General Education, 1987, vol. 38, no. 4, 288-300.
Ruth, Leo. “Reading Children’s Writing.” The Reading Teacher, 1987, vol. 40, no. 8, 756-760.
Writing (Entire Issue) March, 1988, vol. 10, no. 7.
Contents of 1988 Volume III | Directory of Volumes | Index | Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute
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