What I am Learning About My Writing?

My eyes have truly been opened to a new style and type of writing. My past experience was always trying to find more words to put into a paper. Not it is trying to reduce the verbiage and get to the point.

Getting away form the formal, official style is much more difficult that I would have every imagined. I thought if anyone was not tied to the formal register it was me, but as this class has progressed I see that I am wrong. Old habits are truly hard to break and getting away from the old style is very difficult.

I have also found is hard to edit and revise my work. When I do revise it is like loosing a little part of me when I delete sentences and thoughts. The revising takes more time than the actual writing of the paper.

Writing is hard work but this class is making me more confident with the process.

Personal Experiences

PERSONAL EXPERIENCES RELATING
TO MY DISSERTATION

One of the most vivid memories I have of elementary school is walking into first grade for the first time. I was one of the fortunate, or maybe unfortunate, children that didn’t go to kindergarten because it was not required. But, first grade was an extremely exciting time in my life. The first day of school was exciting but scary. I remember walking in and seeing twenty-four faces that I had never seen before. These were my new classmates. After surveying the class I can still see, sitting in a corner, conspicuously, a young man with pale blue eyes, ragged clothes, and blonde disheveled hair, a young man with the name of Buddy. Buddy stuck out from the others because he was older than everyone else in class, he had been retained, held back, or in his words failed first grade last year. In Buddy’s mind he was an outcast, a loner, or someone who was just in school because he was required to be there.
As the year progressed and we settled into first grade, I remember our teacher assigning students to reading groups, and how we were so excited to be placed in groups with others learning to read. At that time the reading books were the old Dick and Jane books. I can still see the pictures of Spot running after Jane and Jane running after Dick, and they were all having a great time. But, in those reading groups it was evident we were placed there based on what we could do, how smart we were, how economically advantaged we might be, even though in the small elementary school I attended there was very little difference in the economic condition of the families represented. The deciding factor was those parents who had jobs and supported the family, and then those families who didn’t and allowed, as my dad would say, the government to take care of them.
It was evident, even to a first grader, that the groups that were assigned were pretty much the red birds, or high fliers, the blue birds, those who were fairly average students, and then the buzzard group, the ones who had little or no chance of success, students who were not given the opportunity to be involved with regular activities, and were mostly placed in the corner, given a worksheet, and told to be quiet and only to disturb the teacher if they had to go to the restroom. My friend Buddy was in the Buzzard group. He was always the last to complete assignments, the first to find ways to get out of the classroom, and always at the top of the at risk chart.
The teachers only called on Buddy when it was absolutely necessary. When they called on him to read a passage in our round-robin reading time we all tried to help Buddy by giving him words, whispered to him. For a sentence of about 5-6 words Buddy would take about 2 minutes to read it. As you can imagine very little opportunity was given for Buddy to read, but that didn’t bother Buddy. Throughout our school experience Buddy just tagged along, as we went from one grade to the next. In his words, “I’ve been failed too many times to hold back any more.”
In the school I attended we only went through 8th grade, and the 8th grade graduation was a big event and the last time I remember seeing Buddy. Our small class of 8th graders went to the high school the next year and it was obvious that Buddy didn’t show up at high school. Buddy wasn’t in any of the classes, did not have a student number or student locker, or a home room class. Buddy just didn’t show up, and sadly no one seemed to care, nor did anyone go looking for Buddy. In 1974 that was not a problem.
There were many Buddys around our county and many jobs for those Buddys to do. A high school diploma was only for those who wanted to go to college or were not being pressed into finding a job by their families. Buddy got one of those entry level, dead end jobs and is still there barely making ends meet with a large family and no possible way to advance himself. His family is the perfect example of generational poverty and the tight grip it has on its victims.
The Buddys of the world are the main reason that I wanted to become a teacher. I felt like I could do something to help, something to make a difference, something to inspire young men and women such as Buddy to stay in school. I held that dream through under-graduate and through teaching math to high school students. I still remember the conversations I had with students in high school who were turning 16 and had made up their mind that they were dropping out. I would continually ask why and I would get numerous responses, but none of them made any logical sense to me. I remember begging and pleading and offering almost anything to keep the students in school. Sometimes they would stay a day or two and then finally they just wouldn’t show up again. I still think today about some of those that just didn’t show up, and wonder where they are, and what their lives are like. Was there anything that I could have done or said differently that would have kept them in school?
Not only did I watch students from the vantage point of a classroom teacher but I also coached several sports. I did notice quickly that the students that were involved on the athletic teams or in the band, or in other extra-curricular activities usually stayed in school. I didn’t have as many conversations with those students about staying in school, as I did about what they were going to do when they graduated. It was evident that a large group of students that I had the opportunity to work with were making bad decisions because we allowed them. We very seldom connected with the students or their parents about the resources they needed to help them make good decisions. Those conversations prompted me to become a school administrator. As a high school assistant principal and principal, my desire to keep students in school went from those I taught or coached to every child in the school.
I remember, as if it were yesterday, two young ladies walking into my office and telling me they were going to quit school. I had really tricked the students at the high school to believe they had to have my permission to quit. They didn’t know that when they turned 16 they could just leave, even though many of them figured it out. I still tried to convince them that they had to have my permission and their parent’s permission and anyone else’s permission that I could think to tell them. Those two ladies were good students, from middle class families, who had every opportunity to be successful. They were students that if you talked with them or watched them interact with others, you would have said they had tremendous potential. They didn’t fit the model of the average at risk potential drop out.
For what seemed to be hours I used every argument and every piece of logic that I could to convince them to stay in school. I gave them the fifty-cent speech, the quarter speech and even pulled in counselors and every piece of ammunition I had to keep them in school. After all was said and done their response was “God has told us to do this”. In my mind I couldn’t figure how to argue with God, even though I knew that was not His directive and couldn’t understand how these young ladies, who seemed to be well in tune with the high school experience, could be thinking this way. They had given me all their reasons for dropping out. They had a great plan all mapped out and had envisioned a wonderful future with a great family. However, I do know that those wonderful plans never materialized because they didn’t have an education.
How sad those days were when students left my office deciding to drop out. I continually ask myself, “what did they drop into? Where are they today? Where did the school fail? Where did I fail? Where did we as a society fail?” Those questions drove me from the school itself to the Central Office where I hoped I could help answer those questions and develop initiatives to keep students in school and for 14 years that has been my goal. I still run into so many obstacles and so many roadblocks, and so many unanswered questions about why students drop out, that I am now driven to research the topic and try to develop answers to questions about drop outs, and design programs that will prevent young people from dropping out of school.
From my experiences I realize that most students decide to drop out at a very young age. Most of those students, I believe, decide that school is not for them around the second or third grade. My desire is to find a way to impact students, at that age, to prevent the idea of dropping out. Not only should we develop prevention programs, we must develop intervention programs. We already have students in the pipeline who are well on their way to dropping out. What can we do to intervene; what strategies can be used to prevent them from dropping out? What can we do to involve collectively: community, parents, and every individual who cares about the future in the drop out prevention program. It is reasonable to expect that the answers to these questions will not come easy. The research will be difficult, and the subjects I talk with will evoke past memories that will not be easy to deal with. I believe deep within my inner being that if we work hard enough, care enough and believe enough, we can make a difference with drop-outs, positively impacted the drop-out rate. I am hopeful that the plans I have, coupled with experiences in my life, will do something not just with the drop-out number but with the individual students as we do all that is possible to help each child to become successful.

Dropouts

Some of my first thoughts of my public school experience go back to students who were in the “buzzard” group in first grade. These students were seldom given any help, shown concern, or even made to feel part of the class. I in the teacher’s mind these students did not exist. Eventually they didn’t exist in school because they became a dropout.

It is true that most were required to wait until they were 16 to physically drop out but I watched children in elementary school drop out mentally. As a high school teacher and principal, I watched in horror and bewilderment as students dropped out of school as simply as we decide to go shopping.

Now as a superintendent, I have vowed to do everything in my power to prevent this terrible was of talent and lives. That is why I want to focus on dropouts in my dissertation. My hope is that there will not longer be the “buzzard” groups in our schools.

MY PERSONAL WRITING STORY

During my lifetime, the word writing has been synonymous with a four letter word that you shouldn’t use in mixed company, or in any company for that matter. In fact, you could say it is an activity I have never enjoyed. I hear people talk about writing for the fun of it, or writing daily in a journal, or stating they enjoy writing someone a note. None of that has ever been true for me. I’ve always looked at writing as an assignment to be completed (under protest) or a requirement to fulfill a duty in my job. Over the course of my lifetime I have been given expensive journals in which to write; even one that is leather bound from England. I never enjoyed writing more than about half a page and I did that so I wouldn’t have to lie if the person making the gift asked if I had used their gift. I’m sure a lot of my feelings concerning writing have come about because I have never really practiced writing and I have never had the sense that I was good at it. In elementary school my language arts experience was basically diagramming sentences, reading Dick and Jane books, and doing book reports.
The first paper I remember writing and having true feedback on was a seventh grade writing assignment entitled “where will I be 25 years from today?” I do remember that at the beginning of the assignment I was a little excited. But, as I progressed through the pages it became less exciting and much more like an overwhelming task. Then as I looked at the red-marks on the paper there remained absolutely no excitement, but only a sense of fear and intimidation about the next assignment requiring that I write a paper. I should have realized that it was my very first assignment of writing, and that there should have been a lot of feedback. But, that had not been the case through seven years of school. In other areas of school work, I seemed to do well without a great deal of negative feedback, so this made me hate writing even more.

Another reason I believe writing is difficult for me is because I am a math person. In math you have a right or a wrong answer. You work with numbers that don’t change. On math problems I can logically go back and find mistakes. In writing, it seems that much is in the eye of the beholder. Writing is a very objective process and writing assignments are graded in an objective manner. I have a hard time getting my arms around such an arbitrary process.
Also, being a math person I look at things very realistically and linear. My writing is much like an equation, such as X + Y = Z. I like to write by placing one point of knowledge, or one idea one after the other, much like a list as opposed to paragraphs. There are not a lot of transitions and not a lot of necessary detail (or what I consider unnecessary detail) and no creativity. Who really needs all those pages and pages of words when a person can write all they really need to say in a few line?. Years ago, my wife, then girlfriend, wanted to borrow my “papers” from my college communications skills course as she was taking a similar course. She thought she would have it made, as she could just tweak my speeches, and be ready for class. What she found was basically one note card with major points for each speech. Everything I had to say came from memory and I had no problem filling my allotted time. I feel the same about writing – here are my points and all of the “fluff” is in my head.
I also feel I lack a sufficient knowledge of the mechanics of writing. I have a fear of where to place comas, colons, semi-colons and quotation marks. Then teachers and professors want things like thesis statements, strong openings and conclusions that tie everything together. How scary is it to try to fathom what meets those qualifications as they define them? Then there is the dreaded end of the paper and APA style puts fear in my total being; where do the italics go, where does the year go, and exactly how do you write the author’s name. These fears have gripped my entire writing life and have given me writer’s cramp.
I remember as a freshman in college the time I spent staring at a white piece of paper, with pen in hand, but nothing would flow onto the paper. I would just sit and hope, even though ideas would come to mind, I was intimidated about writing them on the paper, afraid that I would make a mistake in the mechanics of the writing. I do believe in the old saying “we learn by example”. I was never presented with what I would consider good examples of writing. Shakespeare, Chaucer and Whitman are not good examples for writing class assignments and it seemed we read a lot of these, but not many examples of papers.
Going back through my memory the only true example of writing that I had was during my junior year of high school. I had a teacher, who even to this day would intimidate me, who did show me some good examples of writing. Even though I had the examples and worked very hard on the assignments, when she graded my papers I believe she bought red ink by the barrel.
Not only was writing papers a cause for anxiety, but so was the fact that we had to start typing our papers. During high school and the first year of college the only way to type our papers was to use a typewriter. My junior English teacher did not allow any mistakes. I can’t even start to count the number of times I was almost finished typing the page when I made a mistake. I remember her saying “no correction fluid, no typeovers, it has to be perfect.” That by itself caused me to make more mistakes than I normally would.
All of these issues have compounded over the years making writing a very difficult task for me. At my job I find myself procrastinating when I need to write a letter or when I need to write an announcement or even something as simple as writing a get well note to an employee or student. My salvation in writing has been the advent of word processing programs. Thankfully, those programs check the spelling and give you a little bit of feedback on the grammar, and allow you to save your work and then you can go back, change and edit your work. I cannot imagine going into the dissertation process using an old manual typewriter. It would be interesting to research the length of those papers when the typewriters were used, compared to today using our personal computers.
I am very hopeful that this class will help me to improve the writer’s block I have often experienced, and then give me more confidence in my writing. I also hope that some of the mechanics I worry about will be explained in a way that doesn’t intimidate me the way they always have. I can already tell that the discussions we have had and will have in this class will be a great help and there is no doubt that our reading and writing will do nothing but help our own writing. Who knows maybe I can finish the dissertation and no longer see myself as a ostrich with its head in the sand when it comes to writing, and perhaps instead, I can soar like an eagle.

Learning in the 21st Century

Wehave just entered a brave new world. When I started school in 1965, who would have dreamed a virtual world would exist one day where we could meet in the "zone" from home.

The opportunity for our students is endless but there is a tremendous amount of work to do to get our teachers to the point where they can use this technology.

Who knows what will be next.