![\"Me](\"http:\/\/i830.photobucket.com\/albums\/zz224\/jmleader\/587.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
School Visit in Providence! One of the great highlights of the month.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n As you may know, I used to teach middle-school English, so the chance to be back in a middle-school English classroom was like a little slice of heaven with the smell of grape gum.<\/p>\n The teacher suggested that before I start my presentation, I do a quick go-around with the students.\u00a0 I was a little hesitant, since there were 30 of them and I worried that they might get bored of listening to each other, but it ended up breaking the ice and giving me a great sense of the kids.\u00a0 Since the presentation was called The Journey of a Book<\/strong>, I had already planned to ask who in the class considered themselves artists of any kind, so I did that in the go-around, and I loved hearing how kids identified themselves\u2014writer, drawer, comic-book illustrator, rapper.\u00a0 A couple of them asked, \u201cIs playing soccer an art?\u201d or \u201cis reading an art?\u201d and I said, \u201cIf you think it is, it is.\u201d\u00a0 I also gave props to the kids who said, \u201cI\u2019m not an artist,\u201d because hey, not everyone has to be an artist, but it takes courage to say that when everyone else is declaring their major.<\/p>\n One of my favorite parts of the presentation, and I hope to integrate more elements like this, came when I talked about revising.\u00a0 This school, like the ones I taught at, heartily emphasizes revising, but as I discussed with some teachers recently, kids often have trouble getting enough perspective on their work to understand how to change it.\u00a0 (And why do I say \u201ckids\u201d?\u00a0 Adults have this problem all the time!\u00a0 I am one of them!)<\/p>\n To bring them into the world of revision, I told them about two different chapters I\u2019d initially thought were so great but came to see as greatly in need of change.\u00a0 One scene in which Sachi watched a movie with her sister became Sachi picking her up from after-school; the scene where Marina confesses to Sachi that she accidentally dislocated her sister\u2019s arm the summer before was eliminated completely, in favor of a new emotional moment between the two girls.<\/p>\n When I asked the class, \u201cDo you know why I made those changes?\u201d their answers were spot-on.\u00a0 They really got how a scene with a movie could render interactions lifeless, and that a confession about the summer before wasn\u2019t as relevant as progress in the current activity.\u00a0 I loved that I could draw them into the process of seeing something that I once hadn\u2019t been able to see myself.<\/p>\n Both groups asked thought-provoking questions, too, and I\u2019m sorry I don\u2019t remember them better, but I know I liked them, because my host teacher gently teased me for saying, \u201cThat\u2019s a good question\u201d over and over.\u00a0 I do remember, though, when I got to ask them<\/em> questions, and learned that one of them was writing a play based on his group of friends, about a group of heroes who fights to save the US from people who want to turn it back into a monarchy.\u00a0 How creative is that?\u00a0 Another girl won an award for a fairy tale about\u2026shoot!\u00a0 I can\u2019t remember.\u00a0 But it was great.<\/p>\n I continue to feel at sea over the fact that my writing career has nudged aside my career as a full-time teacher.\u00a0 I\u2019m still not sure how that one\u2019s going to end.\u00a0 However, I\u2019m so glad that the one is able to feed the other, because I felt very full after my day at that Providence school.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" School Visit in Providence! One of the great highlights of the month. As you may know, I used to teach middle-school English, so the chance to be back in a middle-school English classroom was like a little slice of heaven with the smell of grape gum. The teacher suggested that before I start my presentation, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,75],"tags":[76],"class_list":["post-510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-niceandmean","category-school-visits","tag-providence-school-visit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=510"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":517,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510\/revisions\/517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessicaleader.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Me](\"http:\/\/i830.photobucket.com\/albums\/zz224\/jmleader\/594.jpg\")
\n(pic of me sharing my writer’s notebook. It’s not just for kids!)<\/p>\n