Why I write...

I could tell you why I write about education, how that is one way I think I can contribute to helping people dream something better, but since the National Writing Project asked, "why I write?" I thought I'd aim this at students...

I started writing long ago, before I could really write at all. I drew pictures and let them change. Sometimes on pieces of paper, sometimes with chalk. I rarely shared them, but they were ways for me to slow down, to think things out, to talk about fears, at least to myself, to talk about hopes, to imagine possibilities...

And though I've moved to using words, words built out of letters (which have never been easy for me), and I use keyboards or I dictate to my computer or phone (because who cares how you get your stories down, just that you get your stories down), I still tell stories for all those reasons, and I've added another - I tell stories because I want others who dream, others who are afraid, others who imagine, to know that they are not alone.

So I write. I pay little attention to specific rules of grammar. I let the technology fix the spelling. I don't construct perfect sentences. And I don't stick to "appropriate" words.

And so I write to tell about fear and sadness...

Midnight Mass

The wind whips off the Sound but I've pulled myself down between the biggest rocks, stones broken free and rolled by those greatest of the earth's glaciers God knows how long ago. I light my tiny fire, trash and newspapers and driftwood and as it starts to warm me I look at those rocks, the sedimentary stripes going vertically, and because of how I know about these boulders, I start to cry.Christmas Eve, no, Christmas Day now, it has to be after two. I went to Midnight Mass at St. Joseph's because no one would know me there. That kept me warm all that time. I kept my hand over the right side of my face as much as I could. I know it's all swollen and black and blue. I know the cut's bad. I got butterflies though at the Rite Aid in the Mall and got those on in the Macy's bathroom then held my face to the tile floor up at the top of the elevators in the garage. That was cold as shit and brought the swelling down some.

When I climbed in Kathy's window at ten she freaked out when she saw me. She even said she'd get her mom, but I told her "no way" and she cleaned it up and put new butterflies on. Then before anyone there got suspicious I went out again, and got to St. Joe's, with food Kathy grabbed for me plus orange juice and cupcakes I bought at the C-mart on the way to church all stuffed in a paper bag. And then, well fuck him. Fuck them all. I'm not going home. I might never go home...

...and I write to explain how I sometimes see the world in strange ways...

Vision

I thought the picture of them in the pool was our flooded basement. Does this represent a curious way of seeing? My mom, dad, brother, sister by a ladder in water. We didn't swim in pools, not til later. The ocean was at the end of the block. I mistook many things for many things. I still do. Even after I had spent years in pools, every single day, I thought that picture was taken underneath our kitchen while a hurricane washed across the island.

I was disappointed when I learned it was not.

...and I write to say that sometimes we all need to see beyond what is there...

Timing the Night

...I know my history. I come to this park to rehab the knee that I now feel swelling beneath the huge steel brace, but things that are gone fascinate me. I see dead people in my nightmares but even in the waking day I see long vanished buildings and places. And this park, well, long before it was a tomb for eleven thousand Revolutionary War soldiers and sailors killed in prisons by their British guards, it was a fort that Washington had tried to defend. And a hundred and fifty years before that losing battle I know that in the bay out there, in the bay beyond the fucking Farragut Houses, beyond the ancient brick Navy Yard wall, beyond all the old buildings and pierhouses and cranes where once a whole fleet of ships were launched to win the World War, beyond all that there were marshes thick with fish and oyster reefs and migrating ducks and pushing through a narrow channel a Dutch sailing ship arrived on a barely comprehended continent and dumped hired Flemish immigrants, Walloons they called them, to populate a new outpost in southern New Netherland.

If I work on it, especially in the settling dusk, I can see the woods and the deep green prairie that stretches to the tide line. And if I wait and let consciousness slip, sparks will start to fly from mud chimneys in the tiny cluster that will begin Breuckelen. Somehow, I know it is still out there.

I get up and begin to limp around, and though the Trade Center illuminates the night over there and the off-duty gun presses against my side under the big loose shirt and I am circling a Monument not built until 1908 in a park created in the 1860s I can find the seventeenth century. I watch those first Europeans pushing along the old Lenni Lenapi trade routes and creating tiny villages, Boswyk, Midwout, Nieuw Amersfort, Nieuw Utrecht, and Gravesend. Stumpy square-rigged ships drift through the harbor mixing with giant dugout canoes. The moon rises over an empire of trees...

...and I write to re-think memories...

Subway Map

On that weekend when they both disappeared from home, she with a black eye and he with a huge welt on his back where it had struck the radiator when he'd flown across the room, they pooled what money they had and split it mostly between his sock and her shoe and took the Number Six train down to Grand Central then the Seven over to Sixth then the D all the way to the end at Stillwell Avenue on Coney Island where neither had ever been. To celebrate escape they ate hot dogs at Nathan's and bought cokes and walked along the beach which was pretty empty on this early afternoon in early May. He told her he loved her and that they'd stay away forever and find jobs and live in one of those little houses they'd seen from the train that sat on walks not even streets and that, in their house, no one would ever hurt anybody. And the day turned into night and they actually found a twenty dollar bill in the sand plus a bunch of change and felt rich and had knishes and cream soda for dinner, splitting a cherry-cheese one for dessert, then curled up against a giant concrete support under the boardwalk...

And so I want everyone to write... and by "write" I mean to tell your stories. Stories are the way humans learn about each other and about the world. None of them are ever really "true," no, not even those labelled "non-fiction" by your teachers or by your library, but none of them are truly "fake" either, not even the craziest science fiction, they have come from genuine places in the minds of real people.

And if you do not tell your stories in a way that others can reach them - even others who have no idea who you are - you cast less of a shadow on this world and on our lives than you should. Because, we need your voice too... We need your dreams, your memories, your imaginings, and even your fears.

Because we are all important. And our stories are all important. And that's why I write, and that's why I want you to too.

- Ira Socol 

Funding What Works: The National Writing Project

Despite all the nonsense you hear and read on television, in mainstream newspapers and magazines, even in "research," there are not many things in education "proven" to make a difference.

Charter school management doesn't. KIPP doesn't. Teach for America doesn't. Most reading programs (Success for All, Reading Recovery, etc) don't. Being non-union doesn't. Merit Pay doesn't. Broad trained administrators don't. Gates financed principals don't. "Better" testing doesn't. If you honestly look at every bit of research you'll see that even the best arguments for any of these make no difference at all for 95% of kids.

But a few things do work. And, despite all the talk, we know these work. Smaller class sizes. Co-teaching. Multiage programs. Individualizable technology. Great pre-school experiences which offer playtime and stories rather than explicit academics. Reducing poverty. Better family health care. Improved teacher education. Despite Daniel Willingham's essentially irrelevant research, catering to children's learning styles and preferences.

And something else... one of the few federal initiatives of the past two decades to demonstrate real success in making schools better learning environments and improving children's live: The National Writing Project. This is the project President Obama wants to "zero out" in next year's federal budget.

Unlike many who will blog this weekend in an attempt to get President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress to continue funding for this project, I have never been involved with NWP in any way. I've never helped build the project, or worked with the teacher support programs, or implemented NWP strategies as a K-12 teacher... All I've done is see the results.

The National Writing Project is much larger, and much more effective, than its title suggests. And in any given year its impact is 100 times, 1,000 times the positive effect on children of all Arne Duncan's highly funded, political-donor connected initiatives in Race-to-the-Top and I3 grants combined.

Because what the National Writing Project does is help teachers re-think practices in ways which turn children into better communicators - better writers, better readers, better storytellers, better information shares, better information consumers. And those skills are the heart of advancing achievement and opportunity. And study after study has documented the real differences this little program makes.

Photo from Education Week. All NWP blogs are available at Cooperative Catalyst.

Why does a writing program have this kind of impact? Because, in order to write well, you must build all the component skills, from "reading" (text intake and comprehension), to listening (aural intake and comprehension), to careful and creative seeing, to vocabulary and descriptive skills, to research capabilities, to crap detecting, to empathic skills, to performance ability. Writing is all that, and learning to work well with writing inspires and motivates, and perhaps most importantly, gives voice to students across the widest range of diversities.

I don't need to say much more. Read the blogs from teachers who have watched their students benefit. Read the research. Do a quick look at the NWP site. Understand the absurd budgeting decisions the U.S. President and his congressional pals are making - " It costs $25.6 million and it reaches 130,000 teachers and more than 1.4 million students in over 3,000 districts." (Teach for America this year will spend $189 million this year - not including teacher salaries and benefits which are paid for by the involved school districts - on 4,500 untrained teachers, in comparison, reaching - but not improving the lives of, perhaps 115,000 students. Federal contribution to that exceeds $45 million - direct grants, Americorps, I3.)

And understand this: If the President and Congress choose to destroy this program by "zeroing out" its funding, they are admitting, fully, that they are liars. It will be obvious that they do not care "what works." That they do not care about improving literacy. That they do not choose "the best programs" for our children. And that they really are not interested in closing the achievement gap.

So, call your congressional members. Call the White House. Email them. Jam their Twitter accounts. Go stand outside their homes.

Saving the National Writing Project is a tiny thing in a massive budget battle which will re-define America, probably much for the worse. But if we can win this tiny battle, we might save a bit of hope for the future.

- Ira Socol