Warming Up

Just about any worthwhile piece of writing begins with a compelling hook. I have been working on just such a hook for about three months now.

Let me explain.

School starts again for me tomorrow when I will begin year 22 as a public school secondary English Language Arts instructor, and after five days of prep meetings and planning, I will welcome my next set of Happy Campers to the Campsite for a year of literary adventures. (Cheesy? Probably, but teenagers are not above cheese, especially when the Camp director thrives on a diet of cheddar.)

So, after a summer of reading and planning, what is the best new strategy I will take back with me for year 22? A new cooperative learning design? A provocative new text to read? A new system for annotating student work? Nope. While I may have all of those stored in my backpack for our new Camping adventure, the best strategies I have learned this summer come from my own adventure over the last three months with 9 Round. That is where I have been working on this compelling hook.

I started going to my local 9 Round gym just about a month before school let out for summer vacation. I was frustrated for a number of personal and professional reasons, and I believe the stress that soaked through every aspect of my life during the previous six months was contributing to a number of negative repercussions: a short temper, regular neck pains and numbness in my arms, and an incline on the scale that I just couldn’t seem to fight no matter what I did. After trying a variety of methods to combat these effects, my insightful husband proposed this idea: “Would you like to try 9 Round?”. As a physical educator, he knew well the benefits of exercise, but my daily walks and ordinary gym workouts had stalled in their effectiveness. Plus, he knew I just needed to punch out some of those frustrations that plagued me. So, I tried 9 Round.

Now, this is not one of those weight loss triumph stories that end with a sales pitch for the program I chose (but I would be happy to share the story of the beginnings of my physical transformation with you if you would like to hear some time). In fact, this is not about weight loss at all, even though I continue to pursue the golden balance of weight loss / muscle gain. This is about my classroom, the Campsite.

The truly unexpected benefit of working out at 9 Round is that I re-learned some valuable lessons about providing the optimal space for personal growth that I know I can use in my classroom –  lessons that will enable me to empower my students; to help them become stronger readers, writers, thinkers, and communicators; and to build their stamina, independence, and knowledge as they grow.

So, over the next 9 blog entries, I hope to articulate 9 Rounds of lessons I have learned from my trainers at 9 Round that will make me a more effective trainer of young writers.

Round 1 – Let Me Start Where I Am

When I came to 9 Round for the first time near the end of April, a little over three months ago, there was no way I could complete as many hooks in 30 seconds or get my round kicks as high as my trainers; it will take years of training to become as strong and fast as they are, just as it took them countless hours of training to achieve the level of fitness they have. My trainers knew that I had to begin where I could and build up from there. They didn’t expect that past trainers should have taught me anything; in fact, they didn’t even bother to ask about my past trainers. On my first visit, Tammy walked me through every round herself, and when I started on Round 1, she asked me if I was comfortable jumping rope. I replied, “I can jump rope, but I am better at skipping rope.”

Tammy’s response: “Good. Try jumping. If you need to skip, do that.”

I jumped for about 20 licks, trying to impress her, but I wore out soon, so I moved to skipping rope. Within a minute, I started missing the rope and had to start over. When she saw I was struggling, Tammy offered me the mock ropes so I could build rhythm and stamina without having to stop to readjust the ropes every few swings. She encouraged me to start with the ropes each time, but not to be afraid to use the mock ropes as I needed to. After a few visits of mixing the real ropes and the mock ropes, Joleen, another of my trainers, told me that she wanted to see me go 10 seconds more each time with the real ropes. Within a few visits, I was on the real ropes the entire time, even as I still have to skip rope instead of jump. They allowed me to start where I was comfortable, and they watched and prodded me along for progress with positive comments.

Again, just like the jump ropes, Joleen welcomed my starting push-ups on my knees (what they used to call ‘girl’ push-ups). After a few weeks, though, she told me to move on to one knee while the other stayed extended and then switch when I got tired. “From now on, I want to see you using only one knee,” she explained. Next step, as my arms grown stronger, are full push-ups on my toes. Likewise, I started slowly but strong on the overhead bag, and Tammy told me to stay there as I built rhythm and speed, too.

When my students write their first piece for me the first week of school, I cannot expect to have them at a publishable level with their second piece. I also cannot expect them to all enter my classroom with the same writing instruction and experience. I cannot presume that they know certain skills and then become offended when they don’t. Why would I ever return to 9 Round if a trainer had said to me, “You can’t jump rope? You only know how to skip”? I wouldn’t have returned if I felt shamed for not being at an acceptable entry level, and while I can never imagine myself shaming a student for not entering my class with what I deem an acceptable entry level of writing skills, I may need to be reminded that they must begin writing right away, and they must begin with what they know. We, together, can take off from that starting point.

And everyone’s starting point will be different. Someone in the class will have read for pleasure her entire life and will be able to devour much more complex texts than most others in the class and will yearn to experiment with her writing to imitate her favorite writers. Others will brag about their high scores in past English classes without ever reading a single text by themselves. I can’t clip the proverbial wings of my high flyer, just as I can’t expect the reluctant reader to follow her flight path. I have to see what they can do on their own right away, and we start there for all of them, even as starting positions vary as much as their personalities do.

Then, I have to provide their individual literacy workout regimens. I have to watch as they work, determine when they are ready to move to the next step, and prescribe that next step just for them. Here is the beauty of writing instruction as opposed to other classes such as math. While everyone is supposed to be able to divide integers by the end of lesson 3, for example,  in English class, we can personally respond to an individual’s skills just as Tammy and Joleen and my other trainers respond to me personally. Once Suzie has learned to maintain a single focus throughout one piece of writing, I can prod her positively to start looking at adding more specific details to support her ideas. Yet, Sam’s writing seems technically perfect, so his next step is to work on adding voice and personality in effective ways. In no way would I expect my 9 Round trainer to expect me to revert back to mock ropes because someone  else in the gym needed more time on them, and similarly, I would hate for them to expect me to get in as many hits on the overhead bag as someone who has been working out there for years just because we were working out at the same time.

**Ding. Round 1 is over. Fighters to our corners as we await Round 2.**

Round 2 – Allow Me Some Choice

September 2, 2018. We now have two weeks in the books for this school year, and after the orientation, introductions, and diagnostic exercises, we are now at the beginning stages of solid instruction. That means I must begin to differentiate, to break off from the one-way street into a many different tiny avenues, all that must eventually lead to nearly the same destination, which are the specific end goals I have designed for my classes.

My experience working out at 9 Round has helped me in this task, as well.

At first glance, a workout at 9 Round would appear to be repetitive and predictable. Each workout consists of 9 rounds, and those 9 rounds stay the same every visit. Round one will always have jump ropes, round eight always has the overhead bags, etc. Yet, I do not think that I have ever had the exact same workout despite visiting there at least three days a week for about three months. In addition, I do not think that I have completed the exact same workout as anyone else with me in the gym that day. Similar, maybe, but not identical. That is because within the predictable routine, 9 Round varies the individual exercises at each round and offers me choices.

For instance, if I were to decide I didn’t want to battle the jump rope on round one today, then I could choose medicine ball jacks instead. Sometimes at round one, our trainers have devised a challenge of exercise variety where we do a different exercise for each letter in our name. Even within those choices, my trainer Kendall told me one day that I could mix up my medicine ball jacks with tapping the bag with my toes in a light jog while holding the medicine ball. As I still struggle with skipping rope sometimes, I have found I do much better if I can stroll-skip, moving forward as I skip rope. Trainer Tammy has encouraged me in my stroll-skip, calling out one day, “Use the whole gym, Kristie, if it helps you to keep jumping rope.” Within any round that includes weights, I choose the size of the weights, sand bags, or bars that I use.

In between each round, a trainer calls out a quick exercise for everyone in the gym to do together, maybe burpees, maybe push-ups or planks, or maybe crunches or a wall sit. It gives us a time to come back together, either ramp up our heart rates or allow our heart rates to slow back to the fat burning zones, and transition to the next round. Yet, even as we come back together, we always have the choice of running a sprint during that time instead of the called exercise.

Since I have choices within the routine, I can tailor my workout to my personal needs and preferences. Not that I have permission to slack off because the trainers are always there to make sure I am making choices that will improve my fitness and help me maintain proper form, but I do not have to follow the cliched cookie-cutter workout formulas.

Such choice in my classroom can improve my literacy instruction, as well. While I may be teaching a required essay format for a standardized test or reading a particular genre and learning its tenets, I can offer some choice to my students to help them tailor their literacy workout to their personal needs and preferences. For example, when teaching rhetorical analysis for the AP exam, I teach them the process of writing an analysis using a central text, but then I can offer them a menu of similar texts from which to choose when they write their own rhetorical analysis essays. For example, I could give them three or four excerpts from letters or pamphlets from the Revolutionary War or speeches from the Civil Rights Movement or satirical commentary on pop culture. They choose the one they find interesting or the one they feel they understand the best.

For broader writing instruction, I may choose mentor texts of a particular mode, such as narrative essays or nature observations or critical reviews, read them together to determine their common elements, techniques, and purposes, and then allow my students to write their own, all of which will depend on their personal choices following within the general pattern of the genre with me as trainer, guiding them to make effective choices. They would choose the personal story to tell, or the area of nature to observe and the reflection derived from it, or the concert/album/movie/restaurant to review.

Of course, research has shown for many years that allowing student choice when selecting reading materials improves student “buy-in” and therefore increases our chances of building their reading skills. Any time we feel as if we have a say-so in our learning and any time we actually enjoy what we are reading or writing, then we care more about completing the task and completing it well. Plus, choice is key for differentiating learning to the diversity of skill levels and interests and backgrounds present in our classroom. Just like choice is key for differentiating the physical workouts at 9 Round to the diversity of skill levels and needs and goals of those visiting the gym.

There is no way I would continue in a workout program prescribed for someone at a different skill level, and no way I would respond positively to a trainer who tried to force me to follow a rote and repetitive formula every time I entered the gym. In fact, if one of my trainers were so heavy-handed as to demand my following a rigid method, I would grow to resent him or her. Just like a student will grow to resent a teacher who always requires papers to be written following a prescribed formula or who always requires students to read the exact same text using the same teaching method for those texts.

The magic happens, as my trainer Joleen would say, when I am allowed personal choice within a trusted framework proven effective by research and experience, and with guidance from a qualified trainer who watches, encourages, and evaluates my progress with my personal needs and goals in mind. At 9 Round, the trusted framework is the dependable 9 rounds of different exercises that will always be there when I walk in. The choice comes from an open dialogue between my trainer and me; my trainer knows how to get me where I want to go and knows me well enough to guide me there. In my classroom, the trusted framework is the exemplars from professionals and researched-backed best practices. I must be the trainer who knows what works according to research and experience, and who also knows my students well enough to guide them in their choices and build their skills until they reach our common literacy goals.

**Ding. Round 2 is complete. Back to our corners for a break before we begin Round 3.**