A Spark of Creativity

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When I was a young reading teacher, I struggled to understand why my student Buddy hated to read. A walking cloud of dust, Buddy usually wore a dirt-colored tee shirt smeared with grease marks from the many oil changes he did after school daily in a local garage. Buddy was in school to collect a diploma, and he desperately wanted it. But if he couldn’t pass the required reading test, he could not graduate. I, too, wanted Buddy to graduate. But I wanted more. I wanted him to discover the magic of books. My curiosity began to gnaw at me. How could I make that happen?

In a spark of creativity my curiosity drove me to write the story of a fictional Buddy, a student who would mirror the inner turmoil of one of my nonreaders. What made him tick? Where did he work? What car did he rev up in parking lot after school each day?  What music was blaring from his radio? What is the cartoon he kept drawing all over his notebook?

Buddy, the character, began to pour out in a short story, “Buddy and Me.” I began to see inside of this imaginary student. Suddenly I had a new understanding of who he was. Destitute. Sometimes hungry.  Taunted by a brash gang of boys in the parking lot. Happy to end his day at a local garage where he changed oil filters in cars because it steadied him and gave him some spending money. Secretly he did read, but his reading was largely limited to Car and Drive magazine. Possibly Garfield cartoon books.

“Buddy and Me” was the first story I ever published in a teen magazine. Of course this is not what is important. In hindsight I see what matters is that my curiosity, sparked by my creativity, drove me forward to research, study, and write the story of a genuine nonreader, and in the process, I came to see the world through the lens of students like the real Buddy. Disadvantaged students who had an uphill battle when they crossed the threshold into any class. In truth, this writing made me a better teacher. Maybe a better person.

What about the real Buddy?  He learned to find main ideas in passages, and he became good at summarizing stories, especially if it was about cars. These skills helped him pass the required reading graduation test.  While I know Buddy graduated, I cannot remember if he finished reading a book.

But thanks to adolescent writers who became big when I was teaching, many of our nonreaders became genuine readers in high school. Like most reading teachers, I read dozens of young adult books in search of the right stories for my students, and my bet is that I probably handed a copy of S. E Hinton’s The Outsiders to Buddy. If I did, I believe he would have liked it. Why?  Because it is a timeless story that was real for Buddy. Like Ponyboy, Buddy came from a parentless family and had a gang of close-knit friends like the Greasers. Like Ponyboy, Buddy’s friends were mocked in the lunchroom and sometimes attacked behind school dumpsters or in parking lots at night by the wealthier kids. And like Ponyboy, Buddy had suffered painful losses. I have never forgotten when Buddy told our class about how his best friend had been shot and killed at a party. Accidently.

In writing this blog, I realize how important my nonreaders were to me. I learned to understand those who struggled with learning. Those who often came to school hungry. Those who came from homes where reading was not a high priority and those who would need to make a living without a degree. Those with one or no parent. I learned to care about their struggle and to respect them. I learned to advocate for public education for all, and I have always voted with them in mind.

Each story, each experience we have makes us. In writing them we have a chance to see what we have learned. Maybe we can even find a bit of understanding or wisdom to carry forward. I am grateful for the sparks of creativity that ignite my writing and for the unexpected learning that often comes of finding our stories.

May your creativity spark your stories.

Finding Meaning

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Stories are my passion. Everyone around me knows this. I have long said that humans are story-making beings, but after reading the work of social psychologist Timothy Wilson, I think we are also meaning-making beings. Wilson explains that we develop stories to help us understand ourselves. To make our meaning. To help us find happiness. (See Wilson’s book Redirect.)

 Meaning-making sounds like a messy business, but I found it fascinating to explore through the lens of our stories. I suspect we all have themes or even metaphors that can help us understand ourselves. Can’t we see threads of meaning woven through our lives? One of my threads is clearly cancer. I have had it, but long before I became a survivor, cancer knocked on my door, hoping to be my teacher. This is how that journey began.

At age four I loved playing crazy eights with my eight-year-old neighbor, Sandy. We thought it was funny we had the same name. While my birthday missed the cut-off for starting kindergarten, Sandy didn’t go to school because she had leukemia, and her immune system was weak. At the time nothing about that seemed strange to me. We played cards, enacted life stories with our dolls, and tried to twirl like the ballerinas we wanted to be. We spent whole days together–and then we didn’t. Sandy went back to the hospital, and I don’t believe she ever came out.

I remember my mother talking to me about Sandy dying, and I struggled with what she was saying, and I can’t be sure, but I think I cried. Afterwards I remember going downstairs to our basement that my dad was turning into a playroom with black and white vinyl floors. I tried to twirl as I had often done for Sandy, but it didn’t feel right. My stomach fluttered uneasily so I stopped. Instead, I set out all my dolls. A gesture to honor Sandy, I thought.

Then I began to sing. Loudly.  Now my mother says I was born singing—and off-key. By age four everyone (but me) knew I had no hope of being the Taylor-Swift-type prodigy of my day, but I did know how to make up a song and belt it out into the world with the force of a tornado.

At this time in my vinyl-floored basement, I did exactly that. I sang for Sandy. To tell her I loved her. To tell her I missed her profoundly. For I did. I have no clue what kind of gibberish burst out of me, but what I do know is that I sang with as much heart as Celine Dion used to sing My Heart Will Go On. And as sometimes surprises us, there was this feeling of being heard. Perhaps by Sandy. God knows, I was singing loudly enough that if it is possible, she might have heard—and it felt she did. But eventually I realized my mom was sitting quietly on the basement stairs, tears in her eyes. Then I went and hugged her.

But now, decades later, as I write this, I realize that this was one of my first attempts to make meaning of what was happening in my life. At four, I didn’t write in a journal or consciously reflect on my personal meaning as I do now. But I understood a death had happened and that I needed to find a way to take the pain and make a peace with it. By finding my words and singing, I believe I did.

Be Curious

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One afternoon she waddled like a duck into my classroom. A heavy woman with flighty gray hair shooting in all directions, Mrs. Reed glared at me harshly. “Are you teaching music?” she blurted. I nodded. “That needs to stop. We teach English in this department—not music.”

“But they are reading the lyrics from the ‘Sounds of Silence’ and learning to understand” — but the door had already slammed behind her. Of course, I understand this better now. Mrs. Reed was a school fixture who had haunted the halls of Mesa High for decades. I was the new reading teacher foisted on her. Hired by a principal, not her.

By now I have seen many young teachers charge through the doors of schools with new ideas that rocked the way the elders had taught for decades. It can be unsettling. Reed loved “Dover Beach,” and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and everything Advanced Placement.  But the problem was half of the students didn’t love this curriculum and many struggled to read any of it.

My first year of teaching psychology in Indiana, a shy senior named Tommy pulled me aside one day after class. He told me nervously he could not read our textbook—and he wanted to. I was stunned. How could this happen? How could a teenager weave his way through a decade of schooling and not be able to read well? These questions morphed into–how could you take a sixteen-year-old and inspire them to learn to read? How could we excite young minds to explore words, to question, and to discover ideas? Could we teach curiosity? For me, these questions became a long-time passion.

That summer I headed west to graduate school in California, and in the twist and turns of living, I fell in love and married Steve. We landed in Arizona where the Air Force assigned him to teach pilot training, and I enrolled at ASU. Down the street from our new home was Mesa High School. The first time I saw it, I felt a shock of energy run down my spine. Surprised, I turned to Steve and said, “I think I am going to teach there.” In the coming year, as I worked on a graduate degree in reading, I landed a job at Mesa High.

In August I moved into room 202 with boxes filled with lesson plans I had been crafting and books with song lyrics from the pop artists I loved–Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, and of course, the Beetles. Songs the kids would know, and I hoped they would want to read and talk about. While graphic novels had not appeared yet, I had collected a box of Marvel comic books and stacks of old Road and Track and Seventeen magazines. I stocked my room with adolescent novels that I was devouring in my spare time–books like I Know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan and The Outsiders by SE Hinton.   When I hung my inspirational posters in the room, I knew I was ready.

The first week of school was a honeymoon. I liked the vulnerability of my adolescent reading students and their questions, and they welcomed my youthful enthusiasm. But of course, the head of the English Department was not so enthusiastic. After complaining to me that I was teaching music, not English, Mrs. Reed rejected my request to order a classroom set of The Pigman, a book that had been lauded by librarians across the country to hook teens on reading.

A week later I sat in my first English Department meeting during our lunch period. I was slated to share with the other teachers what I had been hired to do–test students, teach reading, and support teachers with reading materials. The principal had set it up.

For forty minutes Mrs. Reed droned on telling teachers about the open house, the new xerox machine, and how to manage school photos. Five minutes were left before the end-of-lunch bell would ring, and Mrs. Reed turned to me. “We won’t have time for you today, dear.” She called me “dear,” but she said it like I was pure poison.

“Oh,” I stammered as I quickly stood and began to pass out a simple sheet with the services I could offer. “I would love to work with this department on reading or on strategies to involve kids, and I welcome your questions—”

“Dear, we are English teachers, and we don’t need reading services,” Reed’s voice thundered across the room like a foghorn. “There is no time for questions. We are here to teach.”  Her right fist slammed across her podium, her left hand waved us toward the door, and English teachers hurriedly scattered.

I didn’t sleep well that night because I had begun to wonder if I were going to survive this new teaching home. Would I be allowed to test and serve students who needed reading help? Could I provide support for teachers? Or would the long-time English department chair make me the school pariah?  She had made a good start at it.

There is an old adage in teaching, when things are tough, close the door to your classroom and teach. And I did. Without sets of books or textbooks, my students and I initially undertook the news as a topic for learning. I assigned every student to dig through magazines and newspapers to find articles to share in class.

“Be curious!”  I advised. And we started to keep “curiosity journals.” On those pages my students reacted to what they read and raised questions for our discussions. Who are hippies? Why are Beetles so popular? What caused the war? How do we stop it?  Charged with student energy, I forgot about how the English department had shut me out.

Then a couple of months later at the faculty mailboxes, I met a new English teacher. Billie Cox. “I liked your handout,” she said. “You are bringing important work to this school—and I have questions for you,” she said this with a warm smile and a face framed by honey-colored hair.

“You have questions?” I asked with surprise.

“I have many questions! As a matter of fact, I think learning is all about questions!” Her laughter tumbled over the top of her words, but her voice was no-nonsense. “Let’s start with—how can we help kids at this school with their reading?”

A powerful surge of warmth flooded through me. “Gr—great question!” I stammered. “Can . . . can we get together?”

This, of course, was the real beginning of our work to bring reading and questioning to students who needed it in the English department and across the school. By the end of the year, even Mrs. Reed was sending students to be tested.

But more than that, this moment was a turning point in my life. It was the beginning of a life-long friendship with a no-nonsense educator who cared not only passionately about our students but about the beauty to be found in questions, in exploring ideas, and living a life where curiosity could be at the center. I am grateful she remains my friend. I am equally grateful she still peppers my life with questions.