Revision: A Guest Post

Tom is one of my oldest professional colleagues. He's younger than me, so not that kind of old, but we've both been at the same school for over twenty years, making us some of the old timers now. For the last decade or so, he's been teaching mostly math, but when he's not doing that, he's writing. His writing career started at an early age, and he's been writing ever since. I knew this about him when I decided to take on the National Novel Writing Month challenge a few years back. I am going to take credit for convincing him to give it a try, and he has kept going with it, long after I quit. He knew he had some good stories to tell, and for the last couple of years, he's been pursuing finding an agent for one of his NaNoWriMo books. Happily, this is the year for him, as he signed with an agent who is excited about his middle grade book, FOLLOWING INFINITY. We decided to do guest posts on each other's blogs, and I asked him to share some thoughts on revision, which is a challenge for most of us, no matter what our writing ability. 

Our district began specializing in intermediate grades ten years ago, which means I haven’t formally taught anything to do with writing since 2004. There have been times I’ve missed working with a curricular area I’m so passionate about, but when I read Betsy’s blog and learn of the strategies she incorporates into her classroom, I’m reminded of what an uphill battle it can be to engage elementary students in writing. Then it seems that maybe working with numbers and shapes isn’t so bad after all.

In a post Betsy wrote about revision, she described how she had students pair off to share their writing and offer each other suggestions about how to improve their work. Too often the students would report back to her that the writing was already good enough so no changes were necessary. Speaking as a teacher, hearing a comment like this would have me mentally roll my eyes and redirect the students to try digging a little deeper, and give them some direction of what to look for. To hear this comment as a writer could quite possibly drive me into pulling my hair out. To put it simply, a lot of what people would think of as writing takes place in the revising. I’ve made the comparison for people that drafting a manuscript is a lot like a sculptor getting their hands on a massive lump of clay, and the revising that follows is when that clay is gradually molded into art. To highlight my point I decided to keep track of how many times I’ve made changes to this post you’re reading before I decided it was ready to send to Betsy. Updating this paragraph will be the last thing I edit before I send it, so I can now say I’ve read and revised this post in some way at least twenty different times.

I thought it was great Betsy was trying to get her students to work with critique partners, since that’s what many aspiring and professional writers do. The trick is finding people who will understand what you’re trying to accomplish, even if they don’t necessarily share your vision, and will be able to read critically and provide you with honest feedback. I’ve been lucky enough to have a small group of people over the years (Betsy being one of them) I’ve been able to rely on as some of my first readers. Collecting opinions from different people helps you identify any problems you might not see yourself because you’re too close to the work. If you have a lot of people identify how something about your story isn’t working for them, it’s pretty clear that needs to be addressed. But sometimes you’ll get contradicting feedback and you have to go with your gut on what to do. Example: Last summer a teacher friend read through a middle grade manuscript I had just finished revising. She gave me some great feedback, including points about one particular (and I’d say pivotal) scene that left her feeling so disturbed she had to stop reading and walk away from it for awhile. It made me wonder if I had pushed the moment too far for the age group of the target audience. Fast forward to eight months later when I received revision notes from my agent Carrie, who also had comments on that same moment but in the opposite direction. Hearing from different people, especially regarding a scene that could be polarizing, helped me clarify why it was important to keep it; ‘disturbed’ was the reaction I had been going for after all, and it worked. But without the benefit of outside opinions to consider I may not have reflected on that scene the way I did, and as a result I might have missed out on newer ideas that stemmed from that moment.

I’ll admit, when the revision notes came in from my agent I opened them with an equal mix of excitement and trepidation. We’d already discussed an overview of her ideas during a couple of phone calls so I knew what to expect. I was looking forward to seeing her specific notes and getting back to work because I knew she understood what I was going for and saw ideas to explore that would make the manuscript even better. But it meant a lot of revising to do on a project I’d already done a fair amount of heavy lifting on three or four times before. Her feedback wasn’t exactly “I love this so much, now go back rewrite the whole thing,” but some of the changes she suggested were big: edits that could result in removing entire chapters, developing characters she wanted to see more of, cutting some characters out, redefining the relationships between others, and expanding on sections of the story to develop the overall progression. This was no thirty seconds of us standing in the back of the classroom and then me telling Mrs. Quist that “my partner thought it was good so I don’t really have to change anything.”

But if I hadn’t gotten that kind of feedback, I would have been disappointed. For her to think about the manuscript so critically shows me how invested she is in seeing this become something more. And I have to say, it was both reassuring and a little scary to know just how dead-on her suggestions were. With the work I’ve been able to do on it so far, I can already see the new directions the story will go and what it will be like when it’s finished.

And once it is, you can bet I’ll be anxious to hear Mrs. Quist’s opinion.

If you would like to read more about Tom's writing life, plus a host of other topics (he has an extensive music collection, views a variety of movies, and is generally a reflective kind of guy), I recommend you check out his blog What I Did On My Summer Vacation. http://ernieyoureafool.blogspot.com

On-line posters

Next year I’ll be doing something new: all of our fourth grade teachers will be looping up to fifth grade, keeping our same classes that we’ve had this year. I’m very excited about this for a number of reasons. I’ve been in fourth grade for thirteen years, and I’m feeling like I need a curriculum change, and I’m glad I’m moving up as I like the complexity of the content as the grades move up. I’m also happy to be spending another year with these kids; we’ve had a great group and I’m glad I can continue on with them.

That being said, I know that I need to mix things up a bit for next year, and provide new opportunities for these students so that it doesn’t seem like a complete repeat of fourth grade. One area I plan to have kids use more often is technology in the classroom.  They need to be able to comfortably word process a page-length document by the end of fifth grade, and I know that much of their work in middle school will be done and turned in on computers, so I want to be sure that they’ve had opportunities to do that in my classroom before moving on.

I also want to hit the ground running in the fall, since I don’t have to take all the time to get to know them like I have all the other years, and to that end, I’ve started to introduce some things that we can practice now, and then hopefully just review a bit before putting it into independent practice in September.

One project we’ve tried is making multi-media posters using our district’s Discovery Education account. Each student has a user name and password, and once they log on, they can begin to use some of the tools Discovery Ed has. I had my students  make multi-media posters about the Dust Bowl, since we had just read a nonfiction text in guided reading. Using the Board Builder program, students were able to include text boxes, still photos, and maybe best of all, short movies from the Discovery Ed collection, all to give the best information they could about the Dust Bowl.

The posters are far from perfect, but the students were very engaged each time they had a chance to work on them. They especially liked selecting movies (no surprises there), and many included more than would be ideal on their posters. It would be great to have them look at each other’s posters and offer suggestions, and I may get to that this spring, but that would be a definite skill to practice in the fall.  They were also quick to pick up the basics, and helped each other out, making it much easier for me to get around to help on more difficult tasks. They could even access this account from home, and a few students did that.

I’m including a couple of examples of posters below; there could be all kinds of discussions about how effective or distracting the backgrounds are, if there is enough information in the text boxes, and what else is needed to make the poster more easily understood. But it’s a start for now, and will definitely be an option for “showing what you know” in the fall.