When I started teaching English at St. Elizabeth, I was
dying to develop a Creative Writing class. 
Not having grown up anywhere near the inner city, I was intrigued by the
verve of East Oakland, by the different modes of expression that seemed to fill
the streets.  I wanted to give my
students an opportunity to add their voices to the racket, to feel that they
were contributing to the mass.  When I
got the Creative Writing class going, it was a hit – we studied hip hop, did big
circle critiques, learned how to support each other’s writing and took field
trips to Youth Speaks poetry slams.  A
friend of mine who is an artist taught at St. Elizabeth for a few years, and we
collaborated to create an art show/ poetry slam night every May that would draw
hundreds of people from our school and neighborhood community.  It was called Delivery Room, and it would
always coincide with the unveiling of the newest edition of Clatter, the
literary magazine I started, which featured student writing and art.  I remember the students taking great pride
that their voices were published and celebrated, and actually reaching a broad
audience.  I even took copies of Clatter
to cafés and businesses around Fruitvale because it seemed essential that this
work get out there.

After buying a house in the suburbs and starting a family, I
came to Carondelet where I inherited the Writing Club.  It was a small, quirky bunch, who would meet
in my room once a week at lunch.  We agreed that I
would give them a prompt, they would write for about fifteen minutes then share
their work with the group.  It was in
Writing Club that I learned about fan fiction, and also realized how poorly I
understood the world of an all-girl school. 
Being moderator of the Writing Club was one of my greatest failures in
my time at Carondelet.  The number of
members dwindled under my leadership, and by the end of the year we were down
to about four girls.  One member decided
at some point that she would no longer physically write, but would imagine
responses while the others wrote and then share what she had imagined with the
group.  Some weeks only one girl showed
up, and I would still give her the prompt and we would sit in an awkward
silence while she wrote.  When I broached
the idea of publishing some of their work in a literary magazine, the girls
immediately asked if they could be anonymous, fiercely resisting the idea of
attaching their names to their work.  I
thought it would be ridiculous to publish a magazine of anonymous writers, so
after a few weeks of me trying to encourage them to take pride in their writing
and own it, the idea fizzled and we tacitly agreed to not mention it again.

My experience with the writing club reminded me of the
inherent vulnerability of having an audience of peers at the other end of a
piece of writing. Out of a respect for my students’ privacy, and with a desire
to allow them to write in a safe space that was uninhibited by potential peer
criticism, this concept of anonymity seeped into my teaching.  Like most high school writing assignments,
much of the work produced in my classes has been completed in solitude, with
encouragement and feedback along the way, only to be chucked out into the great
academic void at the end, from which it will rebound a few weeks later with a grade
and comments affixed.  In my classes we
discuss the concept of audience, and how to most effectively convey ideas to
that audience, but it is generally an exercise in imagination.  The reality, as we all know but don’t often
acknowledge, is that I alone am the audience, a busy, middle-aged man slashing
away with a red pen in an empty theater.

As I’ve gotten better footing at Carondelet, one of the
classes I have come to really enjoy teaching is A.P. Language and Composition.  The project that I get the best feedback at
the end of the year on is the Controversial Topic Project.  For this project, each student chooses some
current controversial topic that they are going to follow over the course of
the year.  I try to encourage them to
find something that is relevant and complex, like the removal of Confederate
monuments in the South this year. They read books related to their topics,
analyze the rhetorical and argumentative strategies of op-eds that are written
about the topic, create satirical works, and share often with their classmates
so that we all become more informed about the world around us.  In the first few years this project
culminated with a research paper that was handed in on the last day, but I was
always disappointed that these papers felt formulaic and lacked the enthusiasm
that my students had shown for their topics throughout the year.

Last year, in a conversation with Hayley, she told me about
a paper in college that she had been assigned that her professor required to be
sent out as a letter to someone.  I loved
this idea, and for the final A.P. Language project last year, I had my students
identify some issue within their controversial topic that they felt strongly
about, and then write an informed, research-filled letter to someone who could
enact some change regarding the topic.  I
encouraged them to keep it local and realistic in scope, not write a letter to
Donald Trump about why the border wall is a bad idea.  One student, who studied transgender bathroom
rights, wrote a letter to a librarian at the Danville library to suggest that
their senior reading group read a memoir about a transgender person.  Her rationale was that people who are older
and more politically conservative often do not have much exposure to, or
understanding of, transgender people. 
Mark DeSaulnier got peppered with about seven letters, and has so far
responded to two.  He assured one of my
students that the next time the topic of public transparency regarding drone programs
comes up on the House floor, he will express some of the concerns the student
offered.  Administrators and faculty
members from Carondelet and De la Salle received letters making informed
suggestions for small things that could be done that would improve our school
community.

Overall I consider this project to be one of the most
successful things I have done in my teaching career for the simple reason that
my students were writing something that they felt personally invested in,
knowing that their writing would reach a real audience.  We were no longer going through the motions
for a pretend audience. They had become stakeholders in something larger than
an essay, and rhetorical choices like diction, sentence structure and
organization mattered because they were trying to communicate something to
someone who did not even necessarily see it coming.  This is not to say that all of my students
were brimming with enthusiasm; I learned this past week that some did not
actually send their letters.  But a number
of these students wanted to be heard, which struck me as similar to my Creative
Writing students at St. Elizabeth standing on a stage in front of hundreds of
people performing their poems.

This past week, I was again reminded about the importance of
authentic audience.  I am teaching
English 3 Blended this year, and much of the work for this course will be
completed online, which is a little out of my comfort zone.  I have been tinkering with how to have
effective online discussions in this class, specifically how to transfer writing
journals into an online format. 
Typically, I have my English 3 students buy a Composition book in the
beginning of the year, and many days begin with a ten to fifteen-minute journal
prompt, in which I try to push them to consider themes and ideas we will be
working with for that day.  I have always
liked the idea of low stakes frequent writing practice, but unfortunately the
writing produced in these journals is often uninspired, and rarely goes into
the depth that I want.  

For the first
journal of English 3 Blended, I had my students respond to a prompt on the
Schoology discussion board, and then required that they write responses to two
other students in class.  I gave a
specific word count for the writing, and had them go through the process the
first time in class so I could see how it would go. 
While my students were silently typing away, I realized that this
generation is pretty comfortable expressing themselves online.  Instagram posts, Snapchat stories, and even
text messages are intended for audiences to see.  At the end of class, I asked the students how
the discussion had gone, especially compared to journals that they had done
previously that were not read. 
Overwhelmingly they responded that not only did they like posting their
writing to the class forum, but that they felt they got more out of the
assignment.  I attribute some of this to
the presence of a real audience.  What
they said suddenly mattered in a different way, and they had to own their ideas
and words.  It’s a little
embarrassing to admit that my epiphany was based on something so seemingly
obvious, but we all know how easy it is to get set in certain routines as a
teacher.

My takeaway from this realization is twofold.  First of all, real audiences need to be found
for student work.  While it is
unrealistic that every piece of writing is read by an audience, I am going to try to create more situations where my students’ rhetorical situations have
authenticity.  While there is
apprehension in writing for the real “other”, having an authentic audience can make
students more invested in their work.  I
know our department has discussed writing contests, and maybe we could even
create our own.  But at the very least I
can give my students more opportunities to read each other’s work, not
necessarily to critique, but to listen to each other’s ideas. 

My second takeaway has to do with the challenge to reimagine academic life at Carondelet, specifically with the development of the new STEM building.  As the English department, our role in the future of our school sometimes seems unclear to me.  Will English classes continue to follow the traditional model of students primarily reading and responding to works of literature?  How can we transfer the skills that we teach our students into a tech-centered curriculum in ways that are meaningful and relevant?  Where does innovation exist in an English class?  When I started teaching, I used to dream of my exceptional students becoming literary figures, writers of important books.  Now I wonder if I should hope that they will be producers of meaningful content in this digital age. There are many exciting career opportunities for our students that exist in the realm of creating content on the internet, and the goal always seems to be to garner the largest audience possible.

I’ll finish with Arcade Fire’s song “Infinite Content”, an interesting commentary on the vast audiences of the internet.