Across the Universe, Running on Empty

The real problem with student writing is not that it's incorrect--everybody makes errors in their writing--but that it seldom reveals what interesting and delightful people they are, or even a small fraction of the interesting lives they lead.

With the right amount of instruction and scaffolding, Sentence Modeling exercises offer an effective way to deal with this problem. But it's important to give your students plenty of opportunities to practice with any new phrase addition before asking them to try a modeling assignment. So manipulative scrambles, sentence combining, and written scrambles all come in handy for developing their ability to recognize these forms. Remember, to our students, as with most people, one phrase looks pretty much the same as another. And this is not just true in sentence writing. It takes training to distinguish the subtle differences in anything: to the untrained eye, one guitar looks the same as another; only a guitar freak can tell a Martin from a Gibson without looking at the name on the headstock.

In my first entry for this blog, I shared a passage by Bruce Catton that I loved, that I once wanted to share with my students, but didn't know how. I first read it early in my career, when I still had a lot to learn. Like most English teachers, I was most compelled by the emotional, aesthetic aspect of reading, something I still want for my students to experience. But when it came to teaching writing effectively, I needed more than mere exhortation, something beyond, "Isn't this beautiful? Write like this!" I needed to understand what it was I was seeing in those sentences that I could find some way of sharing with my students.

Catton did well to sense when his writing would benefit from a shift into pathos, something we should keep in mind when sharing a passage like this: that pathos, in the right moment, is perfectly appropriate, and in fact a crucial step students must take towards developing their writing voice, bringing us teachers closer to the fascinating and delightful individuals so often hiding in their hesitant prose. But if we look carefully, we will see that Catton achieves this powerful pathos through a combination of humble prepositional phrases and -ingbombs:

How far they had marched, those soldiers--down the lanes and cross-lots, over the cornfields to get into position, and from the distant corners of the country before that; they were marching, really out of one era and into another, leaving much behind them, going ahead to much that they did not know about. 

It turns out that prepositional phrases, working together with -ingbombs, create a powerful go-to combination writers often use when it comes time to describe a journey in depth. In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck famously uses the same combo to describe Route 66, the U.S. Highway that served as the main artery for the refugees of the Dustbowl:

Highway 66 is the main migrant road. 66—the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from Mississippi to Bakersfield—over the red lands and the grey lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California valleys.

In The World's Fastest Man: The Story of America's First Black Sports Hero, author Michael Kranish tells the story of Major Taylor, the champion bicycle racer who overcame (sigh) persistent racism to become the toast of the velodromes during the 1890's and early 1900's. On page 264, Kranish describes a journey Taylor took toward the end of his career, from his home in Worcester Massachusetts to Salt Lake City, where he would race against one of his great rivals:

Once leaving Daisy and Sydney behind, Taylor boarded the train, traveling to Chicago, and then headed over the plains, across the ranch lands of Rocky Mountains of Colorado, winding through high desert and the Wasatch Range, and finally arriving in Utah, where Mormon settlers arrived by wagon in 1847 and which became a state in 1896.

That's a single sentence of 55 words. How did Kranish do it? It's that -ingbomb-prepositional phrase combo (plus a nice Dime-Dropper at the end). Two pages later, he describes Taylor's journey home in much the same way:

For more than two thousand miles, Taylor traveled by train from Salt Lake City to Worcester, reversing the journey he had taken with such hope, back across the desert and the Rockies, the plains and the Appalachians, and finally through the hills and valleys of central Massachusetts, to Worcester's Union Station, where in past years he had arrived so triumphantly. 

This sentence is 61 words long. Taken together, the two sentences look not-quite identical, but pretty darn close--fraternal twins, let's say. In each sentence, the details are moved along by way of ingbombs and prepositional phrases.

Even with the most hesitant writers, prepositional phrases come so naturally that there is little need for much instruction on them. If I ask such a student to describe a typical journey, I could fully expect to see sentences like this:

• We went to my friend's house.
• We drove by school.
• We got stuck in traffic.
• We went by a bad accident.

To this day, I still have to remind myself that this kind of writing may well constitute an honest effort, perhaps even a mighty one, and that what I'm actually looking at is a good start. Perhaps, with enough practice and encouragement, by the end of the year, this student might be able to write the same passage like this:

We went to my friends house, driving by school, getting stuck in traffic, and going by a bad accident. 

What can we do to help make such writing happen? In the attachment below, you will see that I've taken those two Kranish sentences and broken them up into grammatical chunks--basically wherever a comma separates (or could separate) one phrase from another:

To ease the task of imitation, I've also included a line beneath each phrase so that students can proceed line by line, creating their own version. A few weeks ago, in one of my first attempts at "Distance Learning," I shared all of these texts--Catton, Steinbeck, and Kranish--with my students and asked them to see if they could use any of them as models to describe the truncated journey the Class of 2020 has taken. I encouraged them to step into the pathos mode by starting with the line "How far they had travelled, these seniors." Here's a sample from Albert, a student in one of my American Lit classes:

How far they have traveled, these seniors,
they first started high school,
wandering the campus,
and then headed in the classrooms,
through the days and years,
learning with friends along the way,
and finally reaching the fourth year,
where students ready themselves to live a new life of adults. 

After about four years of hard work and dedication,
the seniors left high school earlier than expected,
losing the excitement they have built up for graduation,
away from the classrooms and the campus,
the friends and the teachers,
and the high school life they remembered,
to their homes,
where they must live a life of social distancing and isolation.

What a beautiful and empathetic piece of prose! Albert has given me a glimpse into the loving core of his soul, and I like what I see. Yeah, it's not perfect, but perfection is overrated. When the time comes to try sentence modeling, I say go easy on them. Your students will often depart from the model in unexpected, even puzzling ways. No biggie. Always keep the long game in mind: you want them to get comfortable extending their sentences, between the commas, whichever forms they choose.