Call Me Charlie

Issue 292

You guys,

I stood in front of the classroom waiting for my introduction. Fifteen kids, aged 10-12, filtered in from recess and sat at round tables in groups of four or five. The teacher sat at the back of the room and welcomed me, and for the next thirty minutes I was to teach them about personal writing.

This is a feature of Boundless education called Endeavor Time. Parents are encouraged to come into the classroom to share their expertise or a hobby, and teach the kids something, anything, of their choosing. (I debated between personal writing and how to wrap a present.) Most parents sign up for their own kids’ classrooms. I felt I had little to offer George and Layla’s classes—maybe I could read them a book—but teaching about writing was what I really wanted to do.

I have no experience teaching kids how to write. My only experience is with adults, over Zoom. Three weeks earlier I spent hours making a slide deck, including one that said, “Writing can be hard, but it can also be fun.” I ran into the 10-12 class teacher, Veronica, and asked her multiple questions: Will I be able to connect my laptop? Should I just send you the slides? Are slides okay?

“You can’t do slides,” Sam told me later when my slides were nearly finished. “Slides are boring.”

“I’m doing slides,” I told him, thinking about how long I spent on the first one: a picture of me and Sam and the kids and bullet points about myself including, I love Christmas, Harry Potter, and dancing to Taylor Swift in front of a mirror.

The next morning I looked over my slides. They were so basic except that I used a purple font instead of black, and still, they took me multiple mornings to create. I clicked through each one. “Personal Writing,” said one. “Details,” said another. I messaged Veronica on Slack and let her know I had decided to nix my slides. I wondered what she thought of the mother who kept checking in with her and asking questions about the brief, simple session with her class at the end of a school day. I wondered if any of the other parents agonized over Endeavor Time.

On a walk home from school one day, with three of the older girls who George and Layla were completely obsessed with—we had already scheduled each of them to babysit for us—I realized they were all ten years old. “I’m doing Endeavor Time in your class!” I told them. The girls gasped and all wanted to know about what. “Writing!” I told them. The three of them all said some version of, “We love writing! We can’t wait!”

I figured I would take one thing I have taught adults—a tool to make their writing better, more personal, and more fun to write—and teach it to these kids.

The tool was simple: include details. Take something you’ve written and make it more specific.

Before I shared the tool and gave examples, I wanted to see how they’d answer a prompt without it. I wrote on the whiteboard:

Write 1-10 sentences about what you did yesterday or something that happened yesterday.

Before I had them begin, I gave some different ways to approach it. The first was to list what they did, in sentence form. The second way, and the way I approach my writing, I told them, was to start with an emotion. “Usually if I’m starting with an emotion it’s a negative emotion or something I’m struggling with.”

A girl raised her hand. “Can I write about something happy that happened yesterday?”

“Of course you can!” I said, wondering if I just planted negativity into this group of positive thinking minds. “You can write about whatever you want.”

I figured one or two people could read what they wrote, but when I asked if anyone would like to share, most hands shot up into the air, reminding me why I loved this age.

I called on Sawyer first. By now, nearly six weeks into the cohort, I knew or at least recognized most of the kids. On many days, Sawyer and his younger brother walked alongside us to school. The boys could easily walk past but they always slowed their pace. Sawyer gave George and Layla hugs and fist bumps and held their hands as they walked, if they wanted to.

Sawyer wrote about what he bought for himself with the money his grandma gave him for his birthday—two soccer jerseys of his favorite players—and how he messaged her to tell her.

The rest of the kids read aloud what they wrote, and they were full of fun (and happy) details. I wondered if this is something we innately do until we don’t—until we become adults and start writing in vague and generalized and boring ways.

Once everyone read aloud and I had erased the board I could feel myself going into coach mode—serious and drill-sargent-like. I wrote on the board, I watched a movie.

“How many of you watched a movie yesterday?” I asked.

More than half the room raised their hands.

“That’s not very personal then,” I said, and I crossed out a movie and wrote, The Parent Trap.

There was a brief silence before Sawyer called out, “I love that movie.”

“Right?!” I said. “It’s a great movie. How could we make this even more personal? Do you have a favorite part in the movie?”

“I like when they switch places,” Sawyer said.

Someone else called out, “Did you know there’s two versions?”

“Another great detail!” I said. “You could also write, ‘I can’t believe I thought Lindsay Lohan was two people.’”

We did this with multiple sentences and lots of participation. When we revisited the same writing prompt we started with, I asked them to include more details than they did the first time. Sawyer shared what he wrote again, this time including the names of his two favorite soccer players.

Afterwards, when none of the kids approached me to say thank you or they loved it—as I had seen kids approach other parents who’d done Endeavor Time—I replayed each moment in my head and where I must have gone wrong. It was probably my aggressive approach, which seems to come out of me when I’m trying to display confidence and expertise. Or maybe it was simply not a very good tool, since they all seemed to have a knack for including details, anyway. And why did I bother mentioning writing from a place of struggle? This age does not need to hear that! Maybe Veronica had messaged to let me know how wonderful the session was, and how all the kids loved it. I checked my Slack messages the next day. She didn’t.

Two days later, a girl from the class approached me on the playground before school. “I just wanted to tell you thank you for Endeavor Time the other day,” she said. “It really helped me with my journal writing.”

Oh, Endeavor Time? From two days ago? I’d already forgotten. It was no big deal. Any time.

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Until next week,

Charlie