24/10/2023 by Cila Warncke

On Writing Towards Progress

The upcoming release of Lee, Kate Winslet’s film about photographer Lee Miller, got me thinking about how much has changed for women in the past century. And how little.

Lee Miller was one of four women photojournalists accredited by the United States armed forces in World War II. Among the many striking images she created, Miller photographed the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau: indelible evidence of Nazi atrocities.

She was one of four women allowed to shoot the war.

The issue of Vogue with Winslet on the cover, promoting Lee, also featured a profile of Karine Jean-Pierre, the first Black person and first openly gay person to hold the post of US Press Secretary.

Why, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, are we still tallying firsts?

Progress, such as it is, is non-linear, unpredictable and subject to reversal.

In 1997, I started my BA at University of Pennsylvania.

It was only the 64th year in the university’s 257-year history that women were allowed access to a full-time, four-year undergraduate degree program.

In 1998, I became a Daily Pennsylvanian reporter. The first woman permitted to join the illustrious school newspaper did so in 1962. Her name was Sharon Lee Ribner. Ms Ribner (later Mrs Schlagel) had a long, successful career in journalism. She passed away in 2022.

It boggles my mind that my opportunity to become a journalist hung on the balance of 35 years. And that the pioneering female journalist at Penn and I shared a lifetime.

Photo by Michael Rosner-Hyman on Unsplash

Scan any newspaper. It’s plain to see the world is not on an orderly march towards a better future.

This fact affects groups and individuals differently. The more recent one’s rights and privileges, the more parlous.

Women, LGBTQ+ individuals, people of color, immigrants, the poor, the disabled are always the most vulnerable.

In times of economic or social crisis, it is too often their well-being that is considered dispensable.

Progress is parlous because power is not.

When threatened, power does whatever it takes to protect itself. Progress is rarely on that agenda.

As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, the best defense against external chaos is internal order. By identifying and pursuing what matters most, people can craft rich, rewarding lives in suboptimal circumstances.

Education is the essential ingredient, here. An untrained mind is a disorderly mind. A mind unaccustomed to effort is a aimless and ineffective.

While education is not a panacea, or substitute for social justice, it is a vital tool for individuals waiting for the moral arc of the universe to budge.

One of the many reasons I’m passionate about teaching writing is that it is yoga for the brain (no Lycra required). Writing hones logic, burnishes imagination and creates structure. And you can do it anywhere.

Structural inequalities are huge barriers to success. We need to dismantle those barriers. We also need to equip individuals to work around them. Writing is a skill that promotes individual success and provides a means to tackle unjust systems.

For more on writing towards success, check out my new Substack newsletter

17/10/202315/10/2023 by Cila Warncke

7 Fun Play-Anywhere Writing Games

Grab a pen and paper and hone your word skills through play!

Native English speakers only need to learn around 9,000 words to read proficiently (Nation, 2014; Qian & Lin, 2019). This, out of a lexis of over 170,00 words (and growing!)

Hence most of us walk, eat and talk on a daily basis rather than shuffle, feast or murmur.

We’re creatures of habit. The words we use frequently become top-of-mind, and therefore likely to be used again. Our routine vocabulary shrinks like a puddle in the sun.

One way to prevent, indeed, reverse, this trend is to play with words.

Reading, crossword puzzling, etc., can build our word banks but having a fine working vocabulary means being able to summon novel words and express ourselves in new ways. Like play piano, or basketball, this skill requires practice.

The following drills are designed to be pen-and-paper; no reference to outside sources required. Use the back of an envelope, a napkin, scribble on your hand like a teenager, draw in sand on the shoreline.

The goal is to tap your linguistic aquafer. If you feel inspired to augment your vocabulary through reading or dictionary browsing, all to the good, but no pressure.

Grab your quill and parchment and let’s away.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Pre-root-ixes: Prefixes, root words and suffixes

Straightforward: choose a prefix, root word or suffix and list as many words containing it as you can.

Prefix suggestions: ex, dis, im, dis, pre, un
Root suggestions: auto, corp, derm, lum, tele
Suffix suggestions: ism, ity, ment, ness, tion/sion

Word transformation

This is a game I designed to improve upper-level ESL students awareness of parts of speech (POS) and the flexibility of English vocabulary. It’s simple, take a noun or verb, then come up with all the permutations of it you can, including words that contain it, collocations or sayings.

It works best when you think systematically about POS. Let’s use like as an example.

Verbs: to like, to dislike
Nouns: like, likelihood, liking, dislike
Adjectives: like, likeable, likely
Adverbs: like, likely, unlikely
Preposition: like
Conjunction: like
Collocations/sayings: eat like a horse, go over like a lead balloon, off like a shot, like water off a ducks back, look like a million dollars, etc.

CAS – colloquialisms, aphorisms and sayings

Here, the goal is to list informal language terms that either

contain a particular word (as in the example above)
relate to a particular subject (e.g., work, money, travel)

Take ‘time’ as an example. The first category might include

time and tide way for no man
a stitch in time saves nine
once upon a time
time is (not) on their side
time out of mind

The second

to take a rain check
down to the wire
from here to eternity
jump the gun
Rome wasn’t built in a day

Single-word prompts

This drill was the result of being bored of my journal. Left to itself, my squirrelly brain chews over the same topics like its storing fat for winter. So I wrote a random word at the top of each page then, each day, wrote something inspired by it.

Try this for five, seven, 10, 14 days. See what fun your mind has.

Alphabets

Another fast, fun list drill. Jot the alphabet vertically on a sheet of paper then fill it in with words from a given category: adverbs, cities, animals, desserts, compound nouns.

Warm up with a big category like plants or household objects then get esoteric: can you complete the alphabet with shades of blue, pre-20th century literary heroines or 80s song titles?

What do you see?

Prior to writing my novel Ibiza Noir, I wrote 700 words of pure description a day for 30 days. No attempt at narrative, simply drew the most vivid word-pictures possible.

Set a time or word-count goal, e.g., write for 10 minutes without stopping, or write 500 words.
Choose an object of reasonable complexity, a flower, or your living room, and describe it in as much detail as you can muster. Imagine you are describing it to an artist; you want their rendering to be as close to reality as possible.
Challenge yourself to apply this descriptive writing practice to real-world scenes. Go sit in the park, or on a bench at the mall, and write your allotted words. But remember, no narrative, just images.

Daily ledes

This drill is perfect for pre-bedtime journaling.

Choose three events/moments from your day.
Jot down the 5Ws: when, where, who, what and why.
Write a lede (the first sentence or paragraph of a news article) that contains all 5Ws.

Example:

You went to the dentist and got your teeth cleaned.
When: 11:30AM, where: dentist office (43 Main Street), who: hygienist David, what: tooth cleaning, why: six months since last appointment
Lede: At 11:30 this morning, dental hygienist David Smith faced off with a six-month old plaque formation on Patient X’s right rear molar, a struggle that resounded through the office at 43 Main Street.

Bonus game! #semanticfieldgoals

Yes, I just wanted to write #semanticfieldgoals.

It’s also a good game.

A semantic field is a set of words related by meaning, for example colors, plants, foods, senses, etc. For the sake of this drill, any category will do.

Choose a category

List all the words you can think of related to that category.
Choose one of those words as the starter for a new list.
Repeat as often as you like.

Let’s try chemistry:

Chemistry: periodic table, ion, Madam Curie, Nobel Prize, beaker, lab, Bunsen burner, ion, orbital, atom, atomic weight, electron, proton, neutron, bond, reaction, element, carbon, organic
Atom: ancient Greece, Democritus, particle, bomb, Oppenheimer,
Ancient Greece: philosophy, alphabet, city-states, wine, Homer, Sparta, etc.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Play a round or two of one of the games and post your results in the comments!

03/10/2023 by Cila Warncke

Write To Success

As a professional writer for over 20 years, and a full-time educator for seven, I’ve witnessed the transformative power of writing — and the barriers many students face to accessing this power.

Every individual has the right to success. Education should empower young people to pursue their dreams and achieve their goals. Unfortunately, learning is often reduced to a time-consuming rote exercise where students’ main goal is to get through it. This is a disservice to them, and their futures.

There is a better way: a way that prioritizes goal-oriented learning, intrinsic motivation and long-term success: a way that turns writing from a chore to a tool.

Write To Success will offer unique, modular college and university-prep writing courses that empower teens to write their own success stories.

Stay tuned…

26/09/202308/10/2023 by Cila Warncke

On AI: Artificial Ignorance

Artificial intelligence promises to augment our collective processing capacity. But on an individual level it is a neurotoxin that promises learners only artificial ignorance.

We are all familiar with the fact that unused muscles weaken, then atrophy. If one were to permit a developmentally normal, able-bodied child to rely on mobility scooter for transport they would, over time, develop physical incapacity where none had existed: an induced disability.

Thus, it shouldn’t be difficult to grasp that permitting children to rely on artificial intelligence ‘assistance’ such as ChatGPT will weaken, then atrophy, their intellectual capacity: an induced disability.

Writing a better brain

Writing is not just the product of thought. It has a unique ability to generate thought.

‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking’ ~Joan Didion, journalist.
‘With each of the new [ancient] writing systems, with their different and increasingly sophisticated demands, the brain’s circuitry rearranged itself, causing our repertoire of intellectual capacities to grow and change in great, wonderful leaps of thought.‘ ~Maryanne Wolf, Director of the UCLA Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice.

As Wolf explains in her 2007 book Proust and the Squid (from which the above quote is taken) there is neither gene nor discrete neurological structure that enables humans to read and write. Literacy relies on complex, non-axiomatic collaborations between a variety of perceptual and cognitive systems.

Put another way: preliterate and literate brains are structured the same. What changed human history was not a novel biological development but the recruitment of extant neurological capabilities to perform a novel task.

Does that bend your mind a little?

It should.

Writing is not just a means of expression, like speech. It is a process and practice that improves cognitive function; it rewires the brain.

Put another way: it isn’t that smart people are better writers, it’s that writing makes people smarter.

All of us who care about children’s long-term well-being, whether they are our students or offspring, should be anxious to help them develop their fullest intellectual capacity.

We are on a hot rock spinning towards oblivion. Life for kids who are in today’s classrooms will be complex beyond the wildest imaginings of us scions of the analogue order. The will need to be wily, resilient and resourceful AF.

Being laissez-faire about kids substituting artificial intelligence for study makes as much sense as being laissez-faire about children playing with live hand grenades: cool, if you don’t mind the maiming.

There are three key reasons I won’t use generative AI and emphatically discourage its use by students.

Neural stunting

A well-used brain grows, according to Pauwels et al. (2018):

“Practice leads to improvement in and refinement of performance… and this dynamic behavioral process is associated with altered brain activity…. Besides functional brain changes, practice also induces structural changes, such as alterations in regional brain grey and white matter structures.”

A brain that does not practice complex skills fails to grow, just as the disused muscle slumbers undeveloped. The brain becomes stunted compared to what it could have been, could be, with training.

A less-developed brain with fewer neural connections and reduced processing efficiency does not just affect reading or writing skills. If affects a person’s ability to learn, communicate and adapt.

Every time a student outsources their thinking to AI, they are sabotaging their long-term mental flexibility.

Educators and parents bear responsibility for this, insofar as we perpetuate a results-based learning environment. When we prioritize the ‘right answer’, kids get the message that process doesn’t matter. It makes sense for them to use any means necessary to get the answer that gets the desired grade.

We grown-ups need to rewire our thinking and explicitly focus on the learning process. This is not going to be easy, given the baggage of 150-odd years of rote education, but we have to begin. This might be as simple as grading the steps of an essay instead of the final draft, or doing away with grades altogether in favor of a feedback system. (For more ideas: Ungrading with Anthony Lince)

Concentration of intellectual capital

Late-capitalism has succeeded in concentrating financial capital into the hands of a vanishingly small number of individuals. The grotesqueries of this are felt every time an ordinary US citizen needs insulin or an EpiPen, or wants to go to college. There are felt a thousandfold-moreso by the 650 million people living in extreme poverty around the globe.

This concentration accelerated wildly during the Covid-19 pandemic: ‘Billionaires’ wealth has risen more in the first 24 months of COVID-19 than in 23 years combined,’ Oxfam reported. ‘The total wealth of the world’s billionaires is now equivalent to 13.9 percent of global GDP.’

Put another way: those of us not born to oligarchy face ever-slimmer chances of rising to the top. Financially, anyway.

Until now, those not to the manor born could at least, to paraphrase Britpop’s finest cynic, Jarvis Cocker, use the one thing we’ve got more of: our minds.

Unless we allow kids to consign their thinking skills to artificial intelligence.

To be clear, I don’t believe there is a conspiracy among Musk, Zuckerberg, et al. to make the rest of the population dumber so they can rule in full-blown, unchecked Bond-villainesque splendor (mwah haha).

But there is a real danger of that dystopia becoming a reality through lack of vigilance on the part of educators, parents and politicians.

Big tech does not care about us. Does not exist to serve us. Is not our toy.

In the same way wealth-accumulation takes on a life of its own, with money begetting money, intellectual capital accretes to the intellectually adept. Students who read, write and think critically enhance the neural circuits for these skills, gaining efficiency, automaticity and self-confidence.

This enables them to tackle bigger challenges, be more creative, rise to the top. The better they get at learning, the more dauntless they will be; the more quickly they will evolve to meet new demands.

Students who let AI think for them will cultivate artificial ignorance, sap their innate learning abilities and dull themselves into ever-shrinking spirals of incompetence and self-doubt.

They will be victims, not victors, in the knowledge economy.

Diminishing returns

Generative AI is trained on scads of data.

Perhaps one of the reasons it shines is that current tools were trained on the laborious output of human brains. Right now, the machine is well-nourished.

Like any other extractive technology, AI’s potential is limited by the quantity of quality raw material available. As AI is increasingly used to generate blog posts, articles, images, etc., it will, perforce, eat itself. Like a hideous, post-post-modern game of telephone, machine learning will digest its own output to spew forth content that is increasingly bland, distorted and derivative: a garbled self-parody that will further diminish culture and conversation.

This is not an abstract concern. There are AI tools I recommend to students on a limited basis, such as Grammarly, for English-learners or novice writers who need grammatical training wheels. I discourage competent writers from using it because it flattens good writing.

Neither it, nor any AI tool, can distinguish a truly beautiful sentence nor appreciate the work of (to borrow from Salinger) an experienced literary stunt-pilot. Creative word usage, neologisms, daring sentence structures all fall foul; the machine brain cannot cope with linguistic audacity.

This is the chief weakness and biggest threat of artificial intelligence: it prefers the commonplace to the extraordinary and the predictable to the audacious.

Our world needs bold solutions and novel ideas, which it will not get from a conservative technology.

There are plenty of things to outsource to AI: reviewing medical data, tracking undersea tremors, preventing fraud. But not education.

The children whom we want to see thrive need every iota of intellectual capacity and creativity that dedicated teaching and rigorous practice can bestow. Otherwise, we doom them to artificial ignorance.

What are your views on AI in the classroom? Share in the comments?

19/09/2023 by Cila Warncke

On Cultural Cross-Pollination

One of the things that has been (is) vital to my success as a writer and educator is the fact that, from a freakishly young age, I’ve read everything.

Nutritional information. Ancient magazines in waiting rooms. Bumper stickers. Barbara Tuchman. The Lord of the Rings. Gossip magazines. Feminist blogs. Not-so-feminist blogs. James Baldwin. Germaine Greer. Cormac McCarthy. Joan Didion (again and again and again). Orwell. Eliot. Hardy. All the Brontes. Shakespeare. Jack Gilbert. The Bible. The Odyssey. Ulysses. Greek myths. Native American myths. Books on veganism, endurance running, Arctic exploration, gardening, history, booze, the Spanish civil war.

The more I read, the more visible the threads that twitch through the living fabric of literature: allusion, image, theme; the homage, the salute, the nod, the whisper from dead to living to the spirits.

Reading like a starving person at a buffet cultivates a literary meta-perception I cannot imagine arriving at any other way. It leads along skewed yet sound philosophical paths, such as the one that follows.

***

Q: What’s the difference between Charlie Brooker and a Buddhist nun?

A: Not much, it turns out.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, Charlie Brooker is a British writer, satirist (tough job these days), and broadcaster. He dislikes most things and swears a lot. The nun I have in mind is Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist teacher and author.

How did I arrive at this improbable conclusion that these unlike people are very much alike? It started with binge-reading Pema Chodron. Sometimes books, like people, appear in your life and you wonder how you lived without them. They bring a fundamental shift of energy and wisdom that kicks down a door in your brain, shines light into a black room and blows away the dust.

One of Chodron’s books cropped up on the shelf of an Airbnb in rural Arkansas. Stealing it seemed like bad karma, so I went to Amazon for When Things Fall Apart and The Wisdom of No Escape. I was reading the latter on a flight to London, trying to jog myself out of a weird funk. The world felt like it was shrinking around me. Telltale clumsiness had emerged: dropping things, taking wrong turns, sending idiotic emails, all the usual signs of a swerve into depression. I needed to hear something good.

Chodron writes things like:

Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, and therefore it doesn’t do any good to try to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness.

Don’t you feel better, saner, more worthy, just reading that?

How about:

Loving-kindness — maitri — towards ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Mediation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.

That’s how she thinks, speaks, writes. Chodron exudes calm. Her philosophy is that people are basically good and need only to wake up that inner goodness.

Charlie Brooker begs to differ. “I don’t get people,” he writes. “What’s their appeal, precisely? They waddle around with their haircuts on, cluttering the pavement like gormless, farting skittles. They’re awful.”

That’s from Dawn of the Dumb, a collection of his “Screen Burn” columns for the Guardian from October 2004 to June 2007. The dates are significant because that was the pinnacle of my London music journalist/gadabout phase. It spanned my final year at Q, another year on a now defunct music magazine, and a stint as a promotions coordinator for a megalomaniac.

Good years, spent in a delicious, mindless haze of 9-to-5, city breaks, cohabiting, cult TV, and the Saturday Guardian: a newspaper that was the lynch-pin of a way of life, shorthand for everything that was important at the time: London, media, “culture”, aspirational cooking, self-conscious irony.

We didn’t watch loads of TV, but what we did was almost exactly what Charlie Brooker was writing about in “Screen Burn” (with the exception of The Apprentice, which I could never stomach). It wasn’t a matter of seeking out the shows he reviewed, more that he unerringly targeted the excruciating and gawp-worthy. Which we happened to watch for those precise reasons.

Finding Dawn of the Dumb amidst the pile of discarded holiday reads in the foyer of our building was like discovering a time capsule from that slice of my life. It took me back to an innocent time when the prospect of David Cameron as prime minister was just a horrible fantasy, and Big Brother still launched careers (if you can call them that). To my surprise, I still remember most of the BB contestants he skewers, a decade later, not to mention various X-Factor one-hit wonders.

Brooker makes it worth revisiting. He can make almost anything funnier and more vivid than real life. Take his description of Glastonbury music festival:

Once you’re in, the sheer scale of it is initially overwhelming. Imagine forcing the cast of Emmerdale to hurriedly construct Las Vegas at gunpoint in the rain. Then do it again. And once more for luck. That’s Glastonbury: a cross between a medieval refugee camp and a recently detonated circus.

As a veteran Glasto-goer, I promise that is the best description of it you will ever read.

I also watched the pilot of Prison Break, which he summarises thus:

Prison Break is possibly the dumbest story ever told. It makes 24 look like cinéma vérité. It’s as realistic as a cotton-wool tiger riding a tractor through a teardrop. I’ve played abstract Japanese platform games with more convincing storylines.

Brooker writes like a butcher dismembering a cow and most of the time his (metaphorical) knife is hacking at a hapless reality show contestant or D-list presenter. Not, you might think, of a piece with Chodron’s all-embracing gentleness.

Yet through them both runs a thread of intense compassion. Brooker’s rage isn’t at individuals, per se, it’s at the cruelty, greed or stupidity they manifest on TV. His purest vitriol is aimed at psychics that prey on the “grieving and desperate”. No matter how artfully furious, his columns boil down to one message repeated over and over: The world’s a mess, people are a mess, we need to be better and nicer to each other if we’re going to get through.

Charlie Brooker may disagree with this characterisation of his intent, but read the books: it’s there. Like Pema Chodron, he believes people can be better if they just wake up. His method is bucket of ice over the head accompanied by a swift kick to the kidneys versus her cultivate mindfulness and be friendly to yourself but they point the same direction.

This proves Chodron’s point about brilliance/craziness. There is no single right way to do things. You can sit in meditation and learn to love each out-breath. You can also sit, shrieking, in front of crap TV. It’s not just what you do — it is the intent and spirit in which it is done.

The corollary to that is you can learn from all sorts of things. Laughing till I cried over Dawn of the Dumb was as mind-altering as mulling The Wisdom of No Escape. Don’t shut things down, they both counsel. Keep your eyes and mind wide open, and try to laugh.

What is a culture-clash that inspired you? Share in the comments!

05/09/2023 by Cila Warncke

Six Course Planning Essentials

Over the summer, I took two online courses: they were instructive in unexpected ways.

Both were premium-priced ($500+), both were heavily marketed, both were on topics I was keen to learn.

By the second session of Course 1, I was wandering the house, headphones draped around my neck, miming boredom to my husband.

By the second session of Course 2, I immersed in brainstorming, motivated, energized.

The difference was not the quality, kindness or expertise of the teachers (let that be a lesson). The difference was all in the planning.

After completing the two courses, I broke them down and identified six things Course 2 did that Course 1 did not. Here are the six course planning essentials this experience revealed.

Set concrete learning goals

The second course was super-specific about what participants could and should achieve by the end. The goals were concrete: do this, plan this, complete this. There was no vague aspirations like ‘get better at…’ or ‘learn more about…’ — those are worthwhile goals, but not tangible enough to drive action.

In contrast, the first course didn’t set goals. The idea was to just participate and… gain something. This lack of clarity was discouraging. Without a shared agenda, the shared time felt aimless.

Deliver brief lessons

Timing of instruction is something that doesn’t get talked about enough. Usually, class lengths reflect what is convenient for the person(s) scheduling, not what is best for the learners. Course 1 included weekly three-hour sessions (which felt much, much longer). Course 2 sessions were 45-55 minutes plus an optional Q&A. The shorter sessions were more approachable, manageable and beneficial, as I was actually able to pay attention.

Structure assignments

Everyone benefits from structure. Especially creative learners. Especially learners who are super-bright. Especially learners who want to excel. Structure is not a straitjacket, it is scaffolding that lets learners build the mind-palace of their dreams. Course 2 included sequenced assignments, graphic organizers and other forms of structure that made it easy to concentrate on ideas, rather than worrying about what document format I should be using.

Minimize distractions from other learners

Without fail, the first five to fifteen minutes of Course 1 was various participants discussing their dogs/children/medical appointments, etc. Without fail, someone would leave their mic on so we could hear their family chatting in the background, or the road noise outside. For someone with as little patience as I have, this was (is) maddening. It completely derailed my concentration and desire to be there. In blessed contrast, Course 2 was text-interaction only; the only person on camera was the teacher. No voices, no visual disruption, no distractions.

Reinforce key information

Once a course establishes learning goals and provides structured assignments, it is possible to quickly, painlessly reinforce key information. This can be through verbal reminders, chat prompts, post-session email summaries, etc. Regular reminders of what’s important, and why, anchor information in the learner’s mind and allow them to identify what they missed or want to revisit.

Answer questions

Course 2 featured a question-and-answer session at the end of each class. Participants could type questions in a dedicated chat during the session, so no worries about forgetting what I wanted to ask; attendance was optional, which made it feel more like a bonus and less like an obligation; finally, the Q&A was recorded, meaning the extra information was accessible at the my convenience.

What is a course feature you’ve loved (or would love to see)? Share in the comments!

29/08/2023 by Cila Warncke

Writing from Newsroom to Classroom

creativity, education, journalism, teaching
Cila Warncke, critical thinking, education, journalism, teaching, writers, writing
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Things students have said to me:

‘I asked my teacher how long the essay needed to be and he said, “how long is a piece of string?”‘
‘Wait! You can start a sentence with ‘but’?’
‘What is the process for answering an essay question?’

These students attend good schools. They are above-average smart and capable. Yet somehow, despite towers of assignments and torrents of instruction, they lack basic writing skills and confidence.

Reflecting on my own experience and writing practice, this isn’t a huge surprise. The only explicit writing instruction that stuck with me was my seventh-grade teacher’s spiel on five-paragraph essays and, several years later, the guidance of creative non-fiction professor, Paul Hendrickson.

In between times, I was blundering much like my current students: writing without a clue.

In the end, I learned to write in the newsroom, not the classroom. Not because the student editors of the Daily Pennsylvanian were literary geniuses (though some likely grew into such) but because they worshipped at the altar of structure.

Head.

Subhead.

Lede.

Byline.

Pyramid.

The discipline of x-point headers and y-column inches taught me that writing is 95% organization.

However brilliant or clever or downright earth-shattering ones ideas, they are meaningless until organized and presented in a way that makes sense to a reader.

Put another way: to write well, one needs an audience, a reason to address them and strategy for delivering the message.

Based on my students’ comments, what they are getting, instead of practical, actionable teaching, is either prescriptive nonsense (‘don’t start a sentence with “but” or “and”‘ — er, why not?) or no meaningful guidance at all.

This leads to problematic assumptions, such as ‘you’re either good at writing, or you’re not’ or ‘it doesn’t matter if I write well because nobody is going to read it’ or, worse, ‘I’ll just ask ChatGPT.’

Problematic because students who do not learn to write all too often do not learn to think.

What students ask, day in day out, class after class, are not sophisticated technical questions about writing, but questions answerable with basic reasoning and critical thinking.

How do I find evidence in the text?
How do I know what a character is like?
How can I write more about this topic?
How do I explain this example?
How do I know what the theme is?

What students need are blueprints and tools: structure.

In the newsroom, there is a basic means of getting information: the interview.

There are then standard, structured ways to render that information into articles.

Neophyte reporters were drilled in whowhatwhywherewhen. We learned our opinions were unwelcome without hard evidence behind them. We were taught attribution and verification; how to search archives and read microfiche. To my mortification, we were taught to go back and ask the same questions again, and if we got yelled at or told ‘no comment’ to write it down, because that was evidence too.

With due respect to my graduate school writing professors and peers, I learned a hundred times more in the newsroom than in the classroom. And it is no coincidence my most significant writing teacher was, yup, a journalist.

Not all students want to spend time in a newsroom, which is fine.

But every student deserves a classroom that gives them an equally fine set of tools.

‘[Language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish,’ George Orwell argued, ‘but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.’

To reverse the process requires a more structured, disciplined, logical approach to teaching writing.

It is a process in which the good writing produced is one-tenth of the iceberg; the crucial nine-tenths is intangible critical and creative thinking skills.

As an educator, I am committed to continuously developing more effective, engaging, efficient ways to teach students to think and write. Their future success — and the health of our societies — depends on it.

What thinking and writing skills are most important in your classroom? Share in the comments!

22/08/2023 by Cila Warncke

On Beginnings with Melissa Madenski, Pt 2

Welcome to ‘Between the Lines’ – interviews with teachers, writers and writing teachers on specific aspects of their craft. This interview was split into two posts to do justice to Madenski’s generous sharing of time and wisdom. Part 1 covered her biography and writer’s origin story. Part 2 focuses on craft and teaching.

How does one identify the seed of a piece of writing?

Surprise. My Achilles heel is that I get too sentimental. The more sentimental writing gets, the greater the distance. When you write universally, describe, and keep those emotions out, you open it up.

What questions should a writer ask themselves at the beginning of a piece?

Know?
Don’t know?
What to know?

It’s about finding [one’s] curiosity.

What should a writer consider, and disregard, when beginning a piece of writing?

The first step is not creating a story. The first writing, what we used to call free writing, is first thoughts. It frees you from having to be worried about the things you might worry about in a final draft.

One of my small rants is that free writing became a thing, and teachers sit children down and make them write. Once something becomes institutionalized, it’s difficult for students to feel safe with it. If you look at writing as a place to explore, to find meaning, it becomes a different thing.

Why is working through first thoughts important?

A student I loved told me she wrote about a problem she had for five days in a row. The first version was awful, full of blame; after five days, she’d narrowed it to what she could change and what she couldn’t. That was never going to be published, but that is the writing process.

As an adult, I started [writing] the first day after [my husband] Mark died. Those journals were useless – they were just questions. In two full journals, there are probably two salvageable sentences. But it helped me to be a better parent, to get through that.

How important is defining an audience?

I never do until the end; maybe not even then. I write what I’m curious about and if I have that intuitive sense, if it feels good, I’ll keep working. After I finish, then I’ll think of where to send it.

How can writers get better at finding seeds? And drafting?

They get better as they practice, as with anything else. Writing, and maybe this is true of dancing and photography, offers lots of rewards when you start to use it across the arc of your life.

What opportunity does writing bring the writer?

The chance to see things more clearly. The opportunity to notice, to slow, to look. I wrote a poem called ‘Ode to Black’, during the Black Lives Matters protests. I was walking one day and there were crows everywhere. And I walked to the creek and the ducks have this black so black it’s almost indigo on their faces. So much of what I love in nature is black – trees in winter – so I wrote this poem.

Writing has given me knowing what I want to get good at; stability, better understanding of myself, much better understanding of students. I love publishing, but it wouldn’t stop me writing if I didn’t publish.

Madenski recommends

The piece of writing that changed your life before age 18?

‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allen Poe, which I memorized in sixth grade. And Robert Frost, ‘The Road Less Taken’, reading them, something shifted in me.

The piece of writing that changed your life as an adult?

Early Morning by Kim Stafford. It’s a very personal book [about his father], but it’s universal. It helped me see people as complex and beautiful. You can struggle with someone or something, but still see the beauty in them.

A classic you would love to teach?

My Antonia by Willa Cather. I don’t go around thinking of myself as a feminist, but I am a feminist. Willa Cather cut her hair, wore pants, got a job as a journalist. It is beautifully written and would be a perfect thing to teach. To have [students] read the book first, and not know about her, then fold in her influences as a woman writer when it wasn’t easy to be one. That would open up some wonderful conversations.

A contemporary work you would love to teach?

Happiness by Aminatta Forna. It’s about two characters in their late adult years, their children are raised. They have experience; they’ve lived hard lives, and that is part of the story too. The book is complicated: it’s about where we are in the world, our relationship to animals, the divisiveness that pulls us apart. It’s about aging, what it means to have loved, to have a long career. It is about a different type of happiness.

A book about writing every writing student should read?

The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop Vols I, II & III by Diane Lockwood. I wish I’d found these [books] years ago.

A visual artist/musician/film maker who inspires you?

Greta Gerwig. She’s a great example of how we can come to stories about love, friendship, culture, with a different lens. She started out independent with Lady Bird and Little Women, then the Barbie movie, which I wasn’t going to see because of my assumptions. But I went and I loved it. [Gerwig] has a different voice, a way of storytelling that is the opposite of what I thought it would be.

A book you buy copies of to give to friends?

Who Dies? and Unattended Sorrow, both by Stephan Levine. They are about grief. At this time in my life, people are losing big things – parents, children, partners. Levine writes about compassion, in its true sense. Looking through a lens at the hardest things in our lives. I soak up instruction in how to endure difficult things. It’s not an exercise in denial, it’s an exercise in facing.

What’s next?

Inspired by Ada Lemon’s linked sonnets in The Lucky Wreck, I am working on seven verses that began with a walk on the Columbia River. I saw an asylum of loons and that’s where the poem started. It’s not ready to read aloud yet, but it’s going somewhere good.

I’m also working on an essay about ageing, and pulling together poems for a reading with Andrea Carlisle at Broadway Books on 5 September.

Not least, I walked Neskowin Creek [near my old home] from the headwaters to the coast. I had been teaching all summer, couldn’t afford to travel and needed to do something, so I walked. I collected about 80 pages of field notes. [My daughter] Hallie and I, will go in the fall and she’ll photograph it. Then I’ll publish that, maybe.

Connect

Web:

Her Photos, My Poems (a collaboration with daughter Hallie Madenski)

Books:

Field Notes (with Hallie Madenski)
Endurance

Events:

In conversation with Andrea Carlisle at Broadway Books, Portland, OR. 5 September, 2023

08/08/2023 by Cila Warncke

On The Unexpected

blogging, Cila Warncke writer, education, writers, writing teacher
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Two weeks ago, I signed the papers to buy my first house.

One week ago, Le Sallay called, said they couldn’t afford two literature teachers, and that I was not it.

This week, I’m moving my cats to their new home.

Let’s just say none of this was foreseen.

But it has reminded me to hold fast to what Michael Downs remarked: “The unexpected doesn’t have to be dread inducing. The unexpected can also be the reason you get up in the morning.“

***

Though I’m prickly about getting the sack barely six weeks out from the start of the school year, the words of Epictetus come to mind: “Everything has two handles, one by which you can carry it, the other by which you cannot.”

The cannot handle holds the unpleasantness, loss, unsaid goodbyes to my lovely students. All of which are real things.

What I can hold this reality by is trust that there are other opportunities, gratitude for those heartbreakingly great kids who shared their stories with me, affection for the colleagues who enriched my life in many ways.

What’s next?

Who knows

Not I.

I’ve got cats to move, pictures to hang, boxes to unpack.

Everything is open. Anything is possible.

What I can say is the blogging will continue. The learning will continue. Once the moment is right, the teaching will continue.

Coming up soon on the blog, an interview I am thrilled to share, with the poet, educator, gardener, creator, wise woman and dear friend Melissa Madenski. She is a hero; one of the most generous, warm, fully alive human beings I have the privilege to know.

It is a huge honor to share her words and stories.

Stay tuned!

How do you face the unexpected? All advice welcome! Hit me in the comments please — I deleted my Twitter account because, X.

18/07/202317/07/2023 by Cila Warncke

On Hyperlexia

Among the notable words I learned in 2022 was hyperlexia. Burrowing into articles about autism, the term popped up. Hyper = excessive, lexia = related to words. That rung a bell, personally and professionally.

Defining hyperlexia

In 1997, Aram described hyperlexia as, “the developmental disorder in which children decode words early but have significant impairments in aural and reading comprehension”.

Nation (1999) defined it as, “advanced word-recognition skills in individuals who otherwise have pronounced cognitive, social, and linguistic handicaps.”

Four years later, a meta-study by Grigorenko, Klin and Volkmar (2003) concluded “that hyperlexia is a superability demonstrated by a very specific group of individuals with developmental disorders.”

A few years further along, the definition had grown more nuanced: Ostrolenk et al. (2017) wrote that it is, “the co-occurrence of advanced reading skills relative to comprehension skills or general intelligence, the early acquisition of reading skills without explicit teaching, and a strong orientation toward written material, generally in the context of a neurodevelopmental disorder.”

The final clause of that last sentence is significant to the discussion/debate around hyperlexia, which has been running since the mid-20th century. Is it a disability or, as Grigorenko et al. argue, a ‘superability’?

Hyperlexia and developmental disabilities

The answer starts with statistics. Ostrolenk et al. (2017) found that 84% of hyperlexic subjects were autistic.

This does not mean there is a direct correlation between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and hyperlexia. In a 2021 study by Solazzo et al., “9% children with ASD showed early hyperlexic traits”.

So, while autistic individuals are not necessarily hyperlexic, there is a good chance that hyperlexic individuals are autistic.

This makes hyperlexia a significant issue for teachers, especially those who teach gifted students. Arguably, especially those who teach gifted girls.

Risks of hyperlexia

In Aspergirls (2010), Rudy Simone writes, “this early ability to read and comprehend above our years (hyperlexia) gives some young Aspergirls an air of intellectual maturity that tricks people into thinking we possess emotional maturity as well. It also hides autism by shielding our deficits.”

Conventional education is built on a foundation of reading and writing. This fundamental bent of our educational system privileges students who appear to read effortlessly and above-grade-level.

As a teacher, it is natural enough to be wowed when a student sets down their book 10 minutes into an assigned reading period and says: “I’m done. What do I do now?”

Since we associate literary skills with intelligence and competence, it is tempting to stereotype precocious readers as super-competent or super-smart.

It takes discipline to stop and ask ourselves: “What is this student really absorbing? What needs might this apparent super-competence be masking?”

Knowing that north of 80% of hyperlexic kids are on the autism spectrum, we need to treat hyperlexia as seriously as we would treat dyslexia. Otherwise, we risk overlooking significant intellectual, developmental and social-emotional needs.

What hyperlexia is not

Key to academic success
Proof a student has it all figured out
Sign of high executive function
Substitute for social and emotional skills

Let’s look at these one by one

Academic success

According to Zhang and Malatesha Joshi (2019), “originally the term ‘hyperlexia’ only referred to those readers with low IQ but precocious decoding skills”. Though, as we’ve seen, the definition has become more nuanced with time and research, the significant fact of hyperlexia is that it is out of sync with the child’s other capacities.

Whipping through a textbook chapter or an assigned story is an accomplishment, but it doesn’t mean the student is equally precocious in other areas. Hyperlexia should be treated as a sign that a student potentially needs more, not less, general academic support.

Proof a student has it all figured out

Rapid reading does not mean improved comprehension. In 2010, Castles et al. published research that found “clear evidence of a dissociation between reading accuracy and comprehension of the same set of irregular words in hyperlexia.”

In the classroom, I’ve witnessed students who read with astonishing speed and fluency but struggle to offer a simple summary of what they’ve just read. Their decoding is phenomenal, but they are not grasping the significance of the words they skim so easily.

It is vital that teachers do explicit work on comprehension (including explicit and implicit details, descriptions, inference, word choice, etc.) with hyperlexic students, not assume, they read it = they got it.

Sign of high executive function

Author Cynthia Kim was diagnosed with Asperger’s (now formally included under ASD) in her early 40s. In her 2014 book, Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate, she reflects on her schooldays:

“Doubly-exceptional children have an advantage in their intelligence.

Unfortunately, part of this advantage is that we can mask a big portion of our disability with coping strategies and adaptations. And when we fail to hide something, people assume we’re not trying hard enough. Or we’re being deliberately obstinate. Or that we’re lazy, defiant, insolent, shy, ditzy, or scatterbrained.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ they ask incredulously. ‘You can memorize the batting averages of the entire Major League, but you can’t remember to put your homework in your backpack?'”

Research shows up to 80% of people with autism have executive function difficulties. Again, as educators, we need to avoid the category error of assuming that a hyperlexic student will be as quick in other aspects of their life and studies. Rather, we should be alert to the fact it’s likely the opposite: hyperlexia means greater likelihood of executive function challenges.

Substitute for social and emotional skills

Being able to read texts about sophisticated social and emotional realities does not equal understanding or being able to navigate those realities.

“Difficulty with communication and interaction with other people” is a core diagnostic criterion for autism (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, cited by the National Institute of Mental Health).

Precocious reading is more likely to be a refuge than an aid to an autistic child. Books are safe, comforting and non-judgmental. They have predictable narrative arcs. They are readily available and don’t demand emotional reciprocity.

Books are marvellous, natch, but as teachers we have a responsibility to support students’ holistic development. That means supporting social and emotional skills through appropriate collaborative or group activities, encouraging them in discussions, and not singling them out for their hyperlexia.

Ideally, we help our hyperlexic students leverage this strength to support weaker areas without making too much or too little of it.

Every student has unique capacities. We need to be aware of the blind spots in our educational system, and ourselves, to ensure these develop in full, and avoid privileging specific (dis/super)abilities that fit our narrow definitions of what is useful or laudable.

What is your experience with hyperlexic students? Questions? Comments?