The Grouse on Mango Street

Here’s something I wasn’t expecting.

Last year, I decided to change one of my class texts, from short stories (Poe, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Thurber) to The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. I changed the text for two major reasons. One, I thought Mango would be a more accessible first book of the year for seventh graders. Short as they are, some of those stories were rough reading for kids barely out of sixth grade. Two, I thought writing vignettes about their lives would be a more interesting and personally relevant assignment than writing stories modeled after Poe’s or Vonnegut’s. For sure, the previous class had fun writing horror and sci-fi, but I wanted my students to have a chance to express who they were, to use their writing to bring people and places and objects and moments and questions to school that they were used to leaving at home. That was the goal, at least.

For more than a few of my students, writing vignettes was a highlight of the course. The assignment was simple: turn in a collection of at least three vignettes connected by a common theme. (We’d also been talking about the difference between topic and theme.) One girl wrote about her trip to see the orphanage she’d been adopted from in China. One boy wrote about how he loved trains when he was small and told how he leaned down to the grates in the street to listen for passing subways. Another girl wrote about the mural-painted, piss-stinking tunnel near her home, describing how it felt shabby and sometimes scary but also like home. And predictably, I got stories about dogs and camp. (I don’t mind the topic; I mind the lack of emotional connectedness. I’m hoping good peer review will help with that.)

Given the quality and investment in the vignettes, and given that I’d chosen Mango because it’s approachable and lends itself to personal writing about identity, I was stunned to see how few students liked the book. On my course evaluation, of the 62 students who responded, 7 said they loved it, 17 said they liked it, 33 said it was OK, and 5 said they hated it. So, only 24 liked or loved it, and 38 thought it was OK or hated it. By contrast, for A Raisin in the Sun, 39 liked or loved it and 23 thought it was OK or hated it; for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 55 liked or loved it and 7 thought it was OK or hated it. What’s going on that my students like (or love) Shakespeare—ancient, incomprehensible Shakespeare—more than contemporary (well, OK, 25 years old, but that’s the most recently-written text they read, which is itself problematic), early-teenager-friendly Cisneros?

I’m going to start with the assumption that I made the right decision last year when I switched the text. Maybe that’s wrong, but I had some pretty convincing reasons for making the change then, and I’m still convinced now. So under that assumption—that Mango is a good book for my students to begin 7^th grade English reading together and writing off of—I figure something in the way I presented the book turned students cold, or lukewarm, to Mango. (Lukewarm is even worse than cold, isn’t it?) This year, I’m going to have to make some revisions. But what?

Whatever I change, I want to keep the vignette-writing assignment mostly the same. That was a successful part of the unit, so I’ll just tinker a little to get from silver to gold. But the reading bit—the discussion topics and structures—need to change. I think last year might have been a little too scattershot; with a book of vignettes, it’s hard not to be. I need an essential question to stick to. I also think I was a little too heavy-handed in introducing the identity themes in the book. The Big 8 do not have to be force-fed to them the first month of school. And finally, as much as the students need to learn about literary devices, I’m no longer willing to scrap writing time. The House on Mango Street will be, first and foremost, a model of how to write. Along the way, we’ll look at what Cisneros does to make her writing so cool. We’ll do some discovery and interpretation of the devices, and some using of these techniques.

Here’s how I want it to play out.

About half of our class time will be devoted to writing vignettes. Maybe 20 minutes of each class. I want those little buggernuts writing. A lot. That’ll give them even more material to go on when they compile their final collection. I’d also like to have them spend more time doing meaningful peer review and revision.

In that vein, I’m going to give writing prompts related to each vignette. After reading a bunch of them for homework, the kids can choose a prompt based on one vignette they want to write about. Last year, I think I gave too much freedom of choice, overwhelming some of them and leaving others feeling uncertain if what they were doing was “right.” The vignettes in Mango are about things, moments, relationships that make Esperanza who she is, so if the prompts ask the students to write on the topics in the Mango, the students will be writing about who they are. That should tease out the personal stories that make them who they are much better than discussing the Big 8 social identifiers.

As for reading/discussing/analyzing the text itself, I’d like to focus on what Cisneros does that makes the writing work so well. I think the essential question is going to be, “What do authors do when they’re writing for adults?” because to date, most of what they’ve read has been young adult fiction. Mango is a nice crossover book, not quite YA and not quite adult. The kids can see how Cisneros uses motifs, symbolism, irony, foil characters, foreshadowing, unreliable narrator—and that’ll pave the way for the Steinbeck unit. I want to take my students to MoMA to see how some of those literary devices come up in art too (and maybe to use art as a way into more vignette writing). Then, when they’re writing their paragraphs on literary devices, they’ll have points of comparison.

It also wouldn’t hurt to have them do a cool project, like maybe a video interpretation, or artwork inspired by one of the passages. I’ll have to make time.

What made me love The House on Mango Street was how Cisneros used vignettes to tell a story without telling it. How she honored the importance of small things and events—a bike ride with friends, a pair of ugly shoes, a name—and used them to reveal her characters. How she didn’t feel the need to write in grammatically-correct sentences, and her text was all the more powerful for it. If I chose this book for its excellent writing, I should use it to help students see what makes writing excellent so they can do excellent writing too. If I chose it because it’s relatable, then I want to reach the parts of students that relate to it. I want my classroom to be a place where students can bring their whole selves. If The House on Mango Street shows them a way to do that, then maybe it doesn’t matter if they love, like, or hate the book itself.

Honoring Disagreement is Honoring Diversity

Sometimes, while reading student papers, I have moments of self-doubt. I hand the offending work—this time, it’s Zach’s Of Mice and Men essay that I’m about to give a C+— to my colleague, Jeremy, and ask him, What would you give this paper? He skims it and says, I didn’t read it that carefully, and I don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, so you’d know better than I would, but I’d say a B or a B+?

Jeremy is kind enough to give the string of qualifiers that honor my professional judgment, but at the end of the day, what does it mean for Zach when he gets a C+ on a paper that another English teacher—who teaches kids in the same grade at the same school—would have garlanded with a B+? I can’t say to Zach that he earned a C+ when the teacher who sits RIGHT NEXT TO ME would have said he “earned” a B+. But in fact, Zach didn’t earn a C+; I gave him a C+.

Not that I’m wrong to give the C+. He rarely explained his evidence, he integrated his quotations poorly, and he didn’t bother to address the second half of his thesis. And don’t even get me started on the grammar problems. I should have given the paper a C. But in Jeremy’s view, Zach had a interesting and personally-relevant thesis about how Curley’s wife’s asserted a false power because she lacked true power, and how this kind of dynamic exists among the so-called popular crowd at school. Zach also brought his own biting, slightly sarcastic tone to the paper. If you knew Zach, you could totally hear him speaking these words as you read them.

Had I been using a different rubric, say the 6+1 Trait^® Rubric, or one that awarded more points for voice, creativity, and personal relevance, I might have given Zach the B+ that Jeremy would have given. But that’s not the point. The point is that Jeremy and I had very different reactions to this paper because he and I are two very different people. And why shouldn’t we be?

Right now, I’m reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I think is the most brilliant book I’ve read this decade. But I’m certain that there are people who wouldn’t like it. For one thing, the narrators use a lot of Spanish, and to understand it all, a whitegirl like me needs a background in Spanish and/or Spanish-English dictionary and/or Urban Dictionary and/or 33 years of knowing how to attack a word using context. For sure some non-Spanish-speaking readers would find all those Spanish words cumbersome to the reading experience. And though I wouldn’t know for sure, I’d bet good money that Junot Diaz thought about those readers and decided something like, “The Spanish is part of Yunior’s voice. I can’t take it out, and I can’t footnote every time. If some readers can’t deal with the Spanish, too bad for them.”

And that’s exactly the point! All writers make choices about who to include and who to exclude in their readerships. No writer writes for ALL readers. A text as universal as a New York Times article assumes a certain degree of formal education, worldliness, and familiarity with background events. Conversely, most writing is for more than one reader. In real life, the only time we write for one reader is when we write strictly for ourselves, as in a diary, shopping list, or notebook; or when we write strictly for one other person, as in a private email. Just think of the complexities when you decide, midway through writing, to cc an email: all of a sudden, you’re making subtle alterations to your tone, you’re asking yourself if you need to define a term, you’re deleting a joke. And that’s just for one extra person! Imagine how professional authors must feel negotiating the potential misunderstandings of their wide readerships. But they do!

With student writing, though, we make a funny compromise. We pretend students are writing for all readers—or at least all teachers. We pretend that any teacher could read their essays and give the same grade we did. We pretend that there is some measure of fairness to the way we grade. (For gorgeous proof to the contrary, just read the second chapter of Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, by Maja Wilson.) At the same time, we know there’s only one reader this essay is written for. Sure, a peer reviewer or a parent might have a look, but the teacher is the Reader Who Counts.

In real life, much of what we write will be read by multiple readers, our readers’ contexts matter. A Dominican might appreciate the historical and cultural details in Oscar Wao more than I, who have only a very cursory and second-hand knowledge of its history and culture. Someone who knows what cane fields, the SDF-1, and the Rutgers University campus look like will surely have an easier time visualizing these details. (It doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook, especially in this wonderful age of Google images, but it makes the reading experience feel different if we have to look up pictures versus if we have deep-set memories the book calls up.) How I think about a text will be related to my geographic roots, my education, my race, my religion, my gender, my socioeconomic status, my biases as an English teacher, my personal interests, and even—gasp!—my mood at the time of reading.

How is that fair to students? How is it fair that my opinion of Zach’s paper depends on something as incredibly capricious as my mood? It’s NOT fair. But it’s also reality. When Zach’s dad reads my home report at the semester’s end, it will matter whether he opens the envelope after sitting through 90 minutes of traffic or after watching Zach win his season-opening baseball game. He’s not sitting there with the home report guidelines to help him figure out whether my comment is useful. HE, a real person, is sitting there. Reading. When Zach’s mother gets her copy of the report, she might read my words about Zach’s difficulties in English class and blame her ex-husband for not pushing Zach hard enough. People bring themselves to writing. The best I can do as the writer is be as aware of my audience as possible, anticipate possible interpretations, account for some, and knowingly ignore others.

The best I can do as the teacher is teach my students to know their readers for the messy, moody, opinionated, contextualized human beings that they are.

In her book, Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, Maja Wilson spends an entire chapter discussing the fact that readers disagree about writing all the time, and that this disagreement can be very helpful to writers when they examine WHY different readers disagree. Forget the grades; WHY did Jeremy and I have such different reactions to Zach’s essay? Zach might learn that Jeremy used to teach a course on comedy, while my law school background has made me meticulous about logical organization and thoroughness in proving a claim. Then—and here’s what’s really important—Zach can make DECISIONS about how to revise. (When Alfie Kohn spoke at my school, he said something that stayed with me: “Children learn to make decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.”)

What does that look like? After reading Rethinking Rubrics, I’ve decided to try some of Wilson’s suggestions.

Let’s say Zach just finished a draft of his essay. In a peer review session, two of his classmates will use Ted Nellen’s “I heard, I noticed, I wonder” method to tell Zach (a) what they got out of the piece; (b) what struck them about it; and (c) what left them confused or curious, or any suggestions they have for revision. I’ve created a chart version of the “I heard, I noticed, I wonder” method that we can use in class.

Next, Zach has to find two adult reviewers who will also use the “I heard, I noticed, I wondered” method. He can use his parents, his other relatives, his parents’ friends, his godforsaken tutor—whomever he wants. If a student doesn’t know any adults who can fill that role or doesn’t feel comfortable asking, I’ll give them mentors. (My big fat plan is to see if, at a nearby retirement home, there are people with time on their hands and wisdom in their heads. A reversal of good old community service. But I’m not there yet.)

Now, Zach has comments from four different reviewers—some his age, some older; some in his family, some not; some who know him well, some who don’t; some who did a similar assignment, some who don’t know what the assignment was. These different readers have brought their own subjective ideas, both about the content of the essay and about essay-writing itself. They’ve brought their backgrounds, biases, and moods. They’ve brought themselves. How does Zach “extract clarity from disagreement through careful study of readers’ context and [his] own purposes?” (Wilson, p. 65)

He can put all the feedback in one place (my very slightly modified version of Maja Wilson’s “Dealing with Disagreement in Response” chart on p. 97 of Rethinking Rubrics) and then make sense of all that feedback by finding common themes among the comments, thinking about his readers’ different perspectives, and using those perspectives to guide his revisions.

In real life, some writing is for only one reader. But essays are not meant for one reader, and I don’t want to be the one Reader Who Counts. I want to teach students that honoring disagreement is honoring the diversity of backgrounds, opinions, biases, interests, and moods that readers bring. I want my students to learn, in short, that readers are subjective and that writers need to make decisions that will ultimately include or exclude readers. I know the process is going to be messy, but that shouldn’t be what stops me.

An Open Letter to Ben (Or, Why I'm Changing the Way I Grade Papers)

Dear Ben,

More than a year has passed since I read your essay about Holden Caulfield. At the time, it was one of 62 essays about Holden that I was reading; since then, I’ve read 63 more. Still, I remember that your essay applied something you learned in a YES Institute course: that Holden had a “listening,” or biased way of understanding the world, that got in his way. I confess I don’t remember much more about the essay—as I said, it’s one of 125 that I’ve read, and it was more than a year ago—but I do remember two more things about it. One, I remember loving it so much that I told several colleagues about it, and I gushed (which isn’t something I do easily or often) about how creatively you’d applied what you’d learned in one context to something in another context. That kind of interdisciplinary connection-making isn’t something you middle schoolers do too often (not that we teachers help as much as we should), and it’s very exciting when it happens.

Two, I remember the score I gave you: 44/50.

As you know, I graded the essay using a rubric. For everything of yours that I graded, I used a rubric. I don’t have the exact rubric I used for your essay, but here’s the very similar one I used for essays this year:

Paragraph 1: Introductory Paragraph ( /5)

· Introduction explains your topic in general and leads the reader to your thesis.

· Thesis is strong, clearly stated, and interesting.

Paragraphs 2-4: Body Paragraphs ( /10, /10, /10)

· Begin with a supporting argument that helps show your thesis is true.

· Give specific, well-chosen examples from the book that show the argument is true.

· Use at least 3 well-blended quotations that directly support your thesis.

· Explain how each example proves the argument in the paragraph.

· Remind the reader how all points in the paragraph relate back to the main thesis.

Paragraph 5: Concluding Paragraph ( /5)

· Summarizes the points you made in the essay.

· Explains why what you said matters.

Writing Style and Mechanics ( /10)

· Uses clear and precise language.

· Ideas follow each other logically, with clear transitions connecting them.

· Is free from spelling, grammatical, and stylistic errors.

TOTAL ( /50)

I’ve gotten very positive reviews of my rubric. Students, parents, and tutors like that it’s clear and specific. From the rubric and the detailed comment I give at the end, struggling essayists know what was expected, what they did well, and what to work on next time. I like the rubric too. It keeps me honest, keeps me from inflating grades. If the paper lacks clear points, sufficient textual evidence, and underdeveloped ideas, I can’t give it a B+ just because I want to.

Here’s the problem, Ben. Every time—and I mean EVERY SINGLE TIME—I give a writing assignment, there’s at least one piece of writing that I want to give a higher score than the rubric tells me I should. (There’s also at least one that I want to give a lower grade than the rubric tells me I should. I’ll get to that in a minute.) Your year, for the Holden essay, yours was the one I wanted to grade higher. Your thesis was brilliantly creative and the paper was well-written. I could hear your voice in it. In a big stack of essays where some were bad and some were OK and some were pretty good, yours was by far the most interesting. If it weren’t my job to read essays, I wouldn’t want to read most of the essays I read. I’d want to read yours. So why didn’t you get a 50?

I was reminded of your essay while reading an article, an oldie but a goodie, called Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment, by a writing professor named Peter Elbow. Elbow examines three different ways teachers look at their students’ writing: grading the paper, analyzing the paper’s strengths and weaknesses in order to help the writer develop, and connecting to the writing. I have tried to make grades more meaningful by tying them to a rubric. Instead of slapping an A- on a paper because something about it appeals to me (or slapping a B- on it because something about it doesn’t), I measure the essay against important criteria of good writing. A good essay needs to have an interesting thesis; it needs to be well-organized so the reader can follow the ideas; it needs adequate support for the claims it makes. I look for those elements when I read students papers, and the score I put on the paper reflects the extent to which a student has measured up to the aspects of good writing I taught. In Elbow’s terms, I don’t just grade; I evaluate. The grade is merely a reflection of that evaluation.

Except, there’s another dimension of reading a paper. I’m not a paper-reading robot—although, when I have 60 to read, I sometimes feel that way. I’m a person. I connect with some ideas more than others. I enjoy beautiful turns of phrase. I love creative thinking that makes me pause and say, I never would have thought about it that way, or, what an interesting connection, or, YES! Reading your paper as a teacher, I gave it a 44 because it measured up to most of the standards I’d set, but according to the rubric, there were little things here and there that it lacked, or places where it needed more development, or something. (By the way, I don’t remember what was “wrong” with it. I hope you don’t either.) But, reading it as a reader, I enjoyed it. It put enough ideas in my head that I still remember the paper now.

Whenever I read anything, I write on it. When I read student essays, I write notes about the clarity of the argument, perhaps, or the effectiveness of transitions, or the development of the ideas. Evaluative comments. I write evaluative comments on other forms of student writing too: your stories, poems, dialogues, descriptions, and vignettes. I also write on published writing, but not for the purpose of grading it. I’m thinking about it. I wrote on Peter Elbow’s article: arguing with it, jotting down ideas for my own classroom and team meetings, asking questions, connecting his ideas to other articles I’ve read, noting my (rather strong) emotions. I write on fiction and nonfiction, for work and for pleasure, to note the questions and ideas and feelings and associations I make as I read. As a general rule, I like writing that gets me thinking, and the more I think, the more I scribble down. The sheer amount of commentary I write in the margins of a text is a rough measure of how much I like it. Maybe I should start reading student papers like I read everything else and give a grade based on how much I write. That would be a lot easier and a whole lot more fun.

Fun for me, but I wonder how it would affect you, and other students. What if you got back a paper, and instead of reading all the comments about what you did well and what you might have done differently, you got to read comments grappling with your actual ideas? There’d be responses to some of your thoughts and questions about others. You’d find out, through my reactions, where you’d reached me, where you’d convinced me, where you’d inspired me—and yes, where you’d confused me, where you’d bored me, where you’d failed to prove your point. You might come back to me and explain what you were thinking, so I’d get it, and I would say, OK, now go put that in your paper. We could talk about WHY I was confused. Maybe it was the lack of transitions. Or WHY I got bored. Maybe your thesis stated the obvious. See where I’m going?

Peter Elbow makes a startling point in his essay. He says that when teachers like a student’s writing, they find it easier to criticize. He says that when he doesn’t like the writing, he struggles to write comments, “trying to soften [his] criticism, trying to find something nice to say—and usually sounding fake, often unclear” (Elbow, 171). But when he actually likes the writing, when he’s excited about it, he’s also able to be more critical. I’ve discovered the same thing when I read papers. When I really love an essay, when it engages me as a reader and a thinker, I can give specific commentary on why I like it. At that point, I feel like I’ve established an intellectual relationship with the writer, like we are two scholars on equal footing, exploring an interesting idea together. On that equal footing, I feel entirely comfortable raising my objections to the organizational structure, or the wording, or the third paragraph’s content. And the student, who feels genuinely respected as a thinker, eagerly returns to his or her desk to make the writing live up to how much I like it.

I’ve seen it before. But I’ve also seen the opposite, when a student knows that even though he or she got a perfectly decent grade—thanks, rubric—I didn’t really like the paper. There was one essay this year that I remember reading, and though there was nothing really wrong with it and I think I gave it a 42, I just didn’t like it. The arguments were predictable and the prose was boring. It was fine, but it was boring, and I gave the B begrudgingly.

What’s weird about rubrics is what they do to me as a reader. I let the rubric make decisions instead of making them myself. Ben’s essay gets a 44 because he didn’t do x, y, or z. Walter’s essay gets a 42 because he didn’t do x, y, or z either, and he also didn’t do a couple of other things. Writing gets reduced to whatever categories I put on the rubric, and however thoughtful I was in designing those categories, their ultimate effect is still to reduce writing to x, y, and z. Writing isn’t algebra. (Even algebra isn’t algebra—there’s always more than one way to solve for x.) There are no formulas. There’s only me, the reader, you, the writer, and the spaceship of words that carries meaning from your planet to mine. Sure, I might not understand everything you say; I might even misunderstand, and everything you write gets filtered through the atmosphere of experiences, ideas, and biases I already have around me, not to mention whatever weather systems of feelings and thoughts are swirling around at the moment when I read.

But Ben, that’s what reading IS. It’s interactive. It’s as variable and diverse and messy as people are. I use my rubric to try to take all that messiness and make it neat and clean, but as I discover EVERY SINGLE TIME a pile of papers lands in front of me, that neatness doesn’t really exist. If it did, I’d be able to justify a C for Walter and an A for you. But then, if that neatness existed, I probably wouldn’t be an English teacher, because writing would follow easy formulas and would lack the richness and surprise that made me love writing in the first place.

So what happens now? Well, with the help of Maja Wilson’s excellent book Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, which echoes (or rather, presages) many of the ideas I’ve put down here, I am rethinking my entire system of assessing student writing? What possibilities are there beyond the rubrics that strangle my sensibilities? How can I grade (because I still have to grade) and make sure you get that A? And so very much more importantly, how do I honor the wonder and delight I felt upon reading your essay—the relationship we now have as reader and writer? I don’t think that volume-of-commentary system is going to fly, but I am committed to finding something that will.

Respectfully,

Ms P