Because the students are so engaged I did a science review poem project right after my colleagues finished their poetry unit. We collected the students work into a booklet to give out. The idea worked well enough that we want to expand it next year.

I think each discipline gains a lot from the other’s perspective and practice, especially in supporting students being able to adequately express their ideas and observations. As teachers we need to create opportunities for that to happen.

He had more writing in his ART class than in his English class! He had almost as much writing and more poetry (reading and writing) in his Spanish 1A class. Even his science class had more writing in the first semester.

This rather light-weight English class fit with my perception of the prior training of students in my tech writing classes—lots of hand-wavey “discussion” with little real training in the proper construction of papers and arguments.

Luckily, he had an awesome history teacher, who taught them how to write a research paper with proper citations, how to look for and use primary sources, and how to structure an argument and provide support. She also had them doing several different forms of presentation (fake newspapers, research essays, historical fiction journal, …). The history teacher covered everything that the English class should have covered, in addition to American history using largely primary sources from colonial times to 1960s. I realize that not all teachers can do as much (nor would I want them to—the homework load from the history class was easily 3 times that of any other class). The contrast was pretty remarkable though, between an almost college-level history class and an English class for the nearly illiterate.

a) I need more emphasis on the idea that language is constructive: it not only names, but *creates* internal and external reality. Point of view is especially important in considering this idea.

b) Kevin/H: I don’t think your respective emphases are actually mutually exclusive; they only highlight the different ends for language as a means. Any curriculum that forsakes one for the other, OR does not make clear the connection between both, is impoverished.

Kevin, I actually feel as if our middle school curriculum is swinging in an opposite direction from the one you worry about. We’re becoming all non-fiction, all pragmatism, all functionalism. This is wicked important, of course, but not at the expense of The Diary of Anne Frank, or learning how to appreciate, write, memorize, and deliver poetry.