My Out-of-Print books...
NEW Real Mr. Fitz Blog Post:
In 2008 and 2010 I published two books for teachers with Scholastic Professional Books. They are no longer available in print. Actually, I think they are no longer available at the Scholastic website at all – not even as e-books.
This is not a big surprise. Teacher books don’t have a long shelf life and don’t exactly sell like the latest Stephen King novel.
However, I feel like the timing of my books hastened their demise. I also think their failure to really catch on says something about where we are at as a nation in terms of writing and writing instruction.
First, some context.
When I student taught and started my teaching career in 1990, Nancy Atwell’s Reading/Writing Workshop approach was all the rage. I interned at a school in Schenectedy, New York in a pure Atwell Classroom. My first actual teaching job, in Port Orange, Florida was in my current district, which had instituted a program called “Writing Enhancement” that kept class sizes down (I was hired to helpl lower them) so that teachers could successfully use Atwell’s approach.
I’m only going to address writing here, not reading, but the approach really worked for making students into writers. Students got to behave like real writers. Tuesday through Thursday of every week was Writing Workshop. As the teacher, I did mini-lessons each day, but there were few, if any, full class assignments. Students had complete autonomy and choice as far as subject matter and genre. They got to really delve into the writing process and write non-formulaically. It gave students voice and agency and got them thinking about what they wrote rather than following rote instructions. It gave me time to actually talk to students about their writing and their thought processes instead of just assigning and assessing.
So of course the program was cut at the end of the school year, and I was laid off.
Fast forward a few years. To “improve” writing, the state of Florida added a Writing Test in 2000. It was basically a random expository or argumentative prompt and a chance to write, by hand, about it off the top of your head for 45 minutes. No source material required.
Many teachers went the hyper formulaic route to get scores, to the point of telling students to always start their essay with the word “Poof!” somehow or to include the phrase “I was as nervous as a marshmallow in a campfire.” And these hyper-formulaic essays were always, always supposed to be five paragraphs.
Some of us took a different route. I taught them real writing: strategies for focusing a topic, brainstorming and organizing ideas for paragraphs, creating word pictures, and revising on the fly. I taught them to have fun with the writing, no matter the topic.
And I succeeded. My scores were generally way above average. But that didn’t “count” toward our school grades. Only the minimum passing score of 3 out of 6 counted. It didn’t matter that a lot of them were “6’s”. I wrote a “My Word” for the Orlando Sentinal about how this policy inspired teachers to shoot for mediocrity, and it was spotted by the wonderful Gloria Pipkin at Scholastic, who emailed me to ask if I wanted to write a book for Scholastic about my writing strategies. I asked her if maybe Mr. Fitz could come along for the ride and appear in the book, she said yes!
The book, Writing Extraordinary Essays, published in 2008 – and included about 100 of my comics. With the advance, we had our floors redone! I sold enough books that I started earning modest royalities. When I presented to a packed room at the Florida Council of Teachers of English about Writing Extraordinary Essays, dozens of copies sold out in minutes at the bookseller outside the room.
In 2010, I got to write a sequel, which we titled Teaching Students to Make Writing Visual and Vivid. The timing was bad, because now not only was writing workshop in the past – so was the writing test as we knew it. The Common Core State Standards had arrived. The “instructional shifts” in writing (I had a slightly different pronunciation) meant that we were supposed to follow CCSS arcitect David Coleman’s edict that in the real world nobody gives a $#!+ about your personal story or your opinion. Writing was no longer supposed to be personal – you were supposed to do a “research simulation”. This simulation involved reading three articles about some dull topic (I always joke that it’s going to be fence posts – “Write an argument about what kind of material makes the best fence post.”), then writing an essay synthesizing the three articles utilizing “text-evidence.”
Being visual and vivid no longer mattered. Being creative or original no longer mattered. My books no longer mattered. I was actually told by district staff that students didn’t really need to know how to write any more. They just needed to know how to string quotes together. “We don’t need their ‘beautiful words’ anymore,” they said.
I never actually earned my full advance back on the second book. It stopped selling. They sent me the left-over copies. Meanwhile, my wife and I discovered that seniors, after years of writing impersonal essays using text-evidence no longer knew how to write about themselves for their college essays. We did special workshops for them to teach them to make their essays… visual and vivid. To help them find their voices again.
Are my books dated after all these years? Only if you think the nature of writing has actually changed.
It turns out now that the kind of writing we’ve been asking kids to do since 2010 or so is actually the perfect kind of writing to ask an A.I. to do! It’s impersonal, requires citation, and is rated for correctness and use of text-evidence. Actually, this kind of writing is now rated by A.I.s some of the time.
But I don’t think the nature of writing has actually changed, because I don’t think using an A.I. is actually writing. (More on that later, but check out John Warner’s Excellent book about the subject, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in an Age of A.I., or my blog post about it here.)
Writing for yourself – including having something to say, choosing your own topics, coming up with your reasons and details, and refining the writing through revision – it still one of the best ways to develop your mind, your thinking, and even your sense of yourself.
My school district and school were just both received A-ratings from the state of Florida. But writing does not count toward those grades, so it is now only mentioned in passing on our English curriculum maps. One practice for the state test per quarter. That’s it.
I have watched writing go from a valued skill that helps students develop as human beings and citizens to being a thing to standardize and rate on a rubric to being something that doesn’t really matter to the system. We don’t need their beautiful words.
It still matters in my classroom. Every. Single. Day. And not just in my Creative Writing class.
And if writing still matters to you, check out my books. They are still available at other outlets, usually used, so I won’t actually see any royalties. But that’s not the point. Writing matters. That’s the point.
