High School: Day One

This morning, as I greeted a new batch of ninth graders into my first block English class, I knew I wasn’t the only one with transition on the mind. I’m sure it was a shock to all of us to hear that alarm clock ring so early in the morning, officially transitioning us out of our summer slumber to face the realities of a school schedule once again. But for the 24 fourteen year olds staring back at me, the transition from middle school into high school loomed even larger. What would the classes be like? How much homework would there be? Did I really plan on grading their summer assignments? Would they be able to turn assignments in late? How did their teachers expect them to behave? Would they get lost in the massive high school building? How much would their high school grades impact their future opportunities? Were they ready for this?

“Readiness” is an interesting concept. And despite six years of teaching high school English and a background in education policy in an environment where “readiness” is a common buzzword in the conversation around the high school to college transition, I have to wonder what it really means. What do I expect of incoming high school students? What should I expect?

I watched my students write for seven minutes to the first prompt they would ever receive in high school—“Tell me what’s on your mind right now”—knowing some would struggle with its ambiguity, while others would thrive on the freedom it offered. The boy on the front row wrote only one sentence in those seven minutes: “The day before yesterday, I had gone to the pool with my friends.” One of his peers was onto the second page of her freewrite before I told them they could put their pencils down. As their teacher, was I to assume that one was more ready than the other? She certainly had the fluency and the stamina to record her thoughts, while his response certainly did not meet my expectations for an honors-level ninth grade writer.

But in a subsequent component of the assignment, I learned that the boy knew a lot about writing, and more importantly, his own writing, after all. When asked to write down three things I should know about them as a student, this boy’s third item struck me as a better indicator of his “readiness” than the diagnostic writing piece he had just written. He simply wrote, “I enjoy reading and writing. Though I have trouble deciding on a topic.” Next to some of his classmates’ responses (“I have a Yorkshire Terrier whose name is Lexi” or “My favorite color is pink”), this boy’s response was reflective, aware, and metacognitive. He was—and is—ready. Maybe not ready to write a page about his feelings in the first fifteen minutes of high school, or ready to compose a two page analytical essay about Antigone, but certainly ready to learn. Ready to think about his writing process. Ready to engage.

And I am ready to teach him.

Whether we are working with students transitioning from elementary to middle school, middle to high school, or high school to college, it is important to remember that their preparation is not always evidenced by the clean cut diagnostic exams or writing assignments we ask them to perform. As their first point of contact in the transition to writing in middle school to writing in high school, I need to remember that I am not there to assess their “readiness,” or worse, the efficacy of their prior teachers in teaching them what they are supposed to know and be able to do by now, but rather to engage them in the recursive process of developing themselves as writers. I hope that, in four years, their first year college writing professors will do the same.

This is why I am so thrilled and honored to have been invited to participate in this year’s Transitioning to Writing Symposium. I look forward to collaborating with practitioners on both sides of the high school to college transition as we draw from our own experiences to shape the conversation. Ultimately, it is my hope that we can together create an environment that honors the experiences and knowledge that our students bring into our classes on the first day of school as we move them toward the next inevitable transition that they will encounter.

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