What does it take to learn how to write well? Time and support. But the school day is more squeezed more than ever — with test preparation and a laundry list of standards to be taught.
There are few extra minutes to foster expression or help kids convey complex, creative ideas. But one young organization in New Orleans, Big Class, is supporting kids and schools in better writing.
I stopped in at the Big Class writing studio after school one day. It’s in a shared space, on Saint Claude Avenue, a few doors down from Arise Academy. That’s where Akilah Tony goes to school. She’s in the 7th grade, and she really likes to write poetry. We sat together in comfy chairs, surrounded by books and softly playing music.
Akilah says her love of poetry developed at Big Class. “Right now I’m in this stage where I don’t really like to write stories. I just like to write poems.”
Akilah reached onto the wall and grabbed a poem. It’ll be published next month in a Big Class book called How to Survive Halloween. She immediately began reading:
“The room that no one enters. The room that no one enters is dark and mysterious.It has blind eyes that see through the windows of society. The bright mind bulb thinks often, wondering how to escape.”
“It’s kind of like a mystery poem,” I tell her. “To figure out what you’re thinking.”
“Yeah,” she answers. “It took me a while to figure out what it meant.”
“You mean the words came to you before you understood them?”
“It was just flowing and flowing and flowing,” she responds. “And then I actually read it and thought: 'What did I write?'”
Akilah’s flow is due, in part, to the time and space she gets at Big Class.
“It’s a really fun place to work,” Akilah tells me. “Like this area just for kids.”
“Is there anything else in your life that’s just for kids?” I ask.
“Ice cream.”
Akilah says she learns a lot in school — about Black History and poets like Langston Hughes. But in terms of her own writing…
“When I’m in Reading class, I think of a good poem, my light bulb just goes off,” Akilah tells me. “And I’m like I can’t wait to write this in Big Class. And I get so excited. I come here and I’m like woo-hoo!”
“I think that with the test-driven culture that we have in our schools, the data dominant conversation in so many of our schools, what happens is that writing is often taught as a set of skills instead of as a means of communication and expression,” says Doug Keller, who started Big Class after a year teaching a whopper of a big class — 43 first graders. Keller used expression — his students telling their stories — to motivate them to write. It worked.
They published a book, which sold out. They had a well-attended reading at the local library. And then “Big Class” grew into a slew of creative writing happenings: an afterschool program, workshops, and in-school residencies. With the help of a fancy printer, which they rent through a publishing grant, Big Class makes lots and lots of books.
Keller says creative writing helps kids learn empathy and imagine the world they want to create. And most educators want it in their schools. But it gets short shrift because of time.
“I think there is all this… just the constant need of catch up,” says Keller. “I need to catch up. We don’t have enough time. We don’t have enough time for this. We don’t have enough time for that. And that’s a really difficult environment to say: I want to share this story with you that I really love, and then why you don’t you ask lots of questions about it because I’m sure you’re curious because you’re six and all this is new to you.”
Barry Lane writes books on teaching writing, and travels the country supporting teachers in the teaching of writing. “I think the three things you need for a writing classroom are time, space, and choice,” says Lane.
Lane thinks kids best learn skills, like how to use a comma, when that comma is in a story they want to tell. But creative writing helps with more than teaching grammar, explains Lane. It helps students find their voice.
“A lot of the standards are calling for critical thinking, and companies in the world are dying to have innovative workers — people who think for themselves,” says Lane. “So creative writing is a way to discover your own creativity, discover the ideas that you have that have value to the world but you didn’t know it till you started writing them.”
Krystal Hardy is the principal of Sylvanie Williams College Prep Elementary in Central City. “In the neighborhood of New Orleans that our particular school is in we see creative writing as an outlet for our children that’s a very powerful tool,” explains Hardy. She says her students, in their short lives, often see acts of violence and experience high levels of poverty.
“They need to talk to people about it, but they also just need to express what is their day-to-day lived experience. So that they know that the teachers and adults around them care for them by way of reading those things and getting to know who they are as little people by what they write.”
Big Class worked with Sylvanie Williams’ 2nd and 4th grades on a poetry study last year. But this year, Principal Hardy wanted them, and their team of volunteers from Xavier and Loyola Universities, to have a more explicit, permanent place in the school: a room. The Writers’ Room is filled with a couch, a big writing table, and lots of clipboards — which make good writing surfaces when you’re sprawling on the rug.
“We’re going to share out a sentence,” a Big Class instructor tells her a group of 3rd graders inside the Sylvanie Williams’ Writing Room.
“I want my book to go to the library,” shares Jashine.
“Published author,” the instructor exclaims. “Give Jashine some snaps.” Am chorus of snaps gives praise.
“It is life changing for our children,” Principal Hardy tells me. “It really is. Because it gives them such a hope that anything is possible.”
Principal Hardy says when her students see their writing published, their eyes light up.
“Some of our children, they want to seriously just be seen and valued, appreciated and heard, and what a wonderful way — to put it in print.”
When kids work hard on a piece of writing and publish it, they create something enduring for their families and themselves. But Principal Hardy says they also make something for everyone.
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