The Writing Project : Science or Shop, the Pen Is the Learning Tool at S.D. High

Though they have never met, Ramon Hernandez and Kim Camplisson carry on a lively correspondence. In regular, detailed letters, he tells her of his work, of his plans and of his hopes for the future.

“This week, I am doing the back plywood part of the cabinet,” advises Ramon, a student in San Diego High School’s wood shop. “It need to be stained with dark walnut stain, then I am going to spray varnish with the air pistol . . . It is going to look pretty good. . . . The cabinet is going to be placed in my room in our new house in the beaches of TJ.”

Camplisson, a paid writing assistant on the San Diego High staff, drops downstairs from the school’s spacious writing center each week to pick up Ramon’s journal. “Ramon,” she responds on the same page, “your cabinet sounds like it’s beautiful. I like all the diagrams you’ve drawn to show me how it looks. . . . Good luck finishing before the semester ends. I hope you get a good grade. Kim C.”

The unusual exchange is one facet of a school-wide effort under way at San Diego High to bolster students’ skills in one of school’s--and life’s--most crucial disciplines: writing.

Convinced that clear writing is intimately linked with clear thinking, the teachers at San Diego High’s “writing academy” are asking their charges to write. And write. And write.

Like all students, they write in English and social studies classes. But they also must pen a wide variety of assignments in wood shop and gym, physics and mathematics. They write essays, short stories, poems, dialogue, editorials, advertisements, journals and just about anything else their teachers can dream up.

“We’re just trying to get them to write more so they get familiar with the written language,” said Danny Newport, the school’s wood shop teacher. “It’s like anything else. The more they practice, the better they’ll get.”

“We are telling them all the time that writing is valuable, that it’s worth their time to learn to do it well--whatever they do (for careers),” said Trish Allan, a novelist and San Diego High’s “writer in residence.”

If it seems unusual to ask wood shop students to master pens as well as lathes, it is. But as an ever-growing army of teachers schooled in the philosophy of “writing across the curriculum” takes jobs in the public schools, the practice is becoming more a standard than an exception here and across the nation.

In the San Diego Unified School District, Clairemont High and Lincoln High are two of the schools that have embraced a curriculum-wide emphasis on writing. But nowhere is the effort more widespread than at San Diego High, where the writing academy was founded in 1985 as the first of its kind in the United States.

Before the opening in September, 1985, all San Diego High teachers received two weeks of paid training in the techniques of using writing in their classrooms. Many of the teachers were new, having answered the school district’s call for a faculty that wanted to focus on writing.

“That’s the nice thing about San Diego High,” said Robert Infantino, director of the San Diego Area Writing Project, which trains teachers to teach writing skills. “Everyone’s bought into the concept and they’re trying things out.”

To foster accuracy and use of detail, geometry teacher Shirley Cleland asks students to draw a polygon (a many-sided figure), then describe it in words. Each student gives his description to another, who must reproduce the figure from the written words.

Girls basketball team coach Donna Moore asks her athletes to list their goals for each upcoming game in writing. After the contests, they analyze errors and deficiencies, also in writing.

Physics students have turned in philosophy papers on the relationship between quantum physics and their existence. Social studies students recently spent three weeks writing diaries of imaginary wagon train journeys across the United States.

Even in typing class, students are asked to write essays in addition to the usual drills.

“What we’re doing,” said writing resource teacher Barbara Storms, “is changing the way people use and think about writing.”

The experiment has so far met with mixed reactions from students.

“I definitely notice a change, because I was here before the program began,” said Nano Valerio, a senior and one of the school’s best poets. The additional writing time “helps me not only to think clearer--because I’m trying to get something over to another person--(but) to interpret clearer,” he said.

Wood shop student Jose Beltran, however, has not grown to love the concept. Writing is tolerable in classes like English, “where they make us write,” he said. But “to tell you the truth, I don’t like it in wood shop,” he said. “I think it’s OK in other classes, but not in wood shop.”

A look at some students’ wood shop journals shows just six or seven entries since the school year began in September, even though Newport said that his students are asked to write as often as three times a week. Beltran is one such student. Asked what he did during most writing times, he said: “I just talked.”

“I didn’t think I was ever going to write anything,” said Christian Reyes, another wood shop student who has filled just four pages of his journal. “Writing in wood shop, it’s a little weird. But then it starts to get interesting.

“I’m not in love with it. It’s helped me to look at the way I write. My sense of organization comes along.”

Teachers, too, admit that they have not been as diligent as they could be. Gym teachers Donna Moore and Shirley Davis said that they still use writing in less than 10% of their classes.

In part, they are constrained by student attitudes. “You have to bring them about to writing slowly,” Davis said. “Their idea of (gym class) is you throw out the ball and you play.”

But the teachers admit that they sometimes suffer from a lack of motivation.

“It’s hard to gear yourself up and take all these materials and get out to your class,” Davis said. “We have to pick up this box of papers and pencils and cart it out to the class. Because they don’t come to us with papers and pens.”

It is no longer startling news that American high school students have difficulty writing. In 1983, after a three-year study of American high schools, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching concluded that “writing is the most important and most neglected skill in school.”

In its November, 1986, “writing report card,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress--which has been tracking students’ writing skills for more than a decade--reported that “analytic writing was difficult for students in all grades. Even on the easiest tasks, which asked students to compare and contrast, only 25% of the eleventh graders, 18% of the eighth graders, and 2% of the fourth graders wrote adequate or better analyses.”

Students also “had difficulty providing evidence for their points of view” in persuasive writing and “found it moderately difficult to write well-developed stories,” the study concluded.

But most troubling was this announcement: “A major conclusion to draw from this assessment is that students at all grade levels are deficient in higher-order thinking skills.”

The San Diego Unified School District’s October, 1986, assessment of 8th-, 10th- and 12th-graders’ writing skills showed that “the results for all three years point to a common problem in students’ writing across all grade levels and in diverse types of writing: thin development. Students generalize and assert confidently, but they are not learning to exemplify and argue.”

“Kids have trouble with critical thinking,” said Rebekah Caplan, co-director of the Bay Area Writing Project at the University of California, Berkeley. “Kids, when faced with formidable thinking assignments, don’t know where to begin.

“Kids don’t know how to express themselves. They have a reaction to something, but they don’t know how to express those feelings.”

Why? There are as many answers as theorists. Teachers and researchers mention the influence of television, a lack of discipline and the “relevancy movement” of the 1960s and early 1970s that stressed content over writing form.

“That’s kind of the message they have gotten along the way: If it’s creative, if these are my thoughts, my feelings, it can’t be criticized,” said Storms, San Diego High’s writing resource teacher.

Teachers say that they struggle just to persuade students of the need to write throughout their lives, even though colleges and businesses complain loudly that high school graduates are terrible writers. Many students simply don’t want to work hard enough to produce quality writing, teachers said.

But everyone agrees that the schools must shoulder at least some of the blame. Teachers have passed the buck, believing that students will pick up their writing skills somewhere along the way, Caplan said.

Some students are stuck in formula writing, said Allan, San Diego High’s writer-in-residence. “They know the formula, but if they vary from the formula, they lose track of what they’re doing,” she said.

Others have learned mechanics but not how to use them. “They may know what a metaphor is, but they don’t know how to use a metaphor to control the reader,” she said.

But the main problem with students’ writing, Infantino said, is that “they don’t do enough of it. The emphasis at the elementary level and even at the junior highs is reading. There’s not enough integration, until they come into high school, of reading and writing.”

American educators copied the concept of writing across the curriculum from British schools, where writing begins “at Day One,” Caplan said. Though it is not a new concept, there has been a resurgence of its use during the last five years.

The National Writing Project, which grew from the Bay Area Writing Project and now has 161 centers, is instilling the concept in public schools around the country. Each summer, the centers instruct teachers how to teach writing--both to students and to other teachers. The number of teachers bringing the philosophy into schools is growing every year.

At San Diego High and elsewhere, teachers recognize that simply getting students to write is of little value if they are not also taught how to write.

The writing academy emphasizes “the writing process,” a nine-step technique. Students first plan and think about their works. They write a draft and share it with other students. They revise and re-draft. They edit. They re-draft. They evaluate their finished products. In this way, teachers hope to persuade students that their first pearls of wisdom are not finished products, and how to distinguish good writing from bad. “They don’t know why something is good,” Allan said. “What’s the difference between Stephen King and Dostoevsky, or Stephen King and even Steinbeck?” she asked.

They are asked to write for a wide variety of audiences and in a wide variety of styles. In addition to journals and reports, they have written letters to U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and other policy-makers. They write short stories and poetry. A few are trying novels.

Teachers try to make the topics highly personal. “The way to make headway with kids is to tap personal knowledge, personal experience,” Caplan said.

Some of the school’s most serious students are in Allan’s sixth-period writer’s workshop, where about 20 of them will spend the semester writing and dissecting peers’ works. It has taken them some time to become accustomed to criticism, Allan said.

“Writing is in many ways a painful process, because you are exposed to your own mistakes,” said Valerio, a student in the class.

Some of them are quite good. Heidi Hart, now a 17-year-old senior, had a book of poetry published at 16. Junior Chris Bolinger has a future as a fiction writer, Allan believes.

Other students may sign up for two-day workshops in short story and play writing. The writing center includes a bank of computers on which the school’s many native Spanish speakers practice “prompted writing”--answering a series of questions posed by the computer. Higher-level students use the computers as word processors.

Last year, playwrights Edward Albee and Robert Lord addressed the students and worked with them on writing dialogue.

It is too early to assess whether the writing academy has improved San Diego High students’ skills, but the district will probably evaluate the project in coming years, Storms said. Until then, teachers must satisfy themselves that their lessons are being applied.

“I see a lot of girls writing notes (to each other),” said Cleland, the geometry teacher. “But the notes are well-written.”