The Power of the Pen (or Pencil)

The primary focus with my elementary school students is to empower them through the written word, both by reading and writing.

I want my students to know that they can affect the world and their own lives by writing to people who can deal with situations that hurt or help them.

So my kids read a lot and write every day. They see concrete results of the power of the pen. We have been published in magazines, gotten presidential candidate Jerry Brown to come to our school, gotten lots of written response from various presidents and had one of our student’s letters published in a science fiction book.

These students, only 8 years old, have total confidence that when they pick up a pen (or pencil, in their case), something will happen. Something powerful. So now they are taking on Caltrans.

There has been intensive construction just a few feet from the back doors of classrooms, resulting in noise, shaking, pollution, broken sewer lines, dust, unmended fences, soot on lunches in our open-air cafeteria, trucks whizzing by a few feet from the school and huge concrete blocks lifted by crane up and over the students’ heads. This would have never gone on in a middle-class white neighborhood.

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Here is a sampling of the students’ letters and a drawing by James.