Appearances Deceive, by Greg Bouljon, 2003

"Her disability seems most pronounced in the areas of language. You'll see that she can barely put words on paper. How she got this far, I'll never know. She'll pose a real challenge for each of you."

This was our introduction by a consultant to Kendra (pseudonym), a special education student, who really did have great difficulty writing. Her first drafts and notes looked like those of a much younger student -one who was just learning to spell and make letters on paper. It was almost impossible to read and to understand at all.

The teachers on my interdisciplinary teaching team were taken aback by her poor penmanship and seeming inability to form coherent thoughts on paper. We were also quickly amazed at how introspective, analytical, and insightful Kendra was orally in class. How could such a bright child of fourteen have such problems on paper and be such a leader in discussions?

I called a meeting with our team and her mother. Dad also came to the meeting which surprised me that they could both get off work to come in at 1 :30 in the afternoon. I asked the parents to tell us about their daughter before she arrived at the meeting. They told an impassioned tale of a young girl who had never been comfortable at school after kindergarten or first grade. The mother had tears in her eyes as she told of Kendra hating school and trying every trick she could think of to stay home.

The father reminded us of his daughter's identified disability and of the accommodations that were in her special education plan. One of those was that Kendra was not to be expected to write at school. Knowing that the law was clearly on his side, and knowing also of the reputation that he had which was to go on the offensive with teachers who he felt were not helping his daughter, I told him that that was unacceptable. As his eyes opened wider, I explained.

I told him that we needed to see writing not as penmanship on paper, but as composition of ideas that are often new and enlightening. My job was to inspire thinking and to mentor young writers as they struggled to put their ideas on paper. Kendra's job was to think, reflect, and to see her life, learning and world with constantly changing eyes and then to write it down. His job and his wife's job was to take what Kendra composed each day on the computer (she really did have horrific penmanship), talk with her about it at home, and to help her edit and polish it so that she could continue on it the next day. I tried to be adamant that they were not to write for her, not to fixate on errors, and nQ1 to expect that every day's production would go anywhere but in a holding file.

He looked at me and said, "No one has ever talked to me that way." I could feel the tension build in the principal who was sitting next to me. (He shifts in his chair when he is nervous and is preparing to speak.) Before he could, Kendra's dad said, "No one since second grade thought Kendra could write because of what she put on paper. My daughter is not stupid. (She definitely was bright. She just couldn't hand write on paper very well.) I had begun to worry about what would become of her after her school years when she appears so illiterate on paper. But you don't seem to think of her as illiterate at all."

“I may be wrong,” I said. “That is a risk that you’ll have to take. Let’s meet at conferences at the end of the first quarter. If you don’t see improvement, then go to the principal here and ask for another language arts teacher for her. Until then, at least one of you will read her writing every day that she does some at school for any of her classes. You will not –I repeat, not -focus on her penmanship if it is handwritten or her mechanics and conventions regardless of how it is written. You will focus on her ideas and on expanding them. She has much more to say than what she puts on paper. You, her special education teacher, and I will find out what else she has to say and get that on the paper with her."

As Kendra's mother sat with her mouth open, her father sat back in his chair and said,

"You're nuts." Then he agreed to layout the plan with Kendra once she got to our meeting.

Of course, I'm only telling you this because things worked out. I'm not really interested \ today in talking about the plans for kids who went "south" and didn't work out. Kendra wrote some really good pieces, developed some confidence, increased her keyboarding skills, and learned to get along with her parents (not an easy task for many early adolescents) as she needed them to edit and help her.

The point here is that appearances do deceive. What we see on paper is not always what the writer is capable of doing. But if we see "writing" not as penmanship but as "composing" that can be done orally, or performed, or drawn, or written over with help, then our students can take charge of their learning with some degree of confidence.

Don't misunderstand. I believe in correctness. Writing becomes unclear and worthless when the errors stand out more than the ideas. But we all need the "space" to conceive and compose our ideas first and then to edit and polish them when (and it) that time comes. If you ever get a chance to see Hemingway's drafts and handwritten manuscripts, you will understand the value of a talented editor who could decipher his scratchings on paper and edit them into the masterpieces that they remain to this day. Kids deserve the same from their teacher and their parent editors.

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