.Teaching Every Student How to Write, One by One

Successful high school mentoring program expands into Oakland school.

The tardy bell at East Oakland’s Media Academy had just rung, its
scream echoing down the pale yellow halls and bouncing off broken
orange lockers. Outside the door to classroom 1205, a dozen
professional men and women hovered awkwardly. In this small corner of
the city’s beleaguered school district, they were piloting something
unprecedented: one-on-one writing coaches for every tenth grader in the
school.

Someone gave the go ahead, and the group of volunteers filed into
Sonja Totten-Harris’ English classroom. Some of the students inside
looked nervous; others gave shy smiles of recognition. One boy put his
head between his arms.

The writing coaches beckoned to their students: Denis Clifford, an
author of self-help law books, walked out with fifteen-year-old Kalah
Johnson. Fowzia Karimi, a recent graduate of Mills’ creative writing
master’s program, smiled at sixteen-year-old Lester Finney. Out in the
hallway, each pair sat down at a green folding table with a copy of
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart — and an essay to
write.

Now in its ninth year, Community Alliance for Learning’s WriterCoach
Connection project teams up local professionals, church volunteers, and
college students with middle and high schoolers. Coaches go through a
rigorous six-hour training and commit to working with students for an
entire year. Many end up staying on much longer.

For years, the organization’s board members have wanted to push the
program beyond the relative affluence of Berkeley and Albany to reach
students in more impoverished communities, said Kathleen Kahn, the
board chair. This year, for the first time, the small nonprofit is
bringing its model to an Oakland public school. Their goal is to help
Media Academy’s ninety sophomores this year, then expand to other
Oakland schools in coming years.

“It’s a huge event,” said Bob Menzimer, the organization’s executive
director.

WriterCoach Connection, which is unique nationwide, has had
measurable success at the six middle and high schools where it operates
in Berkeley and Albany, Menzimer said. A recent study showed seventh
graders at Berkeley’s Longfellow Middle School, who’d received the
coaching, outperforming students at Willard Middle School, who had not
been coached.

Still, the task ahead of the coaches at Media Academy is a big one:
Two-thirds of the school’s students receive free and reduced lunch, a
common measure of poverty. The majority come from families that don’t
speak English as a first language. Many of the students live in
unstable households and move from school to school, often dropping out
or reappearing halfway through a semester. At least once a year, said
Principal Ben Schmookler, one of his students gets murdered. After ten
years at the school, he has stopped attending funerals.

Media Academy’s goal is to help its 340 students learn about
journalism. As part of that, Schmookler says, teachers are trying to
focus more on writing. When the offer of help from WriterCoach
Connection came through, Schmookler jumped on it.

“This is the most volunteers I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Schmookler said he had some questions about how well the writing
coaches — many of whom hail from wealthier neighboring
communities — would connect with the kids in his school. So far,
he said, both students and coaches seem to be enjoying themselves.

The coaches range from college students to retirees, from tugboat
operators to attorneys to members of the Coast Guard. Many are writers
themselves, seeking to impart their love for the craft to the next
generation.

“I’d like to inspire kids to be troublemaking journalists to make
life miserable for the authorities,” grinned Tim Kingston, a Berkeley
communications consultant and freelance writer who occasionally
contributes to the Express.

The coaches are careful to uphold one of the organization’s
philosophies — to meet students where they are. Unlike classroom
teachers, who might scold a student who hasn’t done his work, the
coaches do their best to stay positive.

Several students hadn’t finished Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
before Thursday morning’s tutoring session, but the coaches tried to
help the students brainstorm for an essay, regardless. The task at
hand: comparing and contrasting the Nigeria described in Achebe’s 1959
novel with the students’ own culture.

That morning, Finney hadn’t finished his reading, but as he sat with
Karimi — the Mills graduate — they found plenty to talk
about. There are lots of differences, he said, between the culture
described in Things Fall Apart, and the society he lives in
today. For one, he said, men who beat up their wives today go to jail.
Karimi nodded encouragingly as he noted that down.

Finney listed another idea: people today have opportunities to
practice lots of different religions, not like those in Achebe’s story,
who believed in medicine men: “They didn’t have a choice,” he said.
“Nowadays we got Buddha, all these different gods, Jesus Christ.”

Nearby, Johnson sat with Clifford, the legal self-help author. He
quizzed her about family structure in Achebe’s book.

In her neighborhood, he asked, “How many men have several
wives?”

“Not a lot,” she said, quietly.

“In the book?”

“A lot.” She paused, then reflected aloud. “It shouldn’t be like
that. The women shouldn’t want to share their husband.”

“It seems to me what you’re saying is you completely prefer your
society to the society in the book,” Clifford said, after a moment. “Is
that right?”

Johnson smiled a little: “Yeah.”

Totten-Harris, the tenth grade English teacher, said it’s too soon
to tell how the coaching sessions will affect her students’ writing
— they’ve only met with coaches a handful of times. But she
believes the individual attention from someone outside the classroom
may already be changing her students’ attitudes toward writing.

The students themselves said they were initially wary of the
coaches.

“I thought it was going to be annoying at first,” said Lester
Finney. “I didn’t think it was going to help.”

But since then, he and others have changed their minds.

“I like it because they really break things down for us,” he said.
“We don’t never really get one-on-one help with somebody like when
we’re doing essays. But now we do.”

Finney’s classmate, Chanthavara Seng, fifteen, agreed
enthusiastically.

“I recommend it to everybody in the United States,” he said. Finney
nodded his support.

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