This Is What Revision Looks Like

I glanced across my classroom today and this is what I saw. About five weeks ago, we started the Modes Project (a great idea from my APSI instructor Valerie Stevenson). This part, the writer’s workshop, in which students meet in ‘expert’ groups to critique each other’s papers was the part I dreaded most. Frankly, in my previous years teaching ninth graders, I’d felt like most group revision was not very helpful, that might students didn’t know enough to truly help each other revise. At best, they were proofreading and editing. This year in this project, with my AP Lang students, I was pleasantly surprised.

I’d had my students read an essay in each of seven modes all centered around the same general topic of language. I then had them read two essays on any subject of their choice in each of those seven modes. For each of those they had to write a rhetorical précis, which is a highly structured four-sentence paragraph blending summary and analysis. Finally, the students had to choose a topic of their own and write an essay on the topic in each of the seven modes.

Our days have been filled with reading, writing précis, getting feedback, and writing essays. Today we are to the revision stage. As I watch my students work in these groups and eavesdrop on their conversations, I hear things like, “If you think metaphorically, you can take this paper from here (the speaker’s hand is waist high) to up here” ( her hand is now over her head). Another group member agrees, “If you stomp through the woods long enough, you’ll get a dead deer! Your paper is really about perseverance.” This narrative essay from a deer hunter was being revised to more than he thought he had written.

I’d written the acronym RIP on the board just before my students began their group revision. “It stands for Rest in Peace,” I said, as this was the first time in weeks they didn’t have assigned homework or a deadline for my class hanging over their heads. We would be back in the groups the next few days in class. “It also reminds you to RIP those papers up,” I said, reminding them of the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

We have created a safe community in these classes this semester. The students know and trust each other. They are highly motivated and want to succeed as well as see their peers do so. I suggested they think of themselves as doctors: diagnose the problem with these paper and cut out the diseased parts before they come to me for summative assessment. “You can even think of me as the coroner. You don’t want your paper to be pronounced Dead on Arrival, so don’t be shy, do for your peers what you want them to do for you—-tell them the truth and help them write their best essay in the mode you are an expert in.

As I watched and listened and heard them caring enough and trusting enough to tell the truth and receive the truth, I realized these revision groups are working a lot like what a friend of mine calls “a pit crew”. Not exactly the NASCAR kind, though she does borrow the image from them. We all need a few people in our lives who are brave enough to tell us the truth, to help us be our best selves, to not let us get away with bad behaviors. We need people who push us farther than we want to go – for our own good, and who call out the bad and tell us to get rid of it. Like a pit crew in a NASCAR race, they make us perform more efficiently and become more capable of finishing the race we are called to run.

This is what is fun about teaching. My students become my teachers. Just watching and eavesdropping in class today reminded me to give thanks for those “pit crew” people in my life who love me enough to clean my windshield, change my tires, and keep me fueled for the race.