Recruiting teens who don’t like to write

A student at Gordon Parks High School today looked me straight in the eye – honest and open – and told me that he hates to write, that it makes his brain hurt.

I was there recruiting for News Team, a class we are teaching at the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press.

Hearing a student say this breaks my heart every time because I know that this statement isn’t about not liking writing, but it being a real challenge for him, and one that some students have already decided they can’t overcome.

My first reaction was one most people have in the face of a hurt – it will get better. But I’ve seen how hard it is for a student who struggles to look around at their peers and see them typing away; it looks like writing is so easy for them. That can kill motivation faster than anything.

It humbles me because I know that I don’t really understand what it is like to be that student. I was starting to read before I entered kindergarten. I’ve got the ability, but transferring it to students who don’t can be a guessing game on how to proceed. Once while working with a student on writing a script for his video – he loves shooting and hates writing – I didn’t think about what impact typing up a quick email to a possible source would have on him. I just whipped it out, and he looked at me like I was a million miles away. I regret it to this day. All he could see was the gulf between him and me and how much work it would take to get there.

If the student from Gordon Parks starts to work with ThreeSixty, it is up to us to make his brain hurt, but to also show him right away why it’s worth it. It will be up to us to challenge him, but also to show him what it feels like for writing to be a joy.

I told the Gordon Parks student that developing your ability to write is like building muscle for playing a sport. He plays pretty much every sport you can play, and as soon as I started comparing working at writing to getting in shape at the start of the season, this student started nodding. He understood. I was honest with him. Writing is hard, I told him, and it will stay hard, but you do reach a point when it gets easier, and ThreeSixty can help you get there. I promised. It’s a big promise.

But we’ve seen it happen. We co-taught a class last spring at El Colegio Charter School in Minneapolis. Half of El Colegio’s population is still learning English, and many of its students struggle with truancy.

We started out with 15 students in that class, and ended up with about five. It was so frustrating the whole semester to watch students come and go, and not try. But those five who did commit did improve in their writing. They wrote about topics important to them – how marijuana should be legalized because one student saw how it helped his uncle with cancer, how guidance counselors at their school help students accomplish their dream of going to college. They claimed their voice, and it made their writing better.

We tested students at the beginning and end of the semester, and all of the ones who stuck with the class improved their writing skills.

Students at Gordon Parks also responded when I told them that even though they face these challenges that our country, our society needs them to step up and fight. I pointed at my white, middle-class face and told them how newsrooms across America are filled with me.

During my three years in a newsroom in Missouri, I saw dozens of reporters come and go from our about 20-person staff. Only a handful of them through those years were not white. When one student heard that he sat back in his seat and said, “Well she sure just breaks it down, doesn’t she?”

I sometimes worry about confronting students that directly, but it’s the truth. We desperately need to hear these voices in the news and these teens’ stories.