Dear Tom,

This is my first year teaching at Menaul Independent. I teach in a not-for-profit independent school serving grades 6-12 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. There are 32 students in 10th grade. Eight are foreign/boarding students (4 from China). There are 40 students in 11th grade with 19 foreign/boarding (12 from China).

Teaching, more so than writing, is such solitary work that sometimes we forget to share. There are no awards for good parenting or good teaching (far and few), and those numerous revisions for a creative writer mean nothing without that finished draft that is published!

I wouldn’t have shared anything yet again but a “Christmas miracle” took place yesterday. The writing workshop for my sophomores (I also teach juniors) was executed so successfully that I had to reach for the school iPad to videotape their conversations. This wouldn’t be as big a deal except many of my students are foreign language students, who are usually afraid to speak in class.

We have had to do a lot of unlearning to finally approach writing as something that happens in the real world and not just an assignment to be turned in. I have utilized my mentor (well, many educators’ mentor!) Kelly Gallagher and his In The Best Interests of Students: Stay True to What Works in the ELA Classroom. I took a workshop with him in 2015 in the middle-of-nowhere California when I was working in a very rural area, and it transformed how I approached writing. Most celebrity author-educators don’t come to the middle of nowhere, but he is not an average educator in any way.

Students have time to revise. Mini-lessons are demonstrated for the students to apply to their own writing with time for student reflection in between drafts for the students to assess and articulate what they need. Assignment deadlines are stretched based on class needs, not on my “finishing a unit.” There is lots of one-on-one time with me, and we track the moves being made in mentor texts individually and as a class.

Something else, which is just an extra bit, something I didn’t even think would be a big deal but has turned into one around here, is that this year I discovered a program called Global One to One, and my sophomores participated in an actual pen pal exchange program. They were shocked to see the originality, penmanship, and grammar skills of students in a remote village near the Himalayas in Nepal. They had never written handwritten letters before, and many chose to practice multiple drafts to make their writing legible! They are waiting for their “peace pals” letters from Nepal to arrive any day now. Here is a piece my school posted about it: http://www.menaulschool.org/paws-on-the-news-november-2017/

Hello Bread Loafers,

I teach Special Ed 11th and 12th inclusion students. The 11th grade is reading Mona Golabek’s Holocaust memoir, The Children of Willesden Lane, and my 12th grade kids are reading James McBride’s The Color of Water. Our 12th graders read excerpts of Junot Diaz’s Drown, and they just adored his work!

I am also teaching AP Lang, which at our school is a 12th grade course. The students are finishing up Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (the book was 503 pages), and it’s taken my students since September to finish it. My AP students have not had much exposure to long works of literature, and Lethem’s work, for many of them, is the first full-length novel read by them. After Lethem, they will read The Color of Water as a whole group, and then I am going to attempt student choice by having groups of four or five pick limited memoirs that we have available: Profiles in Courage, Angela’s Ashes, Down These Mean Streets, and This Boy’s Life.

Our school is experiencing many challenges that urban environments are going through—gentrification, lack of parental involvement, neglect, and physical and mental abuse. Some kids have had been assaulted and are experiencing unimaginable horrors that many of us do not experience in our daily lives. There is the rumor that we might be shutting down due to a drop in student enrollment and test scores. We were one of New York City’s focus schools, and we are still trying very hard to catch up, staying afloat, keeping the kids safe, and making do with what little materials we have. I have to appreciate that, given so little, the kids I teach are enjoying literature a little bit.

I know this will come across as shameless, but I want to end this note with an appeal to the spirit of giving in case anyone wants to donate old books or supplies to us. We do not have a library in the building, so building our makeshift classroom library is the only way I can get my kids to read.

Our school’s address is

Mr. Marcos Namit
Transit Tech High
1 Wells Street
Brooklyn, NY 11208.

We are always grateful.

Marcos Namit
Lit for Life Scholar

Hi all,