The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Incunabula
Beginnings

Still, Up the Down Staircase offers little sense of what a teacher might do besides listen. How might we actually prod students to develop their beginning attempts at writing? Sapphire offers some striking examples of a teacher doing so in her 1996 novel Push.⁴ The characters in Push make the streetwise kids in Staircase look like the prep schoolers in The History Boys. Set in 1987, the novel centers on Precious Jones, an illiterate sixteen-year-old girl living in Harlem with her termagant mother and carrying a second child by her father. Hopelessly behind in her conventional high school, Precious transfers to an alternative class in basic reading and writing, a pre-GED course. Push tracks her growth as a writer despite horrific obstacles: racism, incest, abuse, homelessness, HIV.

The person who sets that growth in motion is Miss Blue Rain, the confident and perceptive teacher of the pre-GED course. At the very start of their work together, Miss Rain asks Precious to read the first page of a children’s book, “A Day at the Shore.” Precious confides to her what she has until then managed to conceal from the rest of her teachers: “The pages look alike to me” (53). In a remarkable scene, Miss Rain doesn’t judge Precious but also doesn’t excuse her from the task, first telling her to “look at the page and say the words you do know,” next to use the illustrations as clues to other words, and finally to sound out, with her help, those that remain. Using this mix of guesswork and decoding, Precious slowly constructs the words “A Day at the Beach.” Not perfect but a start, as Miss Rain clearly feels:

She closes the book and says very good. I want to cry. I want to laugh. I want to hug kiss Miz Rain. She make me feel good. I never readed nuffin’ before. (54—55)

Miss Rain’s strategy is essentially to teach reading through writing. She tells her class of six young women that they must write in a journal for fifteen minutes each day. When one of them asks her “How we gonna write . . . if we can’t spell?” she replies, “push yourself to see the letters you’re thinking” (60—61). Much of the novel shows Precious struggling to do just that. Her first entry is “li Mg o mi m.” Miss Rain translates these attempts at sentences—in this case writing “Little Mongo on my mind” (61)—underneath the words Precious has written in her journal. But she also responds to the content of what Precious has to say—asking her for more information or to explain a thought or sometimes to challenge her thinking. For instance, after Precious gives birth to her second baby, a social worker at the hospital suggests that she might consider putting him up for adoption. But Precious writes in her journal that her grandmother has told her that “onle dog drop babe an wak off (only a dog will drop a baby and walk off).” Miss Rain writes back:

Dear Precious,

Don’t forget to put the year, ’88, on your journal entries.

Precious you are not a dog. You are a wonderful young woman who is trying to make something of her life. I have some questions for you:

1. Where was your grandmother when your father was abusing you?

2. Where is Little Mongo now?

3. What is going to be the best thing for you in this situation?

Ms Rain (71)

There is so much going on in this brief response, all of it admirable. In reminding her to date her entry, Miss Rain is asking Precious to be serious and careful about her work as a student and writer. She then quickly declares her unreserved support for Precious as someone “trying to make something of her life.” And her concluding questions push Precious in two important ways—both by asking her to question her grandmother’s right to tell her what she ought to do and by subtly encouraging her to write more. Precious decides to keep her baby, but she also begins to put her reasons for doing so into writing: “I is be bt met cdls ed” (I is best able to meet my child’s need) (72). Her teacher doesn’t persuade her of a plan of action but rather engages her in a process of reflection.

In many ways, Blue Rain is like Sylvia Barrett as a teacher. Both respect the good will and intelligence of their students. Neither confuses a mastery of writing with an active mind. But as the title of Sapphire’s novel suggests, Blue Rain is far more willing to push. She is the teacher as midwife, coaxing what is inside Precious and her classmates out onto the page. Perhaps the most moving moment in the novel comes after Precious tells her classmates she has learned that, as a result of her ongoing abuse by her father, she is HIV positive. Blue Rain suggests that the students write in the journals and, for the first time, Precious refuses. She feels defeated, drowned. Miss Rain insists; Precious lashes out at her, cursing, screaming that she doesn’t know what she has been through:

Class look shock. I fell embarrass, stupid; sit down, I’m made a fool of myself on top of everything else. “Open your notebook Precious.” “I’m tired,” I says. She says, “I know you are but you can’t stop now Precious, you gotta push.” And I do. (97)

Blue Rain is one of the most remarkable teachers in literature. But she is only a supporting character in Push. Precious is its hero. The novel is written in her voice, and the frequent entries from her journal document her growing fluency as a writer. As time goes by, Miss Rain needs to translate less and less for Precious, as her spelling improves and she begins to write in full if erratically formed sentences. She discovers a flair for image-based poems and starts to read books like The Color Purple (whose structure in some ways resembles that of Push). All of this takes time. Push ends with a set of stories and poems in a class book, “Life Stories,” compiled in 1991, four years after Precious first begins to study with Blue Rain. This book shows that Precious has still not quite caught up with her classmates as a writer. She is represented by three short poems in a book that extends over thirty pages. In the last of those poems, though, Precious refers to Langston Hughes, Louis Farrakhan, Alice Walker, and her teacher, Miss Rain, suggesting that she is not simply putting words on paper but imagining herself as a writer among writers.

The point, it seems to me, is that the accomplishments of a teacher are best shown not through classroom brilliancies, speeches from the top of a desk, but in the writing of students. In 2009 Lee Daniels directed Precious, a strong film version of Push, with powerful performances by Gabourney Sidibe as Precious and Mo’Nique as her mother. But the movie suffers from the same problems as the film version of Up the Down Staircase. A drama of language is subsumed by a narrative of personal growth. Unable to render the writing of Precious and her classmates, Daniels’s film offers uplift in the place of intellectual development. As portrayed by Sidibe, Precious seems a remarkable and endurant young woman, but the role writing plays in her life and education is, at best, only hinted at.

In Oleanna, John is unable to listen to Carol, and her “group” uses her as a mouthpiece. In The History Boys, neither Hector nor Irwin is able to offer their students more than a version of themselves, but, thrown together as co-teachers, they willy-nilly offer the boys a new set of choices in writing. In Up the Down Staircase, Sylvia Barrett does listen, and as a result her students write to her with increasing confidence and fluency. But it is only in Push that we see a teacher, Miss Blue Rain, who both respects the intelligence of her students and also insists that they attempt something more, something beyond what they now feel capable of doing. In chapter 3, I turn to several more examples of teachers working with student texts and of students working with the comments of their teachers to see how it is that a text might be written by one person and yet, somehow, also depend on the thoughtful responses of another.