Confessions of a 30-something year old Drag Queen

One year ago, I was browsing social media and I came across an Instagram post from a bar in Patchogue, NY that brazenly mocked a trans woman. Not only did this bar mock her, but they took her picture and posted it on their social media without her permission, effectively exposing her identity to countless strangers on the internet.

I, without even thinking much of it, immediately organized a protest of the bar in question. I took to social media and wrote an impassioned post about how tired I had become at these kinds of injustices occurring without any significant backlash or consequence. I made an event page and picked a date figuring that I would draw a crowd of maybe 15 – 20 people who would be angry and hold signs and then things would go right back to normal.

Within a day, on the event page 62 people marked themselves as “going” 235 marked themselves as “interested” and there were 52 shares on the event page.

The bars Yelp reviews went under review from a surge of negative reviews regarding the meme, a Brewing company cut ties with the bar, and I was contacted by News 12.

Within 3 days WEHM radio covered the story, I filmed with News 12 and Fios1.

 Legislator Rob Calaraco released a statement via Facebook as did Senator Monica Martinez.
By the time the protest happened, there were 201 people marked as “going” 545 people marked as “interested” and 193 shares.
The event was shared on Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat, and even Fetlife!

The protest itself was attended by more than 200 people and was covered by News 12.

I never considered myself a political activist before this but once it was over, I gained quite the local reputation. I have since been honored with a certificate of appreciation by the Chamber of Commerce of Patchogue for my political activism in the community.

I was also given a seat at the organization of the first ever “pride themed” Alive After Five festival in Patchogue.

All these things happened because of my ability to write effectively.

In fact, the most difficult part of planning a political protest is writing all the emails and speeches that need to be written for it. I was in constant contact with the Suffolk County Police Department, various Senators, Congressmen, Mayors, town officials, and news outlets.

One medium that I wrote on more than any other is often overlooked, yet it shouldn’t be, especially by teachers and medium was social media. In Continuing The Journey 2 by Ken Lindbloom and Leila Christenbury, they state: “We are in an interesting time for writing in general. Social media is reaching new levels of prominence, and as a result, little-known authors can suddenly be thrust into the spotlight and have greater impact than would have been possible just a few years ago.” (24)

I had a modest social media following before planning this protest, but within one day that had doubled, if not tripled. I remember putting my phone down on a table because I was so exhausted, and my phone received so many notifications that it vibrated off the table and across the floor and did not stop until it died.

All the things that I wrote to plan this protest and put my plans into action were things that could be assigned in a school as a “pseudo authentic” or even an authentic writing assignment. Having students learn how to write letters to various audiences is enabling those students to feel powerful enough to enact a change on their own. If students practice writing letters to “intimidating” recipients, they will feel much more confident to do so on their own.

There is evidence of this exact principle in action in Continuing The Journey 2 by Ken Lindbloom and Leila Christenbury. In the chapter regarding authentic writing assignments, they present an example of second-grade students who were tasked with a writing assignment where they had to write to the administrators of their school to petition for a better selection of vegetables in their lunch. According to Lindbloom and Christenbury: “The success of the students’ campaign was tangible and relatively swift.” (31) They go on to say: “In second grade, these writers made a real difference in their world that mattered to them.” (31)

These students challenged the system in which they were living in order to make a change that mattered to them using their ability as writers. That is incredibly empowering and could be the catalyst for these students to move on to attempt to enact more change in their communities as they grow older.

I was blessed to have had a particularly good education. However, if I had not received the kind of education in writing that I did, planning this protest would have not only been difficult, it may have been impossible.

Education is inherently political. History shows us that this is true.

According to nbsnews.com

“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public places and prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, or national origin.

Prior to the Act of 1964, African-Americans faced enormous challenges that were permissible by law including: discrimination in employment, less access to quality housing, disenfranchisement, as well as continued struggles to integrate public schools ten years after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.”

Education is power, learning is a tool. Not long ago, minorities and woman were not allowed the “privilege” of education because it’s unlikely for someone who’s educated to question the status quo and even less likely for the uneducated to have the resources to do anything about it. Educating someone is empowering them and giving them tools they need in order to have their voice heard clearly for the largest audience possible. Lindbloom and Christenbury state it beautifully: “In the English classroom in particular there is a unique opportunity to enact authenticity in writing. This skill and area of study is essential to education and, indeed, to success in later life, but only if what we teach realistically reflects the world beyond school. Spending time with our students crafting accurate and effective arguments, using precise and targeted vocabulary, and shifting out discourse to meet specific audiences and purposes is central to our work without students and central to what the world beyond school expects of them.” (2)

We must teach our students to be deliberate and precise with their language and to know how to write beyond the test. Doing so is not only an act of incredible social justice, but also a way for a teacher to make the world a better place for both their student and themselves.

As writing teachers, it is important that we treat our students like real writers. One of the first things that immediately come to my mind in order to help facilitate this is we could send them a barrage of rejection letters. Perhaps we can make them move into a studio apartment with a roommate on a minimum wage salary and prescribe them unreasonable deadlines for an endless pile of projects.

Unfortunately, even though this may be a reality for a good deal of working writers, we do not want to scare our students away from writing. Maybe it’s time to look at a few less intimidating ways to make our students experiences in the classroom feel “real.”

Give authentic writing assignments

The best way I can think of giving students a taste of real-world writing is to assign real life writing assignments.

Ken Lindblom and Leila Christenbury said it best in Continuing the Journey 2 when they say: “The only way students will experience real written communication and come to understand all the nuances of language and the social dynamics involved is to engage in authentic writing: real writing, written for a real audience, for a real purpose, in a real forum.” (30)

Obviously, we cannot always have our students write real letters to real people or submit articles to real publications, but we can certainly replicate this experience through an assignment modeled after the process of doing these kinds of things. This would be known as “Pseudo Authentic Writing” exercises, which is almost as good as the real thing if done correctly.

Share my own writing – no one’s perfect

One of the best lessons a teacher can impress upon their student is that no one is infallible. This is best illustrated by demonstrating our own writing processes in front of our students. Do not be afraid to lead by example and especially do not be afraid of being less than perfect in front of your students. When we write in front of students, we are not only allowing ourselves to show the vulnerability that we expect from our students which makes their work so much better, but we are allowing students a glimpse into the messiness that comes with an early draft. Also, as a bonus, this helps our students see us as real people and not just some kind of robot that get charged in the classroom closet at night. Do not pretend you did not think your teacher was a real person when you were a student! We have all thought it at least once growing up.

Have them share their writing

This may come as a shock, but part of real writing is having a real audience. Unfortunately, this is not always possible in a classroom setting. However, something very easily done in a classroom is to have other students evaluate their classmate’s work!

Ken Lindblom and Leila Christenbury in Continuing the Journey 2 offer a plethora of suggestions regarding ways to do this kind of evaluation: “To evaluate their writing effectively, writers can read their drafts carefully; ask peers or writing tutors to read their drafts and make suggestions; read their drafts out loud to themselves (or have a computer read it to them); run a draft past a test audience to see if the draft does what the writer intends it to do; and more.”

Having someone else read your writing not only gives you the benefit of an audience, but also when you hear your words come from someone else’s mouth, it’s easier to spot mistakes you’ve made.

Free writing to come up with an idea for a writing prompt

One of the toughest parts of writing is figuring out what to write about and then getting a word on the page. When I am stuck and do not know what to write about, I force myself to write whatever is on my mind at that exact moment. Sometimes I write lists of my favorite things and least favorite things at that moment. In fact, I’m good friends with quite a few comedians and one of the oldest tricks comedians use for material is to write lists of things they like and don’t like so that they have a variety of ideas to expand on regarding things they feel strongly about one way or another. It’s much easier to write about something you feel passionately about in either a positive or negative way!

Get them to journal & write every day.

Related to free writing is keeping a journal. Like any other skill, writing only gets better when we do it often. It would behoove anyone to keep a journal, but it is especially useful to professional writers because journaling not only keeps you in the habit of writing often, but it also gives you the unique opportunity to reflect on tour past writing and experiences. It is probably one of the best tools a writer possesses to really refine their skills while also offering a running account of writing progress and growth. It does not matter so much what the students write, as much as it matters that they write and that they do it often.

Practice makes better!

Hopefully, these are some tips that can make your students feel like they are real writers without giving them the crushing anxiety and self-loathing that can come with the real professional world of writing!

Much like the menu at a diner (remember going to a diner? We’ll be able to do that again eventually), there’s many choices to be made when it comes to the various writing assignments we can choose as teachers. With food and writing assignments alike, everyone has a preference as to what they want to consume. Some of the choices are great (like a French dip… Can’t go wrong with one of those) and some are awful, but the options are plentiful and that can seem overwhelming sometimes.

In reading Jim Burke’s book, The 6 Academic Writing Assignments, I’ve come across countless ideas that have stuck with me and some of them I’d like to continue to have in my mind when crafting my future assignments. I’ve taken the liberty of breaking down some of the basic ideas into three categories for you, so… You’re welcome.

Motivation:

Telling your students that they need to write something without providing them a reason that goes beyond “because I said so and you’re getting graded on it” is not going to work out well. As Jim Burke states: “In other words, students want to know the problem for which a WTL activity is the solution. Or, as some have said, students do not care about the what or the how until they know the why.” (17)

To be fair, I don’t think this attitude ever really goes away because I know from my personal experience that I don’t like doing anything unless there’s a good reason for me to be doing it. If there is not a good reason for a student to be writing something, why should they bother in the first place? To me, that seems reasonable.

Annotation:

Annotation is an important tool for students to learn if you ever want them to close read efficiently. However, making students annotate things too much and forcing them to pick apart a piece of literature may also cause them to develop an aversion to reading in general. How can we expect students to read for leisure when every time we ask them to read something, we make it into a chore?

On page 50 of The 6 Academic Writing Assignments a student is quoted saying: “This is why reading is over. None of my friends like it. Nobody wants to do it anymore.”

Annotation is important, but what is more important is getting kids to read in the first place. Close reading can’t happen if students don’t develop reading skills at all and for literacy levels to rise, the first step is to get kids to read.

An exercise in annotation that Burke suggested which I found incredibly clever was one in which students annotated their own writing. Have students write a response to something and then have them respond to themselves later to examine how their own opinions have (or haven’t) evolved. Making students read and annotate something they wrote helps them to develop their own ideas further while also making them close read something they are sure to care about because they wrote it.

Less Complications:

In chapter 3, Burke talks about writing on demand and how we can develop accessible writing assignments for our students. The key word of that sentence is “accessible”. Here’s the thing, I’ve mentioned it before in other blogs, but one of the best things a professor has ever taught me when I went for my A.S. in theater was “KISS” – Keep It Simple, Silly. KISS has applied to nearly every other job I’ve had and countless other scenarios and this is no different.

Burke states:
“The important lesson here is that we are never just designing a prompt or a writing assignment; rather, we are designing an experience, a document, as assessment, a tool that students must be able to use without struggling to make sense of it or taking too long to read it.” (71)

Don’t make things more complicated than they need to be. It’s a pretty simple concept.
(See what I did there?)

So, next time you find yourself staring down the endless options of offerings on the menu of writing assessment, bear in mind these three basic principles.

In the 2004 cinematic classic, Mean Girls, the main character Cady was a home-schooled girl entering a public high school for the first time and to help her new friend Janis, she develops a faked persona to enmesh herself with the popular girls known as “the plastics.” Eventually, she goes from pretending to be like one of the plastics, to becoming exactly like them. At one point of the movie, this exchange happens:

Cady: “You know I couldn’t invite you! I had to pretend to be plastic!”
Janis: “Pfft! Buddy, you’re not pretending anymore! You’re PLATSIC. Cold, shiny, hard plastic.”

Like Janis from Mean Girls, students of writing are not interested in anything plastic, they want authenticity!

As a future English educator, there are three things that I’d like to keep in mind as it pertains to teaching authentic writing.

1. Genre

In the article Keeping It Real: Valuing Authenticity in the Writing Classroom, Anne Elrod Whitney makes a crucial point pertaining to genre in authentic writing assignments:

“Use authentic language to describe genre. Students shouldn’t be writing ‘papers.’ They should be writing travel, essays, book reviews, advice columns.”

Authentic writing is about writing in the real world for a real audience. Yes, writing a paper is for a real audience and school is certainly part of the real world but authentic writing assignments should transcend this model. There is no shortage of various genres that students can write for beyond the academic paper. Have students write blogs, reviews, letters, and even tweets! The possibilities of genre are endless for an authentic writing assignment.

2. Modeling writing

As an educator, keep track of your own writing and consider modeling your writing process for students in real time. It may be a daunting task to model your own writing for students because you might not want to allow students to see you make mistakes or to have insights on your life through your writing. However, it is for these reasons that it is essential to model your own writing for your students. When students see that even their teacher has some of the same struggles with writing as they do, it makes it much easier for them to conquer these problems.

As Whitney says:

“And when you encounter a student in struggle, you respond with a “me too.” Anne Lamott writes that these words “me too” are the holiest words in English. You say them and mean it. You struggle too: sometimes with writing, sometimes with life.”

3. Audience

Students need to write for a variety of audiences so that they can develop a sense of how their writing may need to be modified under various circumstances. The audience students write for can, and should, be a variety. We write differently based on who we anticipate reading our writing and the only way to know how to tailor our writing to meet the needs of different audiences is through writing and gaining feedback from these various audiences. Students must consider the reaction of the audience to their writing, or the lack of reaction to it.

There are many things we must remember when attempting to teach our students about authentic writing. Don’t fall into the trap of becoming “plastic” and don’t allow your students to do the same. As Gretchen Weiners from Mean Girls would say, authentic writing is “so fetch!”

I went to high school a very long time ago… Like 15 years ago long.

Directly after high school, I went to college for liberal arts, dropped out, re-registered, dropped out, re-registered (solely to go on the Disney College Program), then tried to continue school but couldn’t re-adjust to that life yet again and guess what I did?

Dropped out.

Finally, after years of wasting time not actually learning anything, I went back to school to finish my associates in theater, which I was successful in and eventually graduated.

I spent the next 6 years working as a restaurant manager and a drag performer, both things were fulfilling, and I was very happy. I had moved to Queens and dated someone who made me very happy… until he developed a drug problem and caused me to get kicked out of my apartment. I had called my parents in a severe depression and instead of telling them the truth of the situation (which was that my drug addicted ex ruined my life), I had told them I was inspired to go back to school and would need to move back home to make that a possibility.

Yes, I’m going to school and pursuing a degree in adolescent education in English because of a lie I had told my parents.

The weirdest part of the whole thing is that I honestly couldn’t be happier doing it and I think that all that heartbreak was leading me towards something incredible.

Now, why did I tell you my whole life story starting from the year 2005? Well, because, to be completely honest with all the things that I had mentioned above, not once in any of those times had I even thought about thinking about writing (or teaching writing for that matter). Writing is something I haven’t actively thought about in nearly 15 years.

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I can’t recall how I learned to write; I can’t recall learning to write at all. I’ve always liked writing, but to try to remember any kind of preconceived notions I had about writing before would be impossible, nearly everything I’ve learned about teaching writing has been a “new experience” for me.
With all of that said, the idea that’s been explored in my texts and classes that has really captured my attention as a future teacher of English and writing is the idea of “authentic writing” assignments.

What is an authentic writing assignment you may ask?

According to the text “Continuing the Journey 2”, “In an authentic writing assignment, students write to a real audience for a real purpose in a real forum” (33).

Students learn best by doing, this is a concept you probably don’t need a teaching degree or vast knowledge of pedagogy to understand. Students need to engage in activities where there are tangible results and genuine feedback.

Authentic writing also prepares students for life beyond the classroom. Now more than ever, students are becoming activists and champions of social justice, protesters of climate change, and using writing to make a real difference in the world around them. On a much smaller scale, students are now immersed in a world of social media, where they are implementing authentic writing to reach audiences around the globe and they may not even realize the impact they are having.

Or maybe they do realize it?
As Evelyn T. Pineiro says “In their own ways, they understand the concept of audience better than we do. Everything is public for them on YouTube and Instagram.” (37)

There are multiple ways for us to teach authentic writing to our students, as they are already doing it in their everyday life. It is our jobs as teachers of writing to make sure these students find their voices and show them exactly how far those voices can go in a world vastly different from the one we once knew.

Before reading “Writing in the Work World” I was expecting that my biggest challenge as a writing teacher to have been things like teaching my students to use effective grammar skills. I had concerns about teaching students to write at a college level but hadn’t considered how best to tackle teaching students all the various ways they may need to utilize their writing skills. Not only is this going to be one of my biggest challenges as an educator, but I also think it doubles as a large concern. The fact that I had never considered this before is of great concern to me, if I’m being honest. The real issue is with evaluation and standardization. To evaluate a student’s proficiency in writing, they force students to obsess over form and ignore content. The form that is taught obsessively is the form required on nothing other than state exams, therefore it is only useful in that one situation. Life goes well beyond state led standardized tests, but teachers are not afforded the luxury of time in order to teach anything beyond the bare minimum state requirement.
As a writing teacher, you must be knowledgeable in various forms of writing and able to guide students in learning the differences within them. It’s vital that a writing teacher be versatile in their knowledge and able to adapt to the changing standards of various writing forms. Teachers of all kinds should have open minds and be honest with their students. As essential as it is that a teacher be able to answer a student’s question, it is arguably more important for that same teacher to admit when they don’t know an answer. Humility is much more important that misinformation. A technique that I found intriguing, but also effective is to show students various forms of writing in order to show them that the type of writing they do in class is vastly different from some of the things they will need to write in their adult and professional lives. This technique, I think, would be most effective if done “show and tell” style where they bring things in from their parent’s lives as a way to connect their personal lives to the lesson being taught.

1/30/2020
This is a response to how my experience in High School either matched or didn’t match the gaps discussed in the blog post: “Bridging the Writing Gap: Centering Student Voices in High School and College Writing.” 

I have to admit that it’s difficult for me to accurately gauge how my High School experiences matched up to these because I graduated High School 15 years ago, so my memory of what I had learned that long ago has some major gaps. However, as far as I can remember, these are the responses I have to each of these things:

The Citation Gap – personally, I never learned anything other than MLA from high school into college. Even in college level work, I rarely used anything other than MLA.

The Choice Gap – The only time I wrote anything unprompted was in a class through Syracuse University for an AP Sociology class. Other than that, it was all based-on prompts.

The Template Gap – Other than my AP class, every essay was a 5-paragraph essay. The only variation in high school was a 25-page final in my AP Sociology class. In college, it was all 3-page minimums with 5 pages being the average requirement.

Evidence Gap – To this day, it’s the only way I know how to cite sources.

The Style Gap – I was taught paragraphs were 4-5 sentences long, until college when I realized how to write more to the idea than the format.

The Mode Gap – This was never really taught to me; I just saw each as a different form of writing.

The Revision Gap – I still have issues with this, to be honest. I am not good at essay revision. I was never effectively taught this skill.