Excerpt of "Getting Someplace" by Kate Kennedy

About half my students had come to the U.S. as refugees or immigrants from Somalia, Sudan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Eritrea, El Salvador, Bosnia, Russia, and Afghanistan. The rest were Mainers, born and bred. Our common ground? Everyone struggled to write with coherence, confidence, and fluidity. Some had practiced writing in English only a little. The children of war or poverty or repression, some lacked formal schooling in any language. The Maine-born kids had failed to hop aboard the writing train for varied (and often overlapping) reasons themselves: a learning disability or illness or truancy or behavior troubles or trauma. Two academically focused Bosnians simply needed to burnish their verbs.

In class, a number of girls wore head-scarves; others wore tight, low-cut tee-shirts. A boy from Vietnam used one hand to type because of a stroke; a Somali boy suffered from what I think might now be diagnosed as P.T.S.D. Two sixteen year-old girls, one Afghani, one Cambodian, were already married.

***

Since 2006, Kate Kennedy has been the director of the Southern Maine Writing Project at the University of Southern Maine. She taught writing at Portland High School in Portland, Maine, for twenty years and has also taught basic literacy, sudden fiction, and E.S.L. to adults.

Excerpt from "Dreams of Prison" by Jonathan Putnam

“Sometimes I wish I could go to jail,” he said.

He’d been pacing around the room since he started talking about himself. Not making much eye contact, pausing only briefly to poke at a paper on a desk or erase a letter on the board with his finger.

“You wanna know the truth about me?” he asked shortly after entering the classroom. It was only the two of us, and I hadn’t asked him any questions.

“Only if you want to tell me,” I said.

I hadn’t known him very long. He was one of those students that show up on the roster sometime in March. One day, he was just there. Claimed he had done all of the work at his old school, read all the novels, knew all the skills. Of course, he couldn’t tell me anything about the books he had read, had poor writing, refused to read aloud, didn’t say much at all. Blended in.

***

Jonathan Putnam received a M.A.T. from National Louis University. He currently teaches English and drama on the west side of Chicago.

Excerpt from "We Know" by Erin Parker

We know we don’t know everything. We know feeling like we don’t know anything. But we know so much. We know our students and their families. We know the ones who don’t have enough, and we know the ones who have too much. We know who woke up late, who broke up with whom, who broke into someone’s apartment. We know late nights. We know janitors because we stay at school so late, so often. We know secretaries, because they know everything. We know cheating. We know studying. We know how many hours it takes to put together a lesson, and we know we don’t want to grade anymore. We know taking work home nights and weekends, those summers “off” when we take second jobs and continuing education credits. We know we can’t sleep because we can’t let go. We know we should stop teaching when we’re able to let go. We know we save all the things our students give us—artwork, rap lyrics, flowers. We know lost assignments and missed deadlines, and we know disorganization. We know messy backpacks, lockers, lifestyles. We know frustration. We know “Fuck you!” and “Thank you!” And we know we’re probably doing something right if we hear them in a two-to-one ratio.

***

Erin Parker received her B.S. in ecology from Michigan Technological University and multiple teaching certifications from Edgewood College. She currently teaches high school Earth sciences at Madison East High School in Madison, Wisconsin, where she works hard to emphasize reading, writing, and communicating along with the science content.