by LISA MENDELMAN
I MET AN IMPRESSIVE
CAST OF CHARACTERS in my ninth grade writing class last year. Among them was the gambler who brought down the
house in Vegas but was quickly killed off; the hero who saved a town from monster squirrels;
the abusive father who demanded his son earn straight A's or else; and the modern-day Juliet
who died of heartbreak after her parents rejected the love of her life. Just how did my students,
who’d created these people, know their subjects so well?
Anyone who's ever listened to a 14-year-old will tell you that high school freshmen are certainly capable of exaggeration. But they’re also remarkably good telling the emotional truth. Reading hundreds of writing assignments last year, I learned far more about my 45 students (and how it feels to be 14) than ever anticipated.
Relevant questions get surprising results
Good writing is immensely personal. The goal is to tell a unique story or interpret a classic text in a different way, to share with your reader something new about what it means to be human. If I’d said this to my students early on, their eyes would have glazed over. Instead, I began with the essay question, “Why is writing important?”
Most essays filled less than one page. A handful read more like freely associated bullet points. Few contained anything resembling a thesis statement. Something— not just their subject-verb agreement or punctuation skills— was horribly wrong.
Then it dawned on me: The problem was the question itself or, rather, what it meant to them. They could have written pages on the importance of video games, the necessity of computers, the life-sustaining qualities of MySpace and text messages, but writing, in and of itself, simply did not strike them as important. This would have to change.
Bingo!
Six weeks of intensive grammar review and proofreading sessions later, students were relieved when I gave a new assignment, a persuasive piece on a health-related topic of their choice. Now that they were writing about sex, drugs, alcohol, and sleep deprivation, they found the exercise much more interesting. Handling these sensitive topics with care, I asked them to find examples of persuasive-writing techniques in their daily lives. As they evaluated advertisements for pet adoption, holiday-memory kits, and figure-enhancing bras, they realized, with some degree of shock, that writing in its various forms is actually used to
communicate.
The next two assignments, a personal-narrative unit followed by a creative-writing workshop, took the class to a deeper level. As the first drafts arrived, the results were staggering: gang violence, domestic abuse, social politics, and the war in Iraq. I spent much of my time grading with one hand over my heart.
For the final assignment of the year, I gave students free reign. Not surprisingly, most submitted per-sonal narratives or fiction pieces. One candidly depicted a recent struggle with depression; another, beginning in frustration and ending in triumph, told the story of one student's experience in my class. Many featured brave encounters with mortality. All contained some form of a thesis.
The end brings the beginning
During the last week of school, I gave students a light-hearted figurative-language exercise involving phrases such as “writing (in general)” and “persuasive
essays.” Along with the comic responses, there were a number of heart-warming sentiments: “Writing is like a duck. You may think it is ugly when you've just begun, but if you work on it and believe, it may just become a swan.”
Most teachers will tell you that they learn as much as they teach. My writing class was no exception. I had hoped to demonstrate that writing is important as a means of communication, a way to record history, a key cornerstone of the business world. In the process, however, my students demonstrated its true power: When the final bell rang in June, I walked away with a yearbook of messages about writing’s deepest significance: the ability to connect people, to put us in another's skin, and to teach us what it means to be human.
I can’t imagine a more valuable lesson. 
This article, which first appeared in Teacher Magazine, May 2007, has been adapted by the author for PSI’s Paradigm.
Reprinted with permission from the author.
Lisa Mendelman, a former high school English teacher, is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at UCLA. You can contact her by e-mail at info@psi-solutions.org.