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Believing in Ourselves
Part I - Chapter 5
Sidebar: THE WRITING SISTERS
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Wide-eyed and somewhat hesitant, Kimberly Clayton edges into the principal's
office at Southern Middle School, uncertain about why she had been summoned.
"I wondered what I had done wrong," she said and smiled, learning
that the reason was an interview. She was there to talk about what she had
done right -- receiving a Young Authors Award in the county competition,
just as her older sister had done when she was a student at Southern.
The sisters wrote compelling accounts of family abuse for their award-winning
book entries, but they are the antithesis of violent young people themselves
-- soft-spoken, almost shy, but anxious to talk about their classes.
Katesha Murphy, Kimberly's older sister, was a serious youngster when she
was interviewed two years earlier, upset about raucous public behavior by
young people at a Louisville entertainment event and preaching peace and
self-control. In high school, she has blossomed, joining the tennis team
and becoming a majorette. Her career interest switched from teaching to
law, but her love of writing continues. As a sophomore, one of her poems
was accepted by the high school literary magazine, even though the entries
are almost exclusively for seniors.
"Writing in all the classes at Southern really helped me in high school,"
says Katesha, although she still takes time to write outside of school assignments.
And to help her younger sister edit her writing.
Kimberly's opportunities to write are even greater than her sister's were
at Southern because the school has since adopted an integrated language
arts curriculum, a two-hour block of time that adds speaking and listening
to reading and writing as the core curriculum. Before she left for high
school, Katesha knew that a writing rubric was a tool for evaluating writing.
She could reel off definitions of proficient writing -- writing that expresses
a voice, is well organized, and provides sufficient details.
As Kimberly moves into the seventh and eighth grades, she also is learning
how to use rubrics to evaluate her writing.
Because of their involvement with the Writing to Learn program, Kimberly's
and Katesha's teachers in other subjects have learned to integrate writing
into their core subject areas by renewing and awakening their own writing
skills. This is one of the first steps for teachers participating in Writing
to Learn. Student writing thus becomes what teachers talk about when they
get together, formally and informally.
Writing is one more contribution to creating a school centered on student
learning. For Katesha, who had been in other middle schools before coming
to Southern, the collegiality there and the focus on student achievement
felt, she says, "like a good family."
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