Sometimes coaching is a trial, sometimes it is triumphant,
sometimes it is both at once! Today’s tutoring session at Fremont Unified could
not better encapsulate the wildly differing students and styles a writer coach can
encounter. Their assignment, ultimately, is to write an epic poem in the spirit
of I Am Joaquin/Yo Soy Joaquin
by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales. Thus we coaches found an entire classroom fidgeting
in the school library waiting for us. But before they get to writing they have
to do research, and before they do research they have to find sources, and want
to do it.
Therein lies the rub. Today, I got
two students who could not have been more different. The first, let’s call him
“Marco” (not that that is not his real name), was, to put it mildly, cranky and
truculent. He is a standard-sized African American sophomore with short hair
and a short fuse. “Oh joy,” I thought. Said student insisted he had already
done all the research, had two pages of Web research at his sister’s home (of
course) and did not need to do any more work. “Why I gotta do this, I already
done all the work,” and similar happy retorts shot back and forth between
teacher, Tim, and Marco.
Through a combination of crowbars
and threatening looks from the teacher, Marco reluctantly followed me over to a
table where we started with a question. What is your cultural background and
what research have you already done? The answer, accompanied with a barely
concealed undercurrent of ‘Why the hell are you wasting my time, fool?’ was
African American, White, Portuguese, French and German. Ah, this is interesting,
I thought, and helpful. Helpful because, although Marco had done some Web
research on Martin Luther King, King Henry the 8th and “some white
guy” whose name dear Marco could not remember, he had not done anything about
the Portuguese side of his family.
Cornered, he had no choice but to
admit he had (a) not done any research on Portugal, France and Germany and (b)
still had two and a half pages of notes to come up with. He reluctantly
followed me to the book tables where I found encyclopedias with information
about Portugal, including where the country is on a map. After much grumbling
we set to work making notes and writing information down, with the absolutely
necessary turning around to talk to friends, muttering lyrics to his favorite
songs, etc. But as the session went on, Marco actually got interested in the
topic. Turned around less and less and started asking questions about Portugal,
something I could say a little about since my parents had honeymooned there
before they left England. He was actually getting into it.
What had started out as a well-matched
battle of wills turned into something else entirely—by the end of the session
Marco thanked me and looked like he was actually willing to do some more work
on the poem. Triumph!
Next came Michael (again, not his
real name) on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. Where Macro was mouthy,
Michael was virtually monosyllabic. Michael, another African American teen,
wanted to research the Underground Railroad and the Civil Rights Movement and
he had to repeat himself several times because he looked down and mumbled so
much that I could not hear his one-word responses. We did the book table march,
found some reference books and set to, sort of, reading and writing. Actually
Michael was waffling through a book on the Civil Rights Movement without taking
notes. Not good, I thought. Then I had a brain wave about a civil rights
activist who has not been included in the history books--Claudette Colvin,
a teen mother who beat Rosa Parks to the punch by nine months when she refused
to give up her seat to a White woman. The problem was, unlike Parks, Colvin was
young, feisty, and pregnant by a married man. Thus, civil rights leaders
thought she was wrong for the part, unlike Parks, who was a solid, stable, Black
citizen. I dragged Michael over to a computer, and we started reading, and I
would like to think he actually perked up and became more interested in Colvin
and his project. Maybe I was projecting, but he did thank me, so something must
have worked.
And there in a nutshell is a
writer coach’s day. Triumph, where one least expects it, and a hard, but
ultimately productive, hoe in what one thought was going to be an easy effort.
Neither would I give up for the world. How lucky am I?
Tim Kingston
WCC coach
Media Academy, Oakland
