2004 Creative Writing Contest Winners

Grade 5-6

Franny Levin
Sixth grade
Teacher: Cindy P. Gates
Stevenson School
Central Council

Silence

Sometimes we wish for all of the voices to go away

The nagging voices of people, parents, teachers, relatives.

Even the deaf to the vibrations of the earth’s song.

Vanished shall the voices be

There would be a much simpler dance of life…

For there would be

What then?

for all of the voices to be gone,

it would be impossible

We would be left with

the Voice

Silence.

Grade 7-8

Taylor Anne Gobar
Eighth Grade
Teacher: Mary Ellen McWhirter
St. James Academy, Diocese of San Diego
GSDCTE

Whether prayer, verse, or rhyme
Paragraphs, simple structure.

Basic white pages,
Ready to hold words
Spoken with rhythm.

Emphasizing syllables—
Embellish on what the author
Has given as guidance.

Punctuation becomes
Even beats, drumming.

Melodic chant
Begin to resonate varied pitches,
Through notes, bars, systems.

Unique alphabet begins to form
Universal dialect for musicians.

Quarter- and half-lengths
Indicate duration.

Ensure clear articulation:
Brighter tone!

Reveal your teeth,
Shape your words.

Support—focus sound
Crescendo, intensity, not volumne
Oral performance

Capture a writer’s voice
Make it your own
Pierce through dissonance to an audience

Grade 9-10

Phoebe Jin
Ninth grade
Teacher Kathleen Kelly
Monterey High School
Central Council

Tempest

Yet another Wednesday had arrived and I prepared for my piano lesson with Mr. Lyn Bronson. There were two sides to my feelings, trepidation and eagerness. I was anxious about how I would do on the lesson, for I wanted to play as well as I possibly could. No one plays faultlessly, but I wanted to impress my teacher nevertheless. My eagerness was for the class itself. I am always enthusiastic to learn new pieces and improve my old ones. I also appreciate my teacher’s grand sense of humor.

As I stepped into the house for what seemed like the fiftieth time, I marveled once more at its coziness and warmth. The red carpets and cherry furniture generated a sense of grandeur, despite the track lighting on the ceiling. Ornaments twinkled merrily up at me from unique end tables. The two grand pianos shone in the lamplight; the surfaces reflecting that they were well-maintained. It seemed like only yesterday when I had timidly rung the same doorbell and opened the same door into the same house.

I moved to Monterey seven months ago and even now, I clearly remember the trouble my parents and I went through with the many piano teacher interviews. Some of the teachers were too lax and others just did not teach in the way I learned best. I have been taking piano lessons for about seven years now. Finding the right teacher is crucial at this point because this is the point where one crosses the line between playing as a extracurricular activity and practicing to be a professional.

The reason we chose Mr. Bronson in the first place was because many of our new friends here recommended him highly. When I first met him, he was in a crisp navy suit and tie. His golden white-streaked hair was combed back evenly and his snow-white beard and mustache were neatly trimmed. His brown eyes twinkled with pride and laughter. His mouth was quirked with a touch of mischievousness. This concerned me a bit because my previous teachers all had two things in common; they were serious and obvious perfectionists. Mr. Bronson was different; he seemed more carefree and fun-loving. I wndered how this would translate in my piano lessons.

However, after the first few classes, I began to glimpse the painstaking side of him. He used all his energy in playing the music and paid attention to every single note. I ultimately realized that Mr. Bronson was more than he seemed on the outside. He thought about almost everything and his thinking was profound and logical. With his help, my dexterity at the keyboard increased tremendously as the year progressed. The last class before the first performance, he said to me, “You’re our extended family now. We’ll love you just the same even if you make a mistake.” I burst out laughing, despite my apprehension. Countless similar fond memories gathered up in my mind through the months.

Today, my mind wandered as I fiddled with two crystal elephants. The boy before me was playing a rather complex piece and and Mr. Bronson was criticizing constructively. One part in particular drew my attention away from the sparkling form. “One important thing to remember when playing classical musical is that we have traditions to follow., Decades ago, a pianist from China played Mozart at an international competition. He lived in the time of the Cultural Revolution when listening to western classical music was forbidden in China. Listening to him play was very bizarre indeed, as he played Mozart in the style of Rachmaninoff.”

While I pondered this, I began to comprehend that playing a piece of music, any piece, requires the knowledge of tradition and the correct application of experience and emotion. I need to express my feelings and my own interpretations of the music into the performance, abiding by the set rules along the way. I will try to do that during my practice hours at home and I can only hope that I succeed.

Before long it was my turn to show what I had achieved during the week. I took a deep breath and started the song. After I finished, Mr. Bronson clapped earnestly and announced, “Bravo! You’ve made my day! Beautiful!” If there is one thing that I value about him, it is his ability to cheer anyone up. His own exuberance is contagious; it is almost impossible not to enjoy oneself in his presence.

After my teacher congratulated me on my past week’s progress, he then pointed out the places that needed perfecting. “The biggest room is the room for improvement” is one of his favorite phrases and he repeated it now. He went on to show my mistakes and how they could be prevented the next time. Soon after that, he came to an especially slow and stately portion of the piece. I almost fell off the piano bench laughing when he started emulating Shakjespeare’s characters – with a Marlon Brando accent. “You see, you cannot perform something meant to be done one way in a totally different style. The result you would probably get is something parallel to Marlon Brando acting in Shakespeare’s plays.”

I have never had a teacher like Mr. Bronson before. Even after months of taking his class, I am still surprised at how fussy he is. For example, one time, he corrected my pedaling in a small section of a complex song, which he said was off by a total of half a second. “A half a second!” I thought, “Who notices half a second in a ten minute piece?” But then I listened when he explained, “Playing does not mean you are practicing, just like hearing is not listening and reading is not understanding. Practicing, listening, and understanding all require hard work on your part.” At first, I did not understand, but then I began to see that hearing and liste3ning, reading and understanding, playing and practicing are not the same. When I hear something, I am just using one of my senses. To listen to something is to hear the sound and then process what it means. The same goes for the other two. Playing is just running through the pieces without taking time to improve the flawed places. Practicing is going over one spot repeatedly until it is as good as it can possibly be. Because of the intensive way Mr. Bronson conducts his lessons, I have discovered that now I practice instinctively at home and rarely play at all.

Early this week, he informed me about an upcoming performance class. In these classes, students have a chance to develop the skills of performing confidently in front of a small audience. The ambiance is always very comfortable and casual. I am preparing to play the first movement Beethoven’s Sonata Op.31 No.2. It is nicknamed “The Tempest” because of Beethoven’s answer, “Just read Shakespeare’s Tempest,” to a question about the meaning of the sonata.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a romance and reprisal story. The play opens with a storm striking a ship on the way to Italy. All the passengers are dumped onto a nearby island, where a man named Prospero resides. Later on, we find out that he is the one who causes that storm. More events occur, the guilty find themselves justly punished, and everyone lives happily ever after. The first movement of the sonata is in the heavy key of D minor, representing the huge storm. The other two movements represent the rest of the sonata. It is important to understand that it is this thunderstorm that affects everyone’s life throughout the rest of the play.

As I said goodbye to Mr. Bronson for this week, I wondered how my life would have been different if I had not moved to Monterey and met him. He is my Tempest; he has initiated the big change in my life that will now lead on to even more changes in the future, just as it did in the play. He has been significant not just in developing my music but my outlook on life and how I connect my music to my perception of the world in genberal and my role in it as well.

Grade 11-12

Teresa Ferrell
Eleventh grade
Teacher: Ryan Summers
Oaks Christian School
Southland Council

Broken Voices
The view is blurry – the camera is scanning the school’s concrete quad at ground level, focusing on masses of feet walking, running; two feet crossing one over the other; one foot standing with the other foot slung out. Overhead, muffled voices are heard, each chattering about a different subject: Mr. Hall’s chemistry test, the pop quiz in Spanish, the fight over the weekend, the party tonight, who just asked who to the dance, where so-and-so is going to college. The camera rushes on through the crowd of blur, halts at a single pair of sneakers, then pans up on a boy sitting alone, silent. This is JJ. He has a brain tumor.

Everyday I put together the school’s televised news. I report on concerts, pep rallies, sporting events with cheering crowds. I film, edit, produce, and anchor, and just lately it occurred to me that everything I cover is loud.

JJ is not loud. He therefore is not “newsworthy,” and so he becomes invisible. His voice broke three years ago, when he looked in the mirror and saw one of his eyes swinging outward. His parents thought, as parents would, that this was eye fatigue, caused by their fourteen-year-old sitting in front of computer and video games too often.

The truth was scarier. An MRI pinpointed pineal germinoma, and his strange eye activity was just the first sign of a grotesque conglomeration of cells growing behind his optic nerve.

JJ was too old for the pediatric wards and too young for the adult, so he spent the next three years bouncing between the two, getting the best of intentions and sometimes the worst of care. A clumsy female nurse getting tripped and ripped the intravenous pick line out of his arm. A male nurse talked all night about his love life: “He actually kept me up until five in the morning telling me how his girlfriend doesn’t respect him,” said JJ. “I was half asleep, saying, ‘Please leave.’” Pressure in JJ’s brain affected his gross motor skills and when he walked, he dragged one foot. Chemotherapy took his hair. Doctors put a patch over his wandering eye. All the while JJ strove to maintain a normal teenage life.

Today he is seventeen, and that teenage life disappeared long ago. Kids he once considered his friends now make comments like, “There goes Captain One Eye.” JJ remains silent and instead, he chooses to express himself in another way: through art, angry art. One of his pieces, “Broken Lives, Shattered Dreams” has an emotional effect that cannot quite be explained on paper. From the outside, the piece is a refrigerator-size, very white plywood box that stands upright. It has a hinged door with a bent metal handle and light switch, with an electrical wire running down the rear.

Many who see the box say that it is empty, because it is, sort of. Inside it is painted pure black and lined with pieces of smashed mirror. A clear, bare light bulb hangs down from a cord. Hands with horny fingernails reach at you from the walls, some hands clutching crumpled tin cans. If you are brave enough to step inside and close the door behind you, you are instantly claustrophobic, shut up inside a world of pain, surrounded by grasping fingers and stared at by your own splintered reflection.

“I try to incorporate meanings and messages.” When JJ finally cracks his shell to tell even a part of his story, there is little he says, and yet much that he exudes. His voice is quiet and he tires easily, but his vehemence comes through, and his longing to get back into the art studio to express the pain. JJ knows he is broken, and knows that peers to confide in are a luxury he doesn’t have.

“If somebody feels that it is a burden to be your friend, then that friendship is not worth it. Fiund somebody who cares about you enough to really make an effort,” JJ says. “The only real friends I have now are grown-ups, and they act like they are my older brothers or sisters. If somebody can’t totally love you like family, they are not going to be there when you are sick, or get too old. Family never leaves you.”

My camera is moving again. In the lens are more feet: feet in white shoes running around on white linoleum floors. The first auditory impression is silence, and then faint beeping and muffled voices over an intercom. We enter inches above the floor into a pale blue room with a green vinyl chair and a hospital bed. The camera angle jumps up and zooms in on painted toenails. Seventee-year-old Rolanda is in the bed, her thin legs sticking out from underneath the rumpled cotton blanket. She tries to whisper, “”hi,” but coughs and coughs.

Once upon a time, her voice worked. At age seven, Rolanda threw herself over a casket and screamed through tears, “I didn’t get to say goodbye!” Her aunt, the only parent she had ever know, was dead of cancer. For the next eight years, Rolanda ricocheted among parents, or in any case, no parents who cared. At last, fifteen years old and a child of the court, Rolanda was diagnosed with cancer of her own. As liver cancer ate her alive, she kept faith: faith that she would make it to her 18th birthday, faith that when the final day came, she would be going home to God.

When time was sinding down and she could not physically stand long enough to hold a job flipping burgers, Rolanda and I started work together, creating a website with words of hope and advice for kids dealing with catastrophic illness. She reached dying kids on their level with her straight, strong language:

There may be someone out there in the world a step away from giving up. If that’s how you’re feeling, I just want you to know that I understand. I have liver cancer, and I am in and out of the hospital because the cancer is now in my lungs and I have trouble breathing. It’s hard, and it hurts to know that I have to live with this disease for the rest of my life. I think about giving up. When I really start thinking seriously about it, I always remember the outcome. I wouldn’t be the survivor that God wants me to be.

I’m signing off now. See you tomorrow.

God Bless, Miss Rolanda

Her words break my heart. See you tomorrow? She wrote firmly, as if they were not dying, leaving no doubt that everyone would be online when the next dawn came.

Now Rolanda sits all alone in her UCLA hospital room, and when she goes home, if she goes home, it will be to a foster house. She physically has no voice, but she still distributes hope and love to the world through her keyboard. Rolanda believes in her heart that she will pass from this life to more life, and in the meantime she lives happily.

My camera is moving one last time, panning down from Rolanda’s feet to my own. The two pedicures are identical, hers and mine each carefully dabbed with flowers on the big toes. My feet, though, generally fit in with the crowd, and it is rare to see them on the ground alone. What do broken voices and lonely feet mean to me?

As I edit together my videotape, this is what it shows: Life is meant to live happily. It is so short, so short. Whether we are sick right now or not, we must take advantage of time, because we all die one day, some of us sooner that others. In rough times, there is tremendous emotional energy, and all that built-up energy inside has to go somewhere. Surrounded by voices that say hurtful things, JJ lives for the company of his art and then displays his art to teach compassion to the world. In a world where comforting voices have not been present, Rolanda lives for the company of others on our website and displays her writing to comfort others.

Their feet remain lonely, outside of the crowd, so most of all, my video shows me this: When voices are broken, sometimes it is better to listen with my eyes.

Professional

Voices: Reflections of an Urban Educator
by Emily Fuller Gibson

At the culmination of each school year, teachers pause to reflect. What worked or didn’t work? What should I have done differently? Did the kids learn anything? Or, in these days of high-stakes testing, will I still have a job after the assessments are tallied? Sometimes we get answers we don’t want to hear; occasionally we don’t get any answers, but always we are confronted with the voices that pose the questions and frame the issues. How we interpret these voices and what we do in response to them determines our worth as educators, especially in large urban settings where success is usually outdistanced by failure.

This “gem” came to me unbidden, not from a contemporary colleague, but from a blues singer of another era. The date was June 27, 2003, graduation day for my 8th graders. Only one of the 150 students who had started the year with me had earned a failing grade. The rest were there that afternoon in their own unique finery, receiving the diplomas that marked the end of one phase of their education and signaled the start of another. There was Amie, her dark locks dangling over her shoulders looking for all the world like a modern day Pocahantas, and Karla, hardly recognizable without her frayed cutoffs and Converse sneakers. Emma’s neon green hair would have been garish on someone with less presence, but against the backdrop of the California sun, it did not even clash with the fuchsia of Yolanda’s magnificent mane. The two of them were simply distinct flowers in a garden of diversity.

Rafa, too, stood out from the crowd, his stiff hair carefully sculpted into spikes, reminding me of the Statue of Liberty. Johnny was resplendent in his tux and tails while Antonio, still sporting a slight blemish from his last scrape smiled mischievously, sharing a silent joke with Abraham in his classy, tailored suit . Their own individual style spoke volumes about how these students defined themselves, but their academic success addressed another topic. They had “made it ” -- the “gifted” as well as the “at risk”. This was the feature that set them apart from thousands of other urban minority students.

The voice of the skeptic asks, “ How did you determine their academic success? What did you as a teacher do to bring it about? How can it be replicated ?”

Later that day, in search of answers to these questions, I returned to my own den and creature comforts, kicked off my shoes, and reclined in an easy chair. I decided to reflect and unwind with the music that usually puts my tired mind in focus. The sultry-sweet voice of Esther Phillips suddenly surrounded me, its raw intensity filling the room, wrapping itself around my thoughts, twisting them straight . As Li’l Esther sang the heart-wrenching songs from her 1972 album, “From a Whisper to a Scream”, her haunting voice carried the message she intended, the message I needed to hear. In her dulcet tones I could hear her pain as keenly as her pleasure, her desperation as clearly as her desire. That’s what voices do to you if you listen to them. Soft or loud, silent or strident, they put on a command performance. They bring messages that demand acknowledgement , and if you are a teacher, they goad you into action that encourages you to perfect your craft. How you do this depends on your perspective.

Ever since “no child left behind” became the national mantra, school administrators and policy makers have been less interested in good teaching than in measuring student progress. From their perspective, progress is measured by performance on standardized tests, and in their mad scramble to collect and record scantrons, many of them are floundering and some have lost their moorings. What does the teacher do in these circumstances?

As a teacher with more than 20 years of urban classroom experience , I am more inclined to swing into action than to host a “pity party”. My inner voice nudges me forward, urging me to revisit the classroom practices that have met with success, to listen to the voices that have proven worthy, and to use them as a bridge between the realities of the present and the challenges of the future. What I came up with is a recipe for success in the urban classroom, the new ABC’s:

Alter your perspective. See students as the priority, not the problem.

Build community. Let students learn collaboratively rather than competitively.

Change focus. Guide student thinking; challenge them to venture into uncharted waters rather than directing them to perform like trained seals.

These three strategies came to me in the voices of veteran educators whose wisdom helped me to hone and refine the instructional practices that led to success.

The first strategy, Alter your perspective , arose from discussions with frustrated colleagues who were torn between a desire to make a difference in the classroom and the realities of an educational arena in which learning is often sacrificed on the altar of high-stakes testing. The voice of sociologist Eric Klinenberg jarred me to my senses as I read a review of his latest work in English Education . Book editor Todd DeStigter, was impressed that Klinenberg “models the act of shifting perspective, of cultivating a healthy irreverence for assumed realities.” (p.323). DeStigter wonders what would happen if educators put aside “entrenched notions that certain students are ‘at risk’ due mostly to their own presumed deficiencies”, and if we understood “that many students struggle in school not because of individual characteristics, but because their educational experiences cannot be separated from the effects of living among abandoned buildings, ruined businesses, and violent crime” (p.324)

My inner voice translated DeStigter’s comments into a mandate for change: Teach to the needs of the child, not to administrative demands for higher test scores. I implemented this practice and ironically, my students, both “gifted” and “at risk” not only showed marked improvement on the Gates MacGinitie Reading Test , but also demonstrated scores significantly higher than those of their peers at the school site. Although high scores had not been my priority, they had come as a result of shifting my perspective, and honoring my commitment to teach children according to their needs.

Teaching children according to their needs prompted another positive change.

It renewed my passion for teaching and automatically changed my instructional focus. I found that I had become the guide in a student-centered classroom rather than the “sage on the stage” whose role it is to impart wisdom.

In this setting questions became the currency for trading information and controversial topics were met head on. There were no “sacred cows”, and in the best practices based on Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956), students were encouraged to seek out answers and to apply their knowledge to understanding problematic situations they encountered in literature and in life.

Many of my students live in situations where pain is a more constant reality than pleasure, and some of them have looked into the eyes of Bad Experience so often that they meet New Experience with distrust and hostility. As urban minority students, their voices are crying out for validation of their worth as human beings. They want to be able to make personal connections to the literature they read. They want role models who are mirror images -- authors, poets and real life heroes with names like their own, not just Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Dickinson and Crane. They want stories that engage them and speak to their needs for authentic experiences, not those that have been artificially contrived.

The scholarly voices of Donna Y. Ford and J. John Harris, say all this and more in their seminal work on the value of multicultural education (1999). Their voices helped to shape my classroom practice and encouraged me to expose students to literature that is rich, varied, complex, inspirational and empowering.

Isn’t this the goal of education? Why teach children facts and skills, critical thinking and creativity if not to empower them to make a difference? If we expect them to be the future torch bearers of democracy and the architects of viable social structures, then our schools should be their training grounds, and our teachers their guides.

As a guide in the classroom, my primary role was to build community.

This is the key to unlocking the mystery of why one group of urban minority students succeeds and others fail. We --my students and I -- succeeded because we had come together in chaos and formed a community of learners.

This was a tall order considering the realities we faced at the start of the year. I am an African-American English teacher on an big city campus bursting at the seams with more than 4,200 students, 99 % of whom are both Hispanic and low income. Located a few miles east of Watts -- a community that has twice burned its way into America’s memory with racial conflagration, my school has a large percentage of “second language learners”, and according to the 2002 Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) , only 26% of of them scored at or above the national average in reading.

These were the realities as reported, but I have never been one to be stultified by statistics nor bound by the stereotypes that spring from them. When I set out to make things better, at least in my classroom, the one small corner of the world where I am in control, I listened to the soulful voice of another blues singer, Aretha Franklin belting out her signature song,

These lyrics merged with the academic voices to provide the backdrop for my ABC’s of classroom success. These words had been running through my mind as I altered my perspective to view students as the priority, not the problem. They were the cornerstone in building community, and the road map I used in changing my focus from director to guide, encouraging communication in a non-threatening atmosphere in which the students had a real voice.

I, too, had learned from the experience.

I had increasingly led students into divergent thinking and had learned to honor every response, even when it was not presented prettily in standard English.

I had listened well to the voices of Ford and Harris (1999) and Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis (2000), as they taught me to gently pose questions designed to prompt, clarify, analyze, interpret and evaluate. My students emulated this behavior, besting me at my own game.

Together, as a community of learners, we had searched for answers in an atmosphere based on collaboration. In the process, we discovered there was room for Emma’s anger at social injustice and Karla’s fierce ethnic pride, for Johnny’s conservatism and Marisol’s militancy, for Abraham’s compassion and Amie’s anarchy, for Victor’s introspection, and Jordan’s insatiable appetite for knowledge. This is the essence of education. This is why my parting words to this wonderful class were,”Por favor, recuerden me siempre, como me recordaré de ustedes -- con mucho cariño.” Please remember me always as I will remember you -- with much love.

Works Cited
DeStigter, T. “Why Did You Teach Us This? Becoming Unstuck from Familiar Perspectives.” English Education, Vol 35 Number 4, July, 2003, pp 322-327.
Ford, D.Y. & Harris, J.J., III (1999). Multicultural Gifted Education. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.
Harvey, S. & Goudvis, A. (2002) Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding. York, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers.
Klineberg, E. (2002). Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.