Trying to Write in Class

Like many teachers, I ask students to read Sandra Cisneros’s vignette “My Name” from The House on Mango Street and write about their names. In my language arts class, we thought about this activity in terms of mentor texts, those texts teachers can use to teach students about craft, organization, or garnering ideas for writing.

Every time I ask students to write about their names, I write about mine too. Oddly, I’m usually the last one to finish even though I’ve done the assignment numerous times. What I noticed right away was that my piece isn’t that great, but I shared it anyway hoping that students would get to know something about me, including that most people call me Kaa. Here’s what I wrote:

My name means beautiful flower, or so my father told me. To me, it means too many letters. When you put KaaVonia Mechelle Hinton-Johnson together it also means too many syllables. My father gave me my first name even though my mother wanted to name me Portia. Portia. What a lovely name; it’s so literary. If I could rename myself, I’d be a Portia. Portia Marie to be exact.

In keeping with the idea of mentor texts, I asked the students how we might use “My Name” to teach writing in other ways. They mentioned organization, genre/mode (i.e., narrative and vignette), and figurative language. Next, we tried to write two sentences about our names that included imagery, a simile, or a metaphor.

I tried this too and probably complained the loudest about how difficult it was. The students came up with excellent examples that I will not share here due to anonymity, but our share my attempt:

My name is a mouthful of vegetable soup.

KaaVonia sounds like a prickly cactus.

KaaVonia feels like a licorice stick on a dry tongue.

What I continue to realize about writing is that I never know what I’m doing. I can never really get it right the first, second, or third time. Writers need lots of practice. Writers need lots of time to create something readable, something worth sharing.

After I read my lines to the students, I joked that I’d never go public with them. And what do I do? I post them here. The final thing I’ve learned is that I enjoy lowering the writing bar for my students. I hope it encourages them to think, Geesh, if she’s willing to keep trying after writing that, we should too.