A few weeks passed with our Spanish for Spanish Speakers students attending meetings and talking about writing. Their teacher seemed to bring them to the meetings, rounding them up from their usual lunchtime activities and delivering them to my room en masse. No writing.
We instituted a second meeting day each week, designated a "work day" so students could use the time to write. Since nobody did any reporting, nobody had anything to write. Work days turned into the same kind of talking about writing that they had been doing before.
Then the Spanish speakers stopped coming. We are back to four wonderful sophomores who don't write. But wait, one of them did write a story about our students participating in Poetry Out Loud (our two winners went to the County competition) and got it onto our site. She reports that it wasn't very difficult, though she felt bad about not having a photo to go with it. Then another student wrote a story about the play the Drama class was putting on. She wrote the story in the future tense, encouraging readers to attend the performances, and turned in the story the day after the final performance. I commented on her story in Googledocs that she should revise it to the past tense. That was the end of that story.
So. I suggested that we stop beating ourselves up about not writing and focus our club on consuming and discussing journalism. They liked the idea, so now we bring articles to the group, read them together, dissect them in terms of reporting required and structure.
I did talk to the Principal about what is happening. He is a wonderfully supportive man and he told me that he feels that I deserve the stipend, that the school is lucky to have me, and the kids will learn from what they are doing.
Maybe next year we will get a more dynamic student leader. Maybe we will get some more dedicated writers. Maybe we will resurrect the student news site. I hope so, of course. I just renewed our domain name license for another three years!
