Out of the Mouths of Babes

I learned something about my students’ writing last week. It’s better when they read it to me.

We had just finished reading the biography of Mark Twain written by one of his daughters who was 13 at the time. For homework I told my sixth-graders to write a biography of someone in their family.

On Friday afternoon, while a third of my students were gone to intramural football and volleyball games, I asked for volunteers from the remaining 19 to read their biographies. Five students raised a hand.

“I want to tell you about my grandpa,” read one boy. “I want to be just like him.”

A girl told about her 4-year-old brother who, “gets mostly everything he wants. I don’t get the fact that he chooses a toy over clothes. I think he should go for the clothes.”

Another girl read about her sister who has a different father, “but she treats me as though I am her full sister.”

Sharing his mother’s story, a boy read, “When she was 16 she became pregnant … She had to make some very hard choices, but she finally finished school.”

As I listened to each reader, the cadence of his or her voice, the added emphasis on specific words, and the accompanying smile or grimace told me so much more than I would have seen in their written words alone.

Normally, I read my students’ work with a critical eye – it’s my job. I see things like “grampa” and strike it out with a red pen to rewrite “grandpa.” I see the run-on sentences stringing out for lack of periods, and proper nouns that need capital letters. I am supposed to find these errors, and teach children not to make them. But in my typical, critical perusal, I sometimes miss their stories.

I’m glad I asked them to read them aloud this time. I needed to hear what they were trying to say.

Sometimes it’s just best to let them do the talking.