A BEDROCK FOR LEARNING Workshops in Writing and Thinking at Bard High School Early College The morning sunlight divides the walls of the building opposite into sections of yellow and shadow. The students, sitting around a long table, pull out their pads and quietly write, looking up from time to time. The hum of the air conditioner fills the room. The girls’ handwriting is smaller than the boys’. One girl has a big streak of blue in her hair; another wears a sari. A boy beside me scrawls over the pages of his notebook. The teacher, Amy Hondo ’01, says, “Draw it to a close,” and one by one, we finish our sentences and the freewrite is over. The scene is a classroom at Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) in New York City, early last September during the first week of school. BHSEC offers a curriculum that encompasses high school and the first two years of college in a four-year program. All BHSEC students begin the school year with a weeklong Writing and Thinking workshop. For the group of ninth-graders that Hondo is leading, starting the day with a five-minute freewrite has become a familiar exercise by midweek. After the freewrite, the students take turns reading their homework, this time a detailed observation of something they experienced recently. Malcolm Halle, 14, shares his description of the people in the subway car he took home. Emily Schrynemakers, also 14, offers a meticulous catalogue of her grandmother’s cluttered storage room. Hondo next asks the students to add sounds and other sensory impressions to their observations. “Ask your observation five questions,” she says. Notebooks open, and the students begin to write again.
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The Writing and Thinking workshops parallel the Workshop in Language and Thinking required of all new students at Bard College. At BHSEC, the workshops introduce the idea that “students can take risks with a text and no one will laugh at them,” says Ray Peterson, the school’s principal. “They give students the confidence to speak out.” Underlying the workshops is the belief that writing itself is a learning process. “Students don’t memorize and regurgitate here; we want them to question, to take an active role in their own education,” says Hondo, who is also director of BHSEC admission and who has taught Writing and Thinking at the school for two years. The students at BHSEC, which is part of the New York City public school system, come from all over the five boroughs. Some, like Schrynemakers, commute from as far away as Queens, spending more than two hours a day on a subway. Since the students must apply for admission and go through an interview screening process, most are aware of the amount of writing the curriculum entails. “In my old public school, Wagner, we had language arts,” says Halle. “Here the emphasis is more creative. I like that we start the day writing about anything, then go on to write in different styles, that our opinions matter, that we get to share and discuss.” As the workshop continues, Hondo hands out a poem by Margaret Atwood called “Against Still Life.” Its opening line is “Orange in the middle of a table.” Hondo puts one there. She divides the poem into different voices and actions, with some of us saying only the words “I” or “you,” whenever they occur, others reading the entire poem out