EJ in Focus
Defining Fun and Seeking Flow
in English Language Arts
Tom Romano
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
Mr. Z was quite a funny and humorous guy so he kept students engaged.
I
—College Junior
Where educators have gone wrong is in promoting the idea that learning is fun . . . fun is
not the goal. The goal is learning.
—Carol Jago, With Rigor for All: Teaching the Classics to Contemporary Students
see a colleague one morning stride
into a local coffee shop, a young
math education professor of nimble
mind and quick wit.
“You’ll be interested in an essay I’m writing,”
I tell him.
Todd raises his eyebrows.
“It’s about the importance of fun in teaching
and learning.”
“Fun?” Todd says, smiling exponentially.
“That’s easy: a rich mathematical problem.”
“Fun for English teachers,” I say, “and their
students.”
“Still easy,” Todd says. “I’ve seen you teach.
You love to have fun.”
“I do. And I want students to enjoy my classes,
but I’ve got some cognitive dissonance.”
“The problem?”
“Learning to be literate is serious business,” I
tell him. “I’m uneasy with fun.”
“Ah!” says Todd. “You want fun, but you
want deep fun.”
“Yes! Deep fun! Like deep massage.”
I’ve taught 34 years now, half that time in
high school, half in college preparing future English
teachers. I’ve had a grand time. But I must confess,
what has been fun for me has not always been fun for
30
students. I remember high school sophomores one
August with their cramped hands raised in anguish;
I had made them write nonstop for ten minutes after
a summer of not touching pencils. I’ve prepped reluctant juniors to grapple with the labyrinthinesentenced, super-vocabularied prose of William
Faulkner, then made them start reading. Some students sighed, some rolled their eyes, desperate to
escape the classroom. I prevailed, though, and not
with a laugh or a smile. I’ve conferred with college
students about essays they thought were done. I
showed them where I, a willing reader, didn’t understand, hadn’t followed their logic, wasn’t convinced without examples. There was work to be
done. I was there to help, but many students revised
in resentful silence, decidedly unhappy.
The acts of literacy I pushed students to are
great fun for me. I enjoy writing in my notebook to
explore a memory, moment, or idea. I love reading
something that challenges me and yields intellectual and emotional rewards. Little satisfies me more
than revising a draft.
I want students to expand their notions of fun
in learning. We’ll smile and sometimes laugh along
the way at piercing ironies, delightful characterizations, surprising plot lines, startling perceptions,
adroit wordplay, and knee-slapping language goofs.
We’ll parse the politician’s language when he says
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Tom Romano
that you cannot believe what a suspected terrorist
says because those people disassemble. I’ll introduce
students to the idea of cohesion in an essay by showing them a scene from a Marx Brothers’ movie.
We’ll have fun with content; we’ll have fun with
my methods. But primarily, I want students to
learn to have fun from the fulfillment of engaging
in meaningful academic work. I want them to develop a productive, tenacious attitude toward such
work and take it with them throughout their lives.
My goal is to present students with a curriculum that will so absorb them that time accelerates.
I am giddy when a student raises her head near the
end of class, bewildered, and asks, “Is the period
over?” In my students’ learning, I’m after what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “optimal psychological experience” or, in a word, “flow”:
We have seen how people describe the common
characteristics of optimal experience: a sense that
one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound
action system that provides clear clues as to how
well one is performing. Concentration is so intense
that there is no attention left over to think about
anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.
Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of
time becomes distorted. An activity that produces
such experiences is so gratifying that people are
willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it
is difficult, or dangerous. (71)
Flow is deep fun. Flow is what the rich mathematical problem offered my buoyant colleague.
Flow is what I seek as I write this essay. I’ve seen
students of greatly varying abilities immersed in
optimal psychological experience—the linguistically sophisticated high school junior who writes an
implicitly emphatic fiction of the first day of school
that reveals institutional insensitivity and peer
treachery; the bemused sophomore transfer student
to our writing workshop who has completed countless grammar worksheets over the years but rarely
been asked to write his own vision. He finally
catches fire when he writes three pages recommending a movie, three pages rife with usage, spelling,
and punctuation errors, three pages driven by passion, detail, and evidence.
Students have fun with Facebook, MySpace,
YouTube, and video games. They have fun text
messaging, talking on cell phones, listening to
iPods. They have fun at theme parks and hanging
out with friends. As their
I have a weakness for
teacher I want to introduce
students to another kind of
students who are
fun. This fun can be time
bulldogs. They latch onto
consuming, rigorous, and
a bone of knowledge and
fulfilling. It’s the kind of
gnaw away until they
fun critical to their acalearn all they can.
demic success, their intellectual development, and
their future as literate choice makers.
Bulldog Learning
I have a weakness for students who are bulldogs.
They latch onto a bone of knowledge and gnaw
away until they learn all they can. A bulldog student is the one I confer with about an essay she’s
writing that’s giving her problems. I listen, tell
what I understand, and ask questions about what I
don’t. We talk. Three days later she brings in a revision in which she has done things with language
and thinking neither of us thought of during our
conference.
In his never-more-relevant book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman maintains that students
expect to be entertained. This expectation, he argues, militates against their achieving substantive
thinking. He blames popular media, which insists
on brevity, sound bites, and surface understanding,
instead of depth, analysis, and complex, nuanced
thinking.
Students who wait passively to be entertained
do not develop tenacious learning habits. They are
not inclined to gnaw. They want to be fed. To want
to learn, students don’t need games. They don’t
need “fun” videos so they won’t be bored. They
don’t need candy rewards. They need meaningful
work. They need to see value in it so motivation
becomes intrinsic. Academic demands will arise for
which they’ll need to be Bulldog Learners, or they
won’t succeed.
When I was a teenager, I cleaned my father’s
tavern every Sunday morning. I worked my broom
and mop to and fro, scrubbing beneath barstools
and booths, where customers spilled beverages that
dried black and sticky. Every three weeks, after the
sweeping and mopping, I waxed the floor, a process
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Defining Fun and Seeking Flow in English Language Arts
requiring patience and pains. I disliked rising early
on Sunday morning to work in the silent bar. But I
knew I had to get to the work and do it well so the
rest of the day was mine. My back ached from bending over. I broke a light sweat. I had to examine my
work so I didn’t miss anything. Even with all that,
I learned, to my surprise, to take satisfaction from
the rhythms and results of the work.
In writing about her students’ study of classical literature, Carol Jago writes, “When the bell
rings, I want students to leave class tired, exhausted
from how well they have exercised their minds, yet
happy about all they have accomplished” (56).
Carol Jago wants Bulldog Learners.
could hear the sound, rhythm, and meaning carried
in their words. “Hey,” said one girl, “my poem’s
better than I thought.” The laughter that day was
plentiful, arising from language, meaning, youth
culture, and a respect for student voices.
The exhilarating intellectual pursuit was
driven by the gratification I took in poetry, language, and immersion of students in productive
writing tasks. The research, the planning, the student engagement represented a life of mind, creativity, and improvisation we English teachers get to
practice well beyond academic content standards.
We get to show students how they are part of a powerful tribe of language users that includes the likes
of Shakespeare, Maureen Dowd, and Lupe Fiasco.
The Fun of Intellectual Pursuit
A perk of our profession is intellectual pursuit.
Done well, our job offers the opportunity for mind
work. We didn’t go into teaching to work sans intellect, to perform rote tasks. We went into teaching to revel in our subject matter, to help students
use their minds, and to experience the stimulus and
satisfaction of learning.
Here’s an example: As a young teacher I read
poems by Carl Sandburg in our literature anthology. I’d read no Sandburg in college. Not academic
enough, I presume. (When I asked one professor
about Sandburg, he actually winced.) Sandburg’s
poems interested me, though. On the local PBS
channel, I’d watched an actor assume Sandburg’s
persona, recite poems, strum a banjo, sing folk
songs, and tell stories about hobos, Abraham Lincoln, and Connemara, Sandburg’s farm in North
Carolina. My interest piqued, I read a book of Sandburg’s complete poems, found ones our anthology
hadn’t included but that I thought would engage
students in thinking and discussion of Sandburg’s
themes and vivid use of language. I sketched a week
of study, devised writing assignments that required
analysis, synthesis, and creativity. Sandburg wrote
“Jazz Fantasia.” My students wrote their own musical fantasias. They had to analyze how Sandburg
used metaphor, alliteration, and onomatopoeia so
they could create their poems to capture on paper
the music they loved. I had such high expectations
when the poems were turned in that I spontaneously read each aloud, bringing to them the full
weight of my oral interpretation skills so students
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The Fun of Literature
“Literature,” writes Francine Prose, “is an endless
source of courage and confirmation. The reader and
beginning writer can count on being heartened by
all the brave and original works that have been
written” (Reading 250). Vivid reading experiences
are among the great pleasures for English teachers.
Prose’s Goldengrove, a novel that blurs adult and
young adult literature, is the most recent book I’ve
read that has been a source of courage, confirmation, redemption, and hope. How about our students? Are they heartened by brave and original
works? Are they experiencing the deep fun of
literature?
Questions like those began to guide me as a
high school English teacher. My work was for
naught, I came to believe, if students left my class
with knowledge of canonical literature and literary
devices but rarely read a book. I wanted students to
read literature the rest of their lives. I wanted them
to become eclectic literary hedonists who went to
books for vicarious experience, imaginative wondering, emotional catharsis, intellectual satisfaction, knowledge, and understanding—of others, of
themselves. That’s why I read literature.
Each year I ask my methods students to identify times in their lives when a book became “a
signpost, a continuing presence” in their lives
(Coles 68). This has happened to me countless
times. After certain reading experiences, I saw the
world differently, more clearly, more inclusively.
My vision widened and deepened. At twelve years
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Tom Romano
old I regularly left rural Ohio to mush a team of
sled dogs on the frozen tundra, where I arose each
morning in the bitter cold to build a life-sustaining fire and make strong sweet tea. At 19, I
squirmed as I read about a son whose father had
been slain and whose mother had remarried. For
four years I’d been aggrieved and angry. I, too,
wanted revenge, mine on the men who had killed
my father when the cars they were drag racing on a
public road had collided with his. Reading Hamlet
made me acknowledge my feelings. I was righteous, sickened, and frightened.
Even when the ideas and emotions I encountered in literature were painful or troubling, I found
literature comforting, companionable, and bracing.
My methods students will soon become purveyors
of literature to adolescents. I want them to understand why they themselves value literature. I lead
students to explore their significant relationships
with literature over the years and eventually to
write personal essays in which they render and analyze the experience (Romano, “Relationships”).
If students, all students at every grade level,
do not emerge from classrooms having read some
books that have swept them away, that have heartened and sobered them with truth, that they have
established relationships with, then I say the literature curriculum has failed, and faculty need to examine what they require students to read. Why To
Kill a Mockingbird? Why Of Mice and Men? Why
The Great Gatsby? Do those choices from the vast
world of literature make adolescents want to read
more? Or are there other critical reasons for them
to read such literature? Maybe there are. But we
need to ask and not fool ourselves with magical answers. And then every English department must
ask this: Is there a substantive, accountable, independent reading program in place, a program in
which students can choose and be guided to books
that are the right match for them developmentally,
psychologically, and personally, books with which
they might have optimal psychological experiences
(Nell)?
The Fun of Language
I read students a poem at the beginning of every
class. It’s my routine. I choose mostly contemporary
poems in which the poet has shined a light on some
segment of living, poems that can be accessible
upon hearing once. Contemporary poems feature
some of the best language used in America today,
voices such as those of Mekeel McBride, Ken
Brewer, and Mary Oliver, scores and scores of others, poets well known, poets obscure. Such poems
surprise us with indelible perceptions and precise,
inventive language. When I read a poem to students before attendance, before announcements, before classroom business, students settle into our
learning environment, sharpen their listening skills,
and experience poetry as meaningful and delightful. When I taught high school students, they did
this 180 times a year.
For English teachers and their students, learning to delight in language is crucial. Toddlers show
us the way. My two-year-old granddaughter peers
through the glass of the storm door where her family’s German shepherd customarily surveys the
street. “Look, Mom,” my granddaughter announces,
pointing at the window, “fingerpaws!” Leah Mae is
involved in the deep fun of language acquisition.
It’s not idle play. It’s not casual observation. It’s
definitely not merely “cute.” Language acquisition
is natural, inevitable, creative, playful, and brilliant. Her linguistic sense making is a genius of the
species, critical to becoming fully human.
There is another critical delight in using language, too, one that’s indispensible for negotiating
the world: Using language compels us to think. Actually laying down one word after another is generative, not just communicative. When we talk or
write, we discover, associate, and realize. One of the
stalwarts of our tribe, Donald Murray, maintained
that he wrote what he did not know he knew (Crafting 47). We teachers often overlook Murray’s profound and simple insight as we devise assignments
to prepare students to take proficiency tests in writing by fitting their voices and visions into a
formula.
In Ohio’s book of academic content standards
for K–12 English Language Arts, there are plenty
of standards about writing. Most are sensible, some
rigorous, a few trivial, some absurdly complex when
broken down to their component parts. No standard, however, comes close to identifying language
as generative of thought. Without that fundamental
truth, written communication would be anemic indeed, and writers would find it devilishly hard to
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Defining Fun and Seeking Flow in English Language Arts
compose anything of worth. An academic standard
about writing I’d like to see would read something
like this: “Students will learn to be writing warriors, producing words expansively with faith and
fearlessness both in drafting and revision, trusting
the language in them to lead to surprises of meaning and insight.”
The Fun of Writing
Here is a quotation by James Moffett, another past
stalwart of our tribe. It’s from his brief essay titled
“On Essaying,” the best piece I’ve ever read about
writing that genre: “English literature has maintained a marvelous tradition [of the essay], fusing
personal experience, private vision, and downright
eccentricity, with intellectual vigor and verbal objectification. In color, depth, and stylistic originality it rivals some of our best poetry” (171).
Does that characterize the kind of expository
writing your students are doing? Do they see room
in their essays to express private vision with color,
depth, and stylistic originality?
When students write, I want them to come to
know that the real fun of writing is producing a noholds-barred draft and then engaging in a conversation with
When given latitude
the words, revising and tinkerin topic choice, when
ing with the language until
convinced to be bold
they’ve come to a place of satison the page, when
faction. I want students to realengaged respectfully
ize that few of us get writing
about their writing, when
right with the first draft. I want
them to know that they are not
nudged to be specific,
stuck with those essential and
inventive, simpler, and
replaceable first words and iniclearer, students write
tial thinking that volunteered
remarkably well.
themselves. I want students to
come to know the pleasure and
fulfillment that Bernard Malamud voiced: “I work
with language. I love the flowers of afterthought”
(qtd. in Murray, Shoptalk 185).
In 39 years I’ve not tired of coaching students
to write (Strong). When given latitude in topic
choice, when convinced to be bold on the page,
when engaged respectfully about their writing,
when nudged to be specific, inventive, simpler, and
clearer, students write remarkably well. There’s no
deeper fun in language arts.
34
The Fun of Authentic Voice
In Crafting Authentic Voice, I argued that most appealing authentic writing voices provide substantive information, use narrative at least a little to
make their points, and surprise readers with interesting perceptions. I also maintained that an authentic voice employed humor, lightness, wit. Long
ago Ken Macrorie wrote directly to high school students: “You can write so persons will enjoy reading
your words. Why not do that? Something sinful
about enjoyment: You landed with the Mayflower?
Wear a wide-brimmed tall black hat? Put on a fool’s
colors and be wise for fun” (125).
I’ve wondered if I should have made humor
not a requirement of authentic voice, but a possibility. In the world of writing, after all, there are plenty
of stone-serious authentic voices. Even so, I balk
and want to hold out. Often, authentic written
voices I am drawn to have a lightness about them,
some spark of wit, some humorous perception.
In an op-ed column in the New York Times on
December 20, 2008, Bob Herbert wrote about the
“war against working people in the U.S. that has
taken such a vicious economic toll over the past
three decades.” It’s a serious essay. Early on in it,
though, he describes President Bush’s grudging announcement that emergency loans would be made
available to the auto industry. Herbert uses this
simile to characterize the president: “He looked
like a boy who had been forced to eat his spinach.”
Students can use a humorous sensibility in
their writing, even their academic writing, provided they know their audience. In a written reflection speculating about her upcoming field
experience in a high school classroom, Emily notes
wryly, “Hopefully, I will be able to find a Muse regardless of whether the students respond well to me
and my pal, Academic Rigor. Or better yet, I could
just be the Muse and be satisfied. That would make
waking up at 5 a.m. for two weeks quite worth it.”
The Fun of Multiple Genres
The world of writing is not a snapshot. It is a mural.
It is made of much, composed of many. There is
poetry of all kinds, flash fiction of history, fantasy,
and realism. There is nonfiction of much creativity.
Peruse a newspaper or magazine. Browse the Inter-
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Tom Romano
net. Genres, subgenres, and hybrid genres abound.
The world of writing is larger, more rewarding, and
more challenging than the five-paragraph youknow-what. In fact, that reductive form so ubiquitous in 7–12 classrooms is of little use to students
who attend college, where writing is expected to be
exploratory, substantive, well-reasoned, and as long
or as short as it needs to be.
I encourage students to try the untried. From
literature around us I bring to class possibilities for
experimentation. A few years ago a student introduced me to J. Ruth Gendler’s The Book of Qualities.
In this lovely book of intellect, imagination, language, and drawing, Gendler identifies 99 qualities
or emotions and writes brief portraits to personify
them. We tried Gendler’s style and delighted ourselves and each other. Weeks later, after her field
experience, Sarah wrote this:
Obituaries: October 29, 2007
Deceased: Motivation
Cause of death: Lowered Expectations
Motivation was found early Monday morning
barely breathing as he crawled around the corner
of Stout Street, trying to make it to Smith High
School in time for the first bell. He was bleeding
heavily from the side of the head but still valiantly
carrying on in search of the students he was to
meet that day in school. When authorities found
Motivation, they immediately dialed 911, but
tragically it was too late to save him. He died later
that afternoon at Good Hope Hospital.
An eye-witness observer later told investigative
authorities that he saw Lowered Expectations sideswipe Motivation as she flew around the corner in
her red corvette on her way to school that morning.
Motivation’s brave attempts to continue his pursuit
of students were just not enough to make up for his
60 mile-per-hour encounter with Lowered Expectations. We can only hope that Lowered learned her
lesson: traveling at 60 mph may help you reach
your destination faster, but faster is not always better when students’ Motivation is at stake.
Sarah Halverson, College Junior
The Fun of Multigenre
Recently, I received a desperate email from one of
my college students. She had completed a multigenre paper but was worried that she hadn’t done it
correctly.
I wrote to her, “Why do you doubt your
work?”
“Because,” she wrote back, “I’ve never had so
much fun writing a paper.”
In the last 20 years, multigenre research papers have spread across the land (Putz; Romano,
Blending). Writers elementary school through graduate school are writing research papers that use a
multitude of genres and subgenres, visuals and
strategies to think and communicate.
Although many of my students find multigenre papers fun to write, many of them, also, at
least initially, are scared to death of them. Jaclyn describes her reaction to the multigenre assignment:
I could feel the anxiety creeping up inside of me
like a spider sneaking up my arm. How am I EVER
going to write like this? The thought both thrilled
and frightened me: on my left shoulder sat my
traditional one point of view essay, on my right
sat my future multigenre paper. After a
The world of writing is
second reading of the
larger, more rewarding,
sample papers, my
and more challenging
nerves began to ease.
Why am I complainthan the five-paragraph
ing? I have the opporyou-know-what.
tunity to play with
words and writing! I
have the opportunity to experiment on the page.
As a reader, I noticed how enjoyable it was to
switch from genre to genre, anticipating the next
block of ideas to see how else ideas could be
expressed. Likewise, I also recognized the functionality of a repetend. In a paper as unstructured
as this, a repetend connects the whole paper
together like clothespins on a clothesline, holding
up all sorts of garments.
What I found most enjoyable in this reading
was the use of visuals and text to create an overall eye-appealing visage on the page. I almost
feel as if multigenre is a piece of art; a collage of
many different memories, thoughts, ideas, and
reflections.
Jaclyn Kamman, College Junior
If you don’t know multigenre writing, you can
best learn about it by reading multigenre papers.
Visit my “Multigenre Writing” website (http://
www.users.muohio.edu/romanots/), read multigenre
papers by my college students, and imagine possibilities for your students.
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Defining Fun and Seeking Flow in English Language Arts
Stakes
The epigraph at the top of this essay describing Mr.
Z as a funny guy who kept students engaged with
his sense of humor makes me wary. That’s a lot of
responsibility—to keep students engaged by being
entertaining. I’d rather students remain engaged
because of the intrinsic fulfillment of meaningful
work. Even so, I understand my student’s admiration of Mr. Z’s classroom persona.
Teaching literacy is serious business. For lack
of literacy—and its attendant qualities of thoughtfulness, judgment, and vision—people have sometimes made catastrophic decisions. Lives have sped
toward ruin, wealth has been squandered, progressive educational programs have been eviscerated,
governments have become secretive, mean-spirited,
and arrogant. The stakes in teaching students to
lead literate, thoughtful, examined lives are so high
that I try to carry myself buoyantly in the classroom. I strive to be companionable so that students
want to travel with me. I try to go about my work
with a joyful eagerness that is clearly visible. Students and colleagues often say I am passionate about
teaching (and maybe a little whacked about writing). That’s all right. I’ll continue to bang the drum
of Fun, Deep Fun, in English language arts.
Coda à la Gendler
Fun sits in English class every day, but she is quiet
and can go unnoticed. Students are often unaware
that she has slipped into the room and awaits an
invitation to participate. Fun is not elitist. She has
many styles. Sometimes she
dresses flamboyantly in blowzy
Teaching literacy is
garments of garish colors. She
serious business.
takes pleasure in slapstick,
bawdiness, and frivolity. Fun
is equally comfortable, though, dressing impeccably, buttoned down, starched, and creased. She
takes pleasure in sophisticated wordplay, subtle
irony, and penetrating inquiry. While Fun appreciates a groaner of a pun, she also revels in clearly argued, complex positions. Fun welcomes a belly
laugh, but a wry smile suits her, too.
If Drudgery and Rote are the order of the day,
Fun will retire to a corner of the classroom, unless
she decides to spend time with her dastardly cousins, Cynicism and Scorn, who are adept at under-
36
mining a teacher’s plans. Many believe that Rigor
is the sworn enemy of Fun, but that isn’t true.
Rigor and Fun have a lot in common. Rigor, too,
will refuse to participate in classrooms empty of
substance.
Although students don’t always know where
Fun sits, they all know where Rigor sits, and few
willingly sit near him. Rigor can feel isolated, unwanted, disconsolate. When Rigor feels that way,
there is danger of him becoming supercilious. After
all, Rigor sees himself as exclusive, demanding, and
difficult. To keep perspective, Rigor needs the companionship of Fun. And Fun, of course, benefits
from the company of Rigor. In fact, Fun and Rigor
are each at their best when they collaborate to produce something together that neither could create
alone. That’s when they entertain their mutual best
friend, Fulfillment.
Works Cited
Coles, Robert. The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral
Imagination. Boston: Houghton, 1989.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow, or the Psychology of Optimal
Experience. New York: Harper, 1990.
Gendler, J. Ruth. The Book of Qualities. Berkeley: Turquoise
Mountain, 1986.
Herbert, Bob. “Hope Amid the Gloom.” New York Times,
20 Dec. 2008: A27.
Jago, Carol. With Rigor for All: Teaching the Classics to Contemporary Students. Portland: Calendar Islands, 2000.
Macrorie, Ken. Writing to Be Read. 2nd rev. ed. Rochelle
Park: Hayden Book, 1976.
Moffett, James. “On Essaying.” Forum: Essays on Theory and
Practice in the Teaching of Writing, Ed. Patricia L.
Stock. Upper Montclair: Boynton/Cook, 1983.
170–73.
Murray, Donald. Crafting a Life in Essay, Story, Poem. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1996.
———. Shoptalk: Learning to Write with Writers. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1990.
Nell, Victor. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for
Pleasure. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.
Ohio State Board of Education. Academic Content Standards
K–12 English Language Arts. Columbus: Ohio Department of Education, 2001. 25 Feb. 2009 <http://
education.ohio.gov/GD/DocumentManagement/
DocumentDownload.aspx?DocumentID=786>.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Prose, Francine. Goldengrove. New York: Harper, 2008.
———. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love
Books and Those Who Want to Write Them. New York:
Harper, 2006.
Putz, Melinda. A Teacher’s Guide to the Multigenre Project:
Everything You Need to Get Started. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2006.
Romano, Tom. Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2000.
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Tom Romano
———. Crafting Authentic Voice. Portsmouth: Heinemann,
2004.
———. “Multigenre Writing.” 2006. 25 Feb. 2009
<http://www.users.muohio.edu/romanots/>.
———. “Relationships with Literature.” English Education
30.1 (2008): 5–23.
Strong, William. Coaching Writing: The Power of Guided
Practice. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001.
Tom Romano is professor of teacher education at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Before earning a PhD, he taught high
school students for 17 years. Now he teaches college students who want to become English teachers. In workshops across the
country and summer teaching at the University of New Hampshire, Tom works with teachers who seek to clear the way for
students to blend genres, write with passion, and craft their authentic voices. He caught the writing bug himself in seventh
grade and never recovered. Tom has published five books with Heinemann, dating back to 1987. His most recent is Zigzag:
A Life in Reading and Writing, Teaching and Learning (2008). At Miami, he is the Naus Family Faculty Scholar. Email him at
[email protected].
Croquet
Rock solid wooden balls heavy
in the grass
iron wickets stolid
in the dirt
mallets still strong enough to hew
a heart
We played a meandering course
us siblings congenial again
partnered for play
All was forgiven while
we clubbed our way around the yard
acting out a game
we knew in our bones
How well behaved we all were that August afternoon
the sound of wood hitting wood
so unlike
the slamming of a door.
—Andrea Davis
© 2009 Andrea Davis
Andrea Davis teaches English and is the Humanities Coordinator at Stonington High School in Pawcatuck, Connecticut. Her
work on teaching poetry has appeared in Voices from the Middle.
English Journal
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