(Re)Vision

As an elementary school teacher, my day consists of teaching lessons in every content area, sometimes integrated into a larger study, and sometimes sorted off into their own distinct learning times. Writing is one of those content areas and one of our main focuses in second grade is teaching the writing process. You think of an idea (brainstorm), write a quick draft, add or update details (revise), fix your mistakes (edit) and publish. Revising and editing are two parts of the writing process that are sometimes confused and overlooked by students. What’s the difference, and how does this relate to our ability to teach students in real world, exploratory ways?

“We all make mistakes.” It’s a lesson so many are told, yet making mistakes is often seen as an embarrassment, a deficit or a flaw. When writing, editing helps you correct mistakes that you may have made in spelling, punctuation and capitalization. In education, some teachers hesitate to to rearrange, reteach, reschedule or undo out of the fear of admitting to making a mistake. But many of the scenarios we face as teachers should be thought of less as edits and more as revisions.

As we started our most recent study on trains (a study actually focused on the different communities of NY state and how they’re interconnected), we began to think about the field visits we’d taken in the past and how possible they were in our current state. We hoped to take students on field visits to suburban and rural communities via local train systems such as the Long Island Railroad and the Metro North.

As plans started to materialize, there were a lot of moments when I felt like I was making mistakes. The town we’d visited in the past wouldn’t return my calls and, when they did, we were met with a lot of “no” and “we already told you, no.” I started to think that this was a mistake. This idea was too big to realize during COVID with all of the restrictions and road blocks in place. With the amount of phone calls, emails and begging that had already been done, it felt like doors kept closing and our options were disappearing.

One day, when considering canceling our trip and trashing this draft, I thought of the writing process. My first draft of this trip needed help. The storyline didn’t make any sense and the setting was nonexistent. We had a choice at that moment to either trash this draft and rewrite from the start, or move forward in the process to see if we could make some sense out of this idea. This trip was a cornerstone and a traditional part of this study. Could we possibly save this trip with a bit of revision?

I thought back to my childhood and tried to remember locations on Long Island where the train station was located in a typically suburban, residential neighborhood. I remembered my grandpa. He lived next to a school where my cousin and I would play in the playground often, immediately next to a train stop called Centre Avenue. The setting seemed like it could fit. Residential, play area, walkable. I called the nearby school. If we could use their playground for an hour for lunch and recess after touring homes in the neighborhood, this might be the place for us.

…another dead end. The playground had recently been surrounded by a new fence with a big, dependable lock. I was ready to give up, but instead, I moved forward. It was no fault of mine that our first location was closed due to COVID. These setbacks weren’t errors or oversights, not mistakes to be edited, but just details that needed to be refined. In preparation for our trip we’d already done so much work, interviewing commuters on the railroad, visiting the local station and walking through the train we would ride. We couldn’t let the experience end there.

I sent a text to my aunt who also lives in that neighborhood and the details started to develop immediately. My aunt happens to have connections with the fire department, police department and town hall in that neighborhood. All of those locations are also, conveniently, within walking distance from the train station. A historic home was just a few blocks from the local park, and a hundreds-year old gristmill was also in the area. The details of my initial plan weren’t mistakes to be scribbled out, but minute yet important pieces of the story to be revised.

My new field visit draft wasn’t ready to be thrown out. Instead, it was heading towards publishing and was strongly coming together during the revising stage. Our setting may have changed to make the story more plausible, but the characters and plot were the same. Seventy five second graders and fifteen adults would take a 45 minute train ride to discover life in the suburbs first hand.

Our field visit ended up being a (long, amazing and tiring) success. Within an hour after arriving to school that morning, our students were boarding a Long Island Rail Road train headed to the suburbs for a rainy day in a totally new community. Students played rock, paper, scissors on the train ride, read their favorite books and watched as the scenery outside turned from city to suburbs. We sketched images of a historic suburban home, learned about the community while visiting town hall, explored a fire station and listened to the birds chirp as we identified how the suburbs differ from the city. Reading books about a topic can be engaging and watching videos can be exciting, but I don’t think anything compares to the experience of seeing, hearing and feeling your study topic first hand.

As teachers we are always revising. It can be easy to want to throw out your brainstorms and drafts, citing too many troubles that make your ideas impossible. But revising requires that you consider your idea as a whole and fit the pieces together in a way that hadn’t been done before. What’s missing? What’s redundant? What needs to be replaced or swapped out?

Just like anything, practice makes progress. The more you revise your ideas and plans, the more flexible and creative you are, the more likely you are to flex even more next time. Following this field visit to the suburbs, we continued our study. Our next focus was rural communities and their connection to urban communities and after the success of safely traveling 35 miles with 75 second graders, a quick subway ride to the High Line felt like a piece of cake. We had learned to bend without breaking, to adjust without giving up.

To revise is to reconsider, to update, to amend, to re-examine and to look again. Revising is the work of teachers as we try to find what’s best for our students; the right book, the right story problem, the best fidget, the right field visit. As we approach the last few months of our school year together, and beginning brainstorming for our final integrated study of the year, I look forward to seeing these challenges as chances for revising a story that’s well on its way to publishing.