You're not allowed to shoot deer in headlights in Minnesota

The Recchio and Broadsky articles were tough to read at first.  I’ve never read anything like them before.  I wouldn’t have thought that one could read so much into the contents of student writing.  The articles will lead me to examine what informs my writing and my comments about my students’ writing.  After reading the articles and Lindemann’s chapter on responding to students’ writing I will be more circumspect and careful in my written and oral responses to student composition. 

It’s difficult to find genuine reasons for student writing.  It’s also tough to find a real audience for their writing beyond me.  The Brodsky letter writing exercise reminds me of something my students did. A few years ago I came up with what I thought was a good idea.  I was in Rochester, Minnesota, watching high school hockey games and looking for a school where my kid could play high school ice hockey.  I read in the Rochester Sunday paper that the Minnesota Board of Education determined that students in rural high schools around Rochester are “racially isolated” and that they would be taking trips to Minneapolis to interact with kids that were not white.  When I got home to Long Beach I called the office of the Eyota, MN school district (mentioned in the newspaper article) and talked to the superintendent.  I told him that my students at Garfield are racially isolated and why don’t we put together a pen-pal situation between our students.  He loved the idea.  He gave me contact information of a teacher at the school.  The letters started flying across the country.  My students loved to write and receive the letters.  The writing continued even after I changed to Bell High.  Four of my students, my son and I spent a week in Minnesota during our spring break.  We went to Eyota High School and were treated like visiting royalty.  We spent a day touring the school and went to a nearby dairy farm. We were amazed at the operation. But then things went bad.

I was so proud of what we were doing that I asked one of my students to write an article about our writing for publication in The Eagle Nest, a quarterly tabloid that is sent to the homes of all BHS students.  Cindy Gonzalez, the author of the newspaper article, listed some of the things that we had learned in our correspondence with the Eyota students.  (Cindy told all of us, as we walked the campus of the University of Minnesota, that she would be going to that university some day.  She did better than that.  She got a full ride to St. Benedict’s College in St. Cloud, MN.).  Among the things she listed in the article was that the kids in Eyota go out in the middle of the night in cars with high powered lights to find deer and shoot them.  I sent copies of The Eagle Nest to the school in Minnie.  Bad idea.  The superintendent wrote me that this type of hunting was wrong and very illegal and that he was starting an investigation to find out who wrote about the poaching and who was doing it.  We continued to write to Minnesota but there was never another response.  My phone calls to Eyota Unified were never returned.  We stopped writing to them.