make the change.
Through writing memoir, writers also discover and uncover their own passions and convictions, leading them to choose more effective topics for argument writing. In this way, memoir writing can inspire, or lead to, ideas and, again, voice in opinion and argument writing.
Most importantly, memoir bridges the achievement gap. Research supports the fact that prior knowledge is a major determinant of academic achievement. Memoir is one area in which all students come to the table with the necessary background knowledge—their experiences. Memoir writing values these experiences and levels the playing field as all children—economically, culturally, and academically diverse—inherently have the essential “material” necessary to achieve memoir writing. Not all students have the prior knowledge, skill, or motivation to write to prompts on standardized tests, but once writers learn to write meaningfully on topics that matter, they can transfer those skills to other topics, even to “on-demand” writing tasks.
Last, adolescents are natural storytellers. Ask a group of teens why they missed an assignment or broke a rule, and the most incredible, implausible stories will emerge. Getting them to write those stories leads to more proficient writing and becoming storytellers, a skill that will help them in any future profession.
How to Teach Memoir Writing:
Using Mentor Texts
Like any writing, memoir writing is taught by first reading mentor texts. Memoir as a literary genre is experiencing great popularity, and memoirs are available in diverse reading levels and genres and on a wide variety of topics There are memoir picture books, such as those written and illustrated by Patricia Polocco. There are memoirs poems: George Ella Lyons “Where I Am From” which has developed into a genre of its own; Dolly Parton’s lyrics for “Coat of Many Colors,” which became a picture book (Parton, 1996); Cynthia Rylant’s free verse poetry about her home in Beaver, West Virginia collected in Waiting to Waltz (2001). Graphic memoirs, such as Persepolis (Satrapi, 2004) or El Deafo (Bell, 2014), have become popular with many readers and writers. There are prose memoirs in essay length and novel length. And there are oral memoirs and video memoirs.
Student writers read a memoir and analyze what the author wrote and how the author wrote, deconstructing those texts to discover how authors develop their writings. After the teacher demonstrates how to take those deconstructed elements and reconstruct them into a memoir, the students are ready to brainstorm their own topics and draft.
I like to begin with an aural text, such as the Jerry Seinfeld’s “Halloween.” As the students listen to this memoir, they jot down the elements they notice, such as dialogue, narration, specific details, description, names and other proper nouns, humor, point of view, topics, humor, onomatopoeia, similes, reflection.
After the class creates an anchor chart of elements effective for memoirs, students read a short written text to deconstruct. For example, looking at the first few lines of George Ella Lyon’s poem “Where I’m From” (1999), students are asked to note what they notice about what and how the memoirist writes.
Charlie starts. “I notice smells, ‘Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.’ I am not sure what carbon-tetrachloride is, but I am picturing a chemical smell.” We look it up and find out that carbon-tetrachloride was used in dry-cleaning establishments. A biography of Ms. Lyon reveals that her father worked as a dry cleaner, and students infer that either her father came home from work smelling of the chemical or she visited him at his business. Either way, that smell takes her back to her childhood.
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