These are strange days for the Chicago Public Schools, but on the Tuesday morning before winter break, the fifth-graders in Mr. Harlan’s class at Brentano Math and Science Academy in Logan Square are less concerned with the prospect of a teachers’ strike than with coming up with satisfying endings for the monster stories they’ve been writing all semester with help from volunteers at 826CHI, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center in Wicker Park. 826 has partnered with CPS to produce an anthology of the stories that will be published in the spring.
“Yes, that’s one,” Lichtenstein agrees in the hesitant voice of a teacher who hasn’t gotten quite the response she was looking for. “What else?”
Another student volunteers: “And that was the story of blank and blank.”
And then the students flip open their laptops and, with help from Mr. Harlan and the 826 volunteers, get to work.
So far, the students have invested about 20 hours in their stories. Lichtenstein says they focused more on the writing process than the basics of grammar and punctuation—that all would come later. “We looked at Basquiat paintings,” she says. “We looked at the Maya Angelou poem ‘Life Doesn’t Scare Me.’ We talked about abstract monsters and about fear. And we talked about character, setting, and plot—the complex, potent mixture that makes for a good story. They wrote for the month of November. We talked about word choices, similes, metaphors, figurative language, the triple Ds.”
“There’s a core of students who intrinsically get the editing process and the idea of separate paragraphs,” Borkowski says later. “They probably learned that skill from reading.”
