Write Like This: Sports as a Vehicle for Real-World Writing

Jordan Daniels and Joan F. Mitchell

Session: The Intersection of Literacy, Sport, Culture, and Society NCTE Convention Boston, MA November 23, 2013

“Much like teaching difficult reading, if we want our students to grow as writers, we have to come out from behind the writing curtain and model to our students what good writers do. We can’t hide, like the Great Oz, standing behind the curtain, barking our writing assignments” (Gallagher, 2011, p. 225).

Key Questions:

1. When we teach writing, are we modeling real-world writing or sticking to traditional academic forms? 2. Are we tapping into students’ background knowledge and allowing them to write about topics based upon their own expertise? 3. Do we as educators take sports writing seriously as a genre in the English classroom? 4. Do we consider sports a valid writing topic for our students?

In Kelly Gallagher’s Write Like This (2011), he presents two central premises that characterize his classroom writing pedagogy:

I. “If we are to build students who grow up to write in the real world, we must move our writing instruction beyond a ‘cover the state standards’ mind-set by introducing our young writers to additional real-world discourses” (p. 8). II. “In teaching our students how to write, we must provide them with authentic modeling – modeling that comes from both the teacher and from real-world texts. As the teacher in the room, each of us must become a mentor. As such, we must stand next to our students and show them how real writers write” (p. 8).

Although Gallagher’s text encourages numerous forms of real-world writing, his own love of sports (and his awareness of the sports interests of many of his students) results in numerous sports-themed writing topics and texts to engage students in different forms of writing*. Gallagher organizes his text according to six major purposes for writing: express and reflect, inform and explain, evaluate and judge, inquire and explore, analyze and interpret, and take a stand/propose a solution. The following represent some of the sports-related examples that Gallagher provides as well as others that we have created:

I. Express and Reflect: Students can write personal accounts of their experiences either observing or participating in sporting events in the form of narratives, reflections, or poetry.

II. Inform and Explain a. Mentor text: Rick Reilly’s (2008) “Weighed Down by Too Much Cash?” essay in which Reilly uses sarcasm to highlight the problem of 60 percent of NBA players filing for bankruptcy within five years of leaving the NBA (p. 65). Students use this as a template for similar informative pieces about a sports-related topic such as “Ten Ways to Ruin the Game of Football.” b. Gallagher’s own example of “The Unofficial and Unwritten (but you better follow them if you want to be a baseball player) Rules of Baseball” (p. 76). Students then compose their own list of unwritten rules based upon their particular experiences on a sports team.

III. Evaluate and Judge a. Ask students to create a chart comparing the performance of three of their favorite athletes in any given sport in order to determine which one is the most talented. Then students should utilize their charts to draft an essay that demonstrates their decision-making process. b. Students could also observe a sporting event (school, college, or professional), and write a review evaluating the teams’ performances to determine why the particular outcome occurred.

IV. Inquire and Explore a. Burning Questions: As a fan of the Anaheim Angels, Gallagher writes a list of “burning questions” he has about the upcoming season including the following: “Will the Angels rebound from a bad season? Will the Vernon Wells acquisition be a good move? Who will be the key challengers within the division” (p. 126)? These questions provoke inquiry and exploration, and then students may choose one or more questions to write about further. b. What the Future Holds: What will sports look like in the future? Students may represent their ideas through writing or drawing; they may write reflections, narratives, or “news stories from the future.” Then students are challenged to research what experts in the field predict about the future of sports (p. 129).

V. Analyze and Interpret a. Compare and Contrast: Use Rick Reilly’s (2009) essay “A Tale of Two Little Leaguers,” and analyze it as a whole-class. Students determine what aspects of the article they would like to imitate in order to create a template for another compare and contrast topic. Gallagher gives the example of a comparison between Barry Bonds and Hank Aaron and the issue of steroid use (pp. 149-151). b. Who Is to Blame? i. Who is to blame for LeBron James leaving Cleveland? (p. 152) ii. Who is to blame for the decline of Wake Forest basketball? c. What Will Happen When ______? Students review various sports writers’ predictions about big sporting events such as NBA championships or the Super Bowl. Using those predictions as mentor texts, students practice making their own predictions about an upcoming sporting event that is important to them (pp. 159-160).

VI. Take a Stand/Propose a Solution: Students may choose a sports-related issue such as steroid use in baseball, the danger of concussions in football, exclusion of female members at the Masters golf course, the controversy over the long putter in golf, etc. After choosing an issue, students research both sides of the issue to determine the arguments and counterarguments related to their position. Students may also research potential solutions to the problem at hand so that their final essay reflects the arguments, counterarguments, and potential solutions related to a current problem in sports.

*For more information about the relationship between sports literacy and student engagement, visit Alan Brown’s sports literacy blog at http://sportsliteracy.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/recommended-resources-utilizing-sports-in-the-classroom/. Sports Writers with Mentor Text Titles Podcasts

 **Bill Simmons – “Playing in Tiger’s Shadow”  Mike and Mike in the Morning  Rick Reilly – “Baseball, My Way”  The B.S. Report  **Wright Thompson – “Why You Should Care  Fantasy Focus Football About Cricket”  Fantasy Basketball  Zach Lowe – “Seven Ways the NBA’s New  The Starters (NBA Podcast) Camera System Can Change the Future of  Men in Blazers (US Soccer Podcast) Basketball”  **Radiolab  Jonah Keri – “Presenting the MLB Award  **ESPN 30 for 30 o 9 for IX Winners” o Ice Cube Straight Outta L.A.  Bill Barnwell – “Fear the Panthers” o Ron Shelton Jordan Rides the Bus  Peter King – “MMQB: Steve Gleason on his life o Spike Jonze The Birth of Big Air with ALS, Mission for a Cure” Blogs/Twitter Handle

 True Hoop - @TrueHoop  Fivethirtyeight - @fivethirtyeight  **Harvard Sports Analysis Collective - @Harvard_Sports  Grantland - @Grantland33  **@JayBilas

Podcast Lesson

Enter: While students are reading Slam! or Boy21 or any other high interest texts, have students begin writing about their favorite sports team (high school, college, or professional). Utilizing Gallagher’s “1 Topic = 18 Topics” chart, students can begin writing in each of the six categories of writing purposes.

Explore: At the end of the unit, students can take their writings and turn them in to a podcast in which they draw connections between the text and their thoughts on their favorite sports team. Using one of the listed podcasts as a mentor text, teachers can help students identify effective practices within podcast creation such as inclusion of detail, perspective, interaction with audience, and clarity in speaking. Podcast-creation can be a capstone assignment that demonstrates students’ abilities to write to several, if not all, of the writing purposes detailed by Gallagher.

Extend: Students can continue to use podcasts by creating a recap of their schools’ sports activities every other week that can be included in morning/afternoon announcements to publish student work. Podcast creations can be catered to student interests and cover issues as local or as global as the students/teachers wish it to be.

Resources Lists http://jrdaniels.weebly.com/professional.html http://www.hmhbooks.com/hmh/bestamerican/sportsbookdetails

References Gallagher, K. (2011). Write like this. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Notes/Ideas: ______