Let Them Write Plays!

I was pouring coffee in the break room when I overheard two colleagues talking about one of my students. Iman was bright and insightful in class, they said, but her writing was uncharacteristically bland.

A week later, as I was reading my students' responses to our English department's diagnostic, the teachers' remarks came back to me. We had given each 11th grade student a sample prompt from our state's end-of-course writing test. I'd kept my instructions for responding to a minimum, curious to see what they'd come up with, but all of my students wrote conventional essays—except for Iman, who wrote a two-act screenplay. Its voice, focus, specificity, and depth were exceptional, and it provided a nuanced, implicit answer to the prompt. I asked Iman if she had ever been that experimental before in a class assignment. "Not since middle school," she shrugged, and I began to suspect that my colleagues had only read Iman's conventional essays and papers, which was why they hadn't seen her best writing.