Will My Name Be Shouted Out? Reaching Inner City Students Through the Power of Writing.

• Author: Mayo, Michael K.

It's hard not to like Stephen O'Connor's Will My Name Be Shouted Out? because it's hard not to like Stephen O'Connor. He's an earnest, reflective teacher in New York City middle schools, and his mission, as the subtitle says, is to "reach" inner-city seventh graders "through the power of writing." It's a worthy experiment, one that promises both liberation and art, and it's told by a man who is putting his liberalism where his mouth is. But in the end, both his pedagogy and the book suffer from a problem too common in teaching today: It's too much about O'Connor's and our appreciation of the students' art, and not enough about school.

O'Connor's writing class works like this: Write what you want, as long as you want, using whatever language leaps to mind. Eventually, we suppose, the confusion of adolescence and inner-city living (as well as that of nouns and direct objects) will resolve itself into some kind of order. Order like this:

I am New York. I am the

chimnees that puffs out smoke

into the air I am the earth

quakes that rips trough the ground

under the houses all around

I am a building being torchered

by a crane banging and banging

until I'm all gone. I am New York

a very unpeaceful place.

The book is full of work like this, and it's usually a pleasure to read. Free writing (as such no-holds-barred lessons are usually called) is an essential part of any English curriculum: You can't convince a 12-year-old of the importance of commas and semicolons without giving him somewhere meaningful to put them.

The question, though, is meaningful to whom? In the first few pages, O'Connor provocatively asks whether writing can matter: "...not just charm adults or conform to current literary fashion, but matter to my students. If I couldn't help them see the value of writing in their own lives, how could I be sure it had any value at all?"

The answer, it would seem, is that it doesn't. After a year of free writing, his kids are just as bad-mouthed, confused, and headed for disaster as they were on page one. To be sure, their problems are enormous--dead siblings, drug-addicted mothers, murders on their doorsteps--and writing can't change all that. But you expect some progress: a greater range in feeling, a more sophisticated thought, a change or two in someone's life. Otherwise, stop--and try a different approach. Instead, O'Connor goes back for another year, with the same program.

For a time, one student's grades go up a bit, but then slip right...