Write Around the Clock

Teaching Pre K-8, Mar 2004 by Rodia, Becky

A day in the life of Charley Hoce, teacher and poet on the go

At four o'clock in the morning, most of us are dozing in our warm beds, our days full of myriad interactions and tasks to be completed still ahead of us. For New Paris, OH teacher Charley Hoce, however, life is a little different.

Four a.m. is Charley's regular wake-up. He begins his day with half an hour of exercise, and then spends a full hour working on small wonders such as:

From the Diary of an Escaped Sheep

I went under the fence this morning

No one knows where I am

I love the freedom that I've found

I'm a sheep that's on the lam.

Charley Hoce is a poet. A real-live, write-every-day, rewrite-until-it's great poet. He has seven or eight book-length manuscripts of children's poetry completed, one of which - Beyond Old MacDonald - will be published by Wordsong/Boyds Mills Press in 2005.

Hard work pays off for this self-described morning person. After writing for an hour, and serving as "the best alarm clock in the world" for his wife Joanele (a former classroom teacher who is now the county's Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Professional Development), he's off to National Trail Elementary School to turn his attention to his other passion - teaching.

On the trail to an education. By 8:30 a.m., Charley's waiting at the entrance of National Trail Elementary School, where he has taught for his entire 22-year teaching career. About 40 of National Trail's 450 K-4 students arrive by car, and Charley's there to greet them every morning.

National Trail School is an enormous K-12 building with two "arms." National Trail High School is in the central part of the building, while the 5-8 middle school and the K-4 elementary school each form one of the "arms." There are approximately 1,200 students in the entire building.

Charley spends his days in the elementary school, teaching reading and writing to first, second and third graders in their own classrooms, as well as Title I kids who come out of those classrooms.

Rising to the challenge. Once the 9:00 a.m. bell rings, Charley spends the first hour of the day working with Title I students in grade-level groups of 5-6 kids per group.

"I've always had second and third grade, and I've always been good at making kids better readers," Charley said. "Getting first graders was a shock. Some of them have no idea how to read. It's a developmental thing they have to go through, a maturity thing.

"A couple of years ago, I went back to school and got my reading endorsement, so I've been using those skills with these kids. It's a challenge, but I enjoy it."

Hugh Aukerman, National Trail's K-5 principal, feels that Charley's up to the challenge. "He's a fantastic reading teacher and he's great with the kids," Hugh told us.

All of this became clear as we watched Charley with a group of first graders. He kept up an energetic patter that engaged the kids' attention as they built word families and used the words in oral sentences. Half an hour later, that group left, a new group came in and the cycle repeated, with Charley just as enthusiastic as he'd been with the first group of kids.

Learning from a pro. At 10 o'clock, we followed Charley next door to Amy Medaris' first grade classroom, where Charley helps teach a writing process that includes peer editing. He showed us a folder full of peer-edited drafts, featuring students' suggestions and actual proofreader marks. Then we got to hear him remind the class about how to be a good peer editor.

"Sometimes, when you're peer recommending," he told them, "you might want to take somebody's word out. But, be careful. You might hurt that person's feelings if you start marking out whole sentences. You know, when I give my writing to other people and they come back and say, 'Mr. Hoce, this isn't any good at all!' it makes me feel bad. But if they come back and say, 'You know, Mr. Hoce, this is pretty good, but why don't you think about changing this and this?' that makes me feel a lot better."

Some of the people to whom Charley gives his writing are instructors and colleagues at workshops he has attended, such as the Ohio Writing Project (a local site of the National Writing Project professional development program) and the Chautauqua Children's Writer's Workshop. At these events, Charley's work is "peer edited" and he gets valuable feedback from other teachers and writers. This interaction with the teaching and writing communities keeps Charley energized and augments his innate talent; he's a real pro, and the kids obviously benefit.

For one thing, they definitely had a handle on constructive critiquing. As they paired off and began editing one another's work, one girl told her partner, "I marked that spelling word on your paper because you know Mrs. Medaris would have marked it once she saw it."

During class, Charley also imparted advice about where to get ideas for writing, with the help of one of the first graders. When the girl told Charley she was going to write about the tooth she lost the previous day, Charley enthused: