Carol Guensburg
Edutopia
Summer 2007
As a public school teacher for nearly a decade, Nínive Clements Calegari learned firsthand, and often the hard way, that kids need one-on-one feedback to improve their writing -- a fact that large classes, constant lesson planning, and myriad administrative responsibilities get in the way of, no matter how determined the educator is.
Rather than give up her conviction, Calegari gave up her role as a teacher in what she calls "the intestines" of the classroom, helping create an organization to offer the kind of tutoring the practice of writing requires. These days, Calegari (a member of GLEF's National Advisory Board) facilitates one-to-one feedback for thousands of student writers and their teachers as head of San Francisco's 826 Valencia, the innovative writing center she helped friend and author Dave Eggers launch at that address in April 2002. She also leads the 826 National network, with chapters in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Chicago; Los Angeles; New York City; and Seattle.
The nonprofit centers provide students ages 6 - 18 with assorted free services and programs: after-school, drop-in tutoring, English-language-learning resources (at selected locations), zine and book publishing, and workshops on writing student newspapers, plays, and college-admissions essays. They recruit legions of skilled community volunteers -- 1,200 in San Francisco alone -- to supply much of the personal attention on which youngsters thrive.
"Dave understood there was a group of people who could be put to work," Calegari says, ticking off a lengthy list of 826 volunteers that includes writers, illustrators, business writers, and marketing people, among others. Actor Robin Williams wrote the foreword for a collection of San Francisco students' stories and myths; Ira Glass, creator of the Chicago Public Radio (and now Showtime cable-television) program This American Life, serves on the Chicago chapter's board of directors.
The writing centers lure constituents with clever, head-turning storefronts unique to their locales: New York's Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co., Seattle's Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co., and San Francisco's Pirate Store, which sells peglegs and glass eyes. Retail sales generate revenue for the centers, which do their own fund raising and grant writing. (Calegari and 826 National supply the curriculum framework.) This year, 826 National will devote roughly $3 million to supporting students. Its programs reached more than 15,000 students last year, Calegari estimates, and the numbers likely will increase when a chapter opens in Boston this fall.
Beyond the storefronts, 826 staff and recruits take a light-hearted approach to the serious work of writing. For Storytelling and Bookmaking, a popular field trip, visiting classes write a book that's professionally illustrated right before their eyes -- all within two hours. "At 826, we use play as a tool to engage students," says Calegari, but "it's all rigorous -- completely academic."
She ensures it. Armed with a master's degree in teaching and curriculum from Harvard University, Calegari primarily taught in public high schools for eight years -- in Cambridge, in California's affluent Marin County, and at a fledgling charter school in her native San Francisco. She was teaching at a private school in Cuernavaca -- her Mexican mother's hometown -- when Eggers called with his idea for a writing center. "That was the unbelievable blessing," says Calegari, who adds that she had been looking to move into teacher support and training.
All the 826 centers will serve any students who come in, but they reach out to schools with high numbers of low-income students. At a teacher's request, the organization will deploy groups of volunteers to classrooms for special projects, such as student newspapers or oral histories. Calegari recently led a team that spent several days advising juniors and seniors in a high school lit class for a collection of children's stories 826 will publish.
"Getting someone to sit down with you and have a dialogue is much more beneficial than having a teacher just correct a paper -- and that could take two weeks," says that class's grateful instructor, Guilan Sheykhzadeh, a multigrade English teacher at San Francisco's Raoul Wallenberg Traditional High School. En masse, she adds, the volunteers "quickly home in on problems."
Under Calegari's direction, 826 Valencia also acted on one of Dave Eggers's ideas: a teacher-of-the-month award that comes with a $1,500 award -- and the stipulation that the money can't be spent on classroom supplies. "It's not enough money, but it's symbolic," says Calegari, who with Eggers and Daniel Moulthrop cowrote Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers. At 826, "we honor teachers' professionalism, their voice, their work," Calegari says. "It's the norm here."