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Each September, teachers are welcomed back to school with new initiatives that encourage us to reshape or even scrap what we have done in the past.  And, no matter how promising these initiatives might sound, we must confess that they often struck self-doubt and fear in our hearts.  That is, until we began teaching memoir twelve years ago. From that point, nothing any consultant espoused fazed us because we knew that under the umbrella of memoir, we were constantly addressing educational issues past, present, and future:

Literacy
When issues of literacy are raised, we know that in memoir students learn to “read” their most difficult text, the text of self.  By writing about themselves, they are able to read and understand the texts of others, both fiction and non-fiction.  By making connections between their lives and those of others, they are able to understand themselves and improve their critical reasoning and writing skills.  Maxine Hong Kingston’s complex text  Woman Warrior: A Girlhood Among Ghosts becomes accessible and relevant when students write parallel stories about their ghosts.  Their rituals of life take on new poignancy when read against Mitch Albom’s in Tuesdays with Morrie.  Suddenly their rituals, their “dinners with grandma” and “golf lessons with Dud” have meaning when written using Albom’s structure and metaphor. 
  
Differentiated Instruction
Differentiated instruction suggests that a successful classroom is student centered.  What a student learns, how it is learned, and how that learning is demonstrated must match the student’s readiness, interests and learning style. This has natural connections to memoir. For example, students select individual memoirs to read that appeal to their interests/abilities; an artist might select a graphic memoir like Persepolis; a foodie Tender at the Bone; a history buff Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight or A Long Way Gone. The possibilities are endless. As students read these published memoirs, they make connections with their own lives and stories; hence, their own experiences frame the curriculum. Likewise, when they write their own memoir pieces, they find the prose or poem models that best match their stories/experiences/writing ability. They might write a poem “Where I’m From” to delineate the important people, places and events of their life; they might write a prose “games” piece about a time they played the game Sorry or they might use the game metaphorically and write about a time they were or were not "sorry." Since memoir provides so many options for students to make connections between texts and their own lives, it certainly aligns with the philosophy of differentiated instruction; it tailors the education to meet the student rather than tailor the student to match the curriculum.

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