Student Voices: Lessons on writing, collaboration, and empathy

Note: The author of this article is coauthor of 30 Days to Empathy (2013), a book written with his teacher and 29 classmates in Honors Interdisciplinary Writing class at Chicago’s Whitney Young Magnet High School. Teacher Jay C. Rehak said he had mulled over the idea for a class-written novel for years before springing it on his students in fall 2012. Each student wrote a chapter about a day in the life of fictionalized character Jake Holomann that was based in part on their own lives. The book is available through Amazon.com.

Rehak wrote the book’s first and last chapters. “I was trying to get them first of all to learn the power of self-expression. Then I was trying to get them to understand the power of collaboration; I was trying to improve their writing skills,” Rehak said of the book project that won a Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association. “It was an exercise in empathy, trying to get them to have a sense of each other.”

Student author Zachary Deitz’s chapter, “Mr. Popular,” confronted the notion of how quiet and brainy Jake Holomann might feel in his shoes, a popular student on the swim team who also plays saxophone in the school band. Here, Zach tells about his involvement in the total project.