English Classes

There have been many positive classroom structures that included writing in my career as a student, but there have been many negative as well. The positive experiences have helped me become a better writer through the use of real and meaningful writing lessons. I remember learning that I enjoy writing when I was in seventh grade. The teacher had us keep a journal and would use the free-writing strategy quite often. I thought it was so cool when she told the class we could write, “I don’t know what to write”, as many times as we needed to. I think this is the first “writing-as-process” (Nagin, 36) strategy that I encountered. I remember the teacher explaining that as long as we just keep on writing something will come to us. She said that many writers write junk first and that junk is what usually springs the good stuff out. That made me believe that I did not have to be the best writer at first. Throughout the years I kept believing that and mastered the game of English class grades. The other eye opening experience I had in a language arts classroom setting was in college. It was in my poetry class. I had never had to write so much and share it all with the rest of class. It was the first time I had ever shared my poetry with anyone that gave me any feedback. It made the writing real. The structure of the class was based on writing, revising, and critiquing. We also had to model many of the poems we were reading and create our own using a technique we found in the poems we read. I learned more about poetry by copying others and also learned about my own writing and developing by hearing feedback from others. It was a win-win situation.

Many experiences that I encountered separated writing from learning and clouded my enjoyment of language. Throughout all of my high school English classes, we had D.O.L. also known as daily oral language. The teacher would put sentences on the overhead that had grammatical errors and the students were supposed to correct them. I did not care about that assignment. It separated teaching grammar from learning anything else. All that taught us was how to underline a letter that needed to be capitalized and properly add punctuation in non-relevant unrelated situations. Writing is supposed to flow, but this daily oral language approach separated the grammar from the writing process. It should be included. I also had very pointless papers and essays that did not create any uniformity with the writing to learn or learning to write process. My learning to write process was separate from learning and vice-versa unlike what Nagin writes about in his book Because Writing Matters. It was pretty much the opposite throughout much of the experiences I encountered unfortunately.