Being a Writing Teacher

One thing that scares me about being a writing teacher is scoring the creative minds in the classroom. I know that is one of the biggest things I will struggle with when I start teaching, besides classroom management. I want my students to get real feedback on their writing and in a way that makes them learn from their mistakes. I must admit that the 6-traits of writing will help make this process of grading a writing piece much easier. Now I can have a specific and concrete checklist for students to check their own work and have specific ways to respond as well. Once I create a rubric based off of the 6-traits of writing, then I shall not struggle with questioning what I am scoring and how to explain it to the students. A rubric will also help eliminate personal preferences in writing and make me double check my writing bias. Many students refer to page numbers and appearance for a good paper but should be focusing on ideas and details. Sometimes longer is not better. In fact, in drafting, we should be eliminating the non-important stuff while enhancing the important details. Sometimes that makes a piece shorter, but as long as it follows the rubric it will be OK.

sample of me

The Landscape of Sickened Security

My gritty nails seize the barbed fence

Almost snapped apart like fish line

tempting to catch your siege and

cast it into the corroded cesspool.

The tipsy tremulous twine

unable to grasp the weight,

of plastic cards and Mercedes keys,

powdered glass and pip thieves,

bubble baggies and crack teeth.

My future cannot mend the cartilage

hardened like clay molded into a porcelain doll

with past parties gnawing on my bones.

My mucky limb extends, quivering

stretching to reach and conquer

summit’s intoxicating effect.

Ready to climb sunken valleys

and crawl over fallen trees

that clasp on and drag.

I should carve roots into soil

before the first frozen wind

twirls the last brown leaf.

Heres What I Have to Say About the 6-traits of Writing

The only way that we can assess students on writing is by being very specific about what we expect of them. The 6-trait writing tool is the perfect way to attack those specifics. Many teachers I learned from assessed my writing on grammar and punctuation more than on what I was trying to say. Sometimes I would just ramble on to achieve the length of requirement but not really say much at all. As long as I wrote in complete sentences, had the correct spelling, grammar and punctuation, then I was set for an A in the class. The entire reason many of us can relate to this same experience is because grammar and punctuation are the rules to writing and are easier to assess without a rubric. Many teachers assume that the ideas will come through the correct grammatical use. Yet, when students get a paper back with red ink all over it they feel defeated. There were very few times when I was told that I had something important to say or that I should expand on a wonderful idea I came up with. How can a student get empowered to write if they are not praised about what they have to say? We need to consider other things besides writing conventions like ideas and voice. According to Vicki Spandel, students write to find their voice so that is the most important trait in writing that we as teachers need to focus on developing in our writing assignments.

When Spandel discusses the idea of prompt writing I can’t help but think back to my years of pre-developed ideas. I had a teacher that was the master of prompt writing and used it frequently. In class she would start the ideas to write about in our journals and we would expand and develop the details. It was very informal writing and she told us not to worry about the conventions, just the ideas. That helped my mind get more creative and worry more about the voice and ideas than the boring conventions. I have read many students’ papers that follow all of the conventions but do not have a creative voice or anything important to say. Unfortunately though, these kids sore through school because they can follow the rules. We need to use this theory of the 6-traits to create rules for the most important aspects of writing; the ideas behind it all.

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.

My Autobiography as a Writer

I do not consider myself a good writer; however, I have gotten better over the years. I have found that the more I read, the more I want to be a better writer and improve my vocabulary and sentence structure creativity. I was always interested in writing since I was young before I could even read or understand what it meant to write letters on a page. Now I do not have time to write freely as much as I used to but look forward to the day when I can.

As a child, I kept a diary. I used to write down the experiences that had the biggest impact on my emotions or that made me feel better about myself. I would reflect what happened in the events and how it made me feel. Unfortunately, though, most of my journal entries were about the boys I had a crush on and how we interacted. As I got older, my journal entries were a little farther between the dates and consisted of new theories about myself and my resolutions to improve who I was.

I started writing poetry in junior high. This was the year when writing was my way of expressing my inner turmoil of my life at home and who I wanted to be at school. Many of my poems were expressing how I wanted more freedom and felt trapped by all of the rules my stepmother imposed. At the same time, I read a lot of Emily Dickenson and felt that my poems had a dark side of loneliness like much of her poetry. I did not want to be like everybody else and felt frustrations when the society did not support who I wanted to be. I still catch myself writing poems that reflect my frustrations with society.

There have been a few teachers in my life that have truly helped me become a better writer. The first teacher that encouraged me to just write my thoughts so I can have them on paper to turn back to was my seventh grade English teacher. She encouraged us to free write in a journal in class for five minutes every once in a while. She gave us topics to free write about and encouraged us to write “I don’t know what to write”, as many times as we needed to until we found something to say within those five minutes. I loved it. Now I catch myself free-writing for almost every paper I write. There was not a specific teacher in high school that helped with my writing but that is when I started to gain confidence in my academic writing versus creative writing. Ninth grade was the year I remember mastering the five part essay. My essays were used as examples on the over-head projector for other students to follow. I felt confident when I heard the teacher mentioning everything I did correctly to show the students how an essay was supposed to look. It wasn’t until I got to college when I found out that my organization and grammar needed some work. In my first college English course, my papers were given back to me with tons of red ink corrections. In fact, one of my papers was on the over-head projector as an example of something not to do. All of a sudden, I lost all confidence in my academic writing. I could not figure out how I could go from being a good example to a bad example. A couple semesters later, an education teacher took some time to go through a paper with me and help me figure out what I was doing wrong. She helped me realize I needed to work on organizing my thoughts better. At first, I did not want to take her advice because I was upset that she felt she needed to tell me how to write a better paper. Then I realized that I would feel better about my writing if I made a few changes in my approach and organized my thoughts differently. I still find that I have so much to say floating around in my head and can’t seem to type fast enough o say it all. I think that is why I free write before I attempt any academic writing now.

23 things on a stick

I knew the basics of many of the things listed on this list but I had never heard of Library Thing. This is a social networking technique to discuss books you read with other people and also get recommendations based on what you have read before. I thought it was interesting because there have been many times I have read a book for pleasure and wanted to thoroughly discuss it. Unfortunately though, many of my friends do not read much so it will be enlightening to discuss portions of books with others. This would be great to incorporate into the classroom as a yearlong activity. Students can find other books that relate to the topics they like to read about and discuss it with others when they are not in the classroom.

Poetry Webquest

I participated in the poetry webquest from our reading in “Teaching Media Literacy”. The webquest takes you on a journey through the past, present, and future stages of your life. It helps you gather images and details to represent in specific poems. As you look into those different aspects of your life you incorporate the details and imagery into the poem structure. Then by modeling after another poet for a specific format you come to create a masterpiece. The poems that this site uses to offer templates are: Fifteen, where I’m From, I Am, Just a Daydream, and Dreams Deferred.

I thought this site was confusing as first. The first task did not seem to explain the expectations very clear. Then I discovered the templates, worksheets, and questions that were aligned with each task and thought that made it very clear. I had a ton of fun writing about different periods in my life and thinking poetically about it. I found that my dad and his Harley always seem to find a way into my past and that I enjoy describing his bike using words like, glimmer, shimmer, shiny, bright, anything that reveals the reflection from the sunlight in the summer off the brand new chrome all over the bike. I really enjoyed writing a poem and then finding a piece of art work that goes along with it. I am an art teacher currently and have always thought literacy and art go hand in hand and thought that was a fantastic way to mingle the two together.

I would love to incorporate a web quest into my lesson plans. I would want the web quest to be based on a thematic unit where students will have to do more researching. I was thinking possibly having a webquest for the Harlem Renaissance poets and have them research aspects of the time period and connect the two together.
This would give the students control of what they want to learn about the Harlem Renaissance and give them ownership of their learning.