Teaching (and learning) to Write

Week Four. Challenge Writing Tasks. Drafts pictured above. Slightly less drafty drafts typed below. I. With “Here’s What ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ Can Teach You About Life”  as a mentor text, here’s my own “Five Things A Semester of College as an English Education Major Can Teach You About Life.” In the wise words of Theodore Roosevelt, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” You will never be the very best at everything, or maybe not even the very best at anything. You’ll exhaust yourself trying. You have to be the very best you. You have your own thing going for you. Don’t compare that to what someone else has going for them- you may lose sight of your own abilities by lusting for theirs. It goes the other way, too- you never know who’s wishing they had what you have. I am a very excitable person. I always find myself watching these beautifully calm people accomplish amazing things because of their confident composure. I think, wow, it must be so g...

Week Three. "Where does my writing take place in my teaching?" I've decided I'm sticking with this whole jungle metaphor because the classroom really is a wild, exciting adventure and, perhaps more relevant at this moment, I’m finding myself exploring and navigating the jungle of my own ideas and expectations. Draft pictured above. Slightly less drafty draft below. It's hard not to see the value of writing with my students (even if part of me, loudly fussing " but I don't wanna write, I hate writing," tries to ignore the studies and the stories). After seeing how significant "being a teacher who writes" really is, I have a responsibility to be a teacher who writes. However, I don't yet know what that means for me.  The theory is invaluable because it's a treasure chest from which I can grab the ideas and methods that sparkle for me. In those pedagogical gems, I find brilliant ideas that I couldn't have produc...

Week Three. Challenge writing tasks. (Who knew that before the jungle of the classroom, there would be the jungle of me?) Drafts pictured above. Slightly less drafty drafts typed below. Six Word Memoirs    It wasn't planned, but that's okay. 𓅬 She listened. That changed absolutely everything. 𓅬 When he told me, I understood. 𓅬 I made something with that experience. 𓅬 He left me. I met me. 𓅬 Yes, I still miss what was. 𓅬 "Here I am!" I thought. "Finally." 𓅬 Even my dad cried that day. 𓅬 "It'll be okay." And it was. 𓅬 I am where I should be. 𓅬 And then I understood their love. 𓅬 Modeled on Wallace Stevens's  "ThirteenWays of Looking at a Blackbird," my own "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Person." I. Among the multitude of faces. the only thing I see is their gaze. II. I was of a mind, as so many are, to look somewhere, someone, easier. III. The...

A letter to Penny Kittle, teacher and author. Dear Mrs. Kittle, Thank you for sharing your experiences as a teacher and a writer (and therefore as a student). When you write about “the series of decisions [you] make each day to tune instruction to the needs of a particular group of personalities and keep all moving forward in their work” (Kittle 63), I think of three other brilliant quotes I cherish:  "The secret in education lies in respecting the student” (Ralph Waldo Emerson), "If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn" (Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Estrada), and “Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners” (John Holt). As fellow teacher and author H. Richard Milner IV explains in his book, learning can only take place when students allow teachers to teach them (53). Therefore, when you explain that a successful classroom begins with acknowledging the student’s personalities, I w...

Welcome to "Teaching (and learning) to Write," the electronic portion of my reflections for the English Education course "Teaching Writing." I anticipate that it'll be a jungle out there in the middle school classroom, both wild and beautiful. That being said, I want to start this jungle-y looking blog with the following thought from an unknown author:  You gotta nourish to flourish. Here's to nourishing who I am as a writer and a teacher so I can flourish in the classroom as both student and teacher.