“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” ― Stephen King

Week Five.

Challenge Writing Tasks.

The title for this week’s writing comes from Stephen King, but I believe that Katherine Bomer would heartily agree, as she says that reading “teach[es] us how words can look and sound on the page, and most often, [reading] can offer up surprising differences from the staid old notions of good writing that we picked up in our own schooling… the point is to read so that we can teach with insider knowledge our lessons about both reading and writing” (76).

Task 1.

Part one of Task 1 is the "Hello it's me" letter. Part two of Task 1 is a combination of observation, interview, and writing territory (inspired by the writing tasks offered).

These entries didn't lend themselves to keyboard revision; I think these belong on paper. 

Immediately below are the entries from my GED students (taken from the right page pictured above) answering some questions on writing introduced by my mentor teacher to the not-so-different emerging writers of the placement school.

Task 2.

Below is a picture of my notes for a reflection on readings from Katherine Bomer's book, 

Hidden Gems, with regard to the placement school classroom. Typed below the picture is the draft those notes became. (The numbers scattered like a hot mess are the page numbers from the reading relevant to the idea they crowd beside.)

My mentor teacher and the author Bomer seem largely in agreement regarding how a classroom of writers should function. The students, of course, don’t know this. They just know that writing is hard and think that some of them “suck at it” (although I haven’t seen any truly “sucky” writers yet, our mentor teacher assures us that they’re there), and as middle schoolers, they’re not looking much further than that. But, to my excitement, they’re all willing to write, so we can begin to see how Bomer’s theory looks in the experienced classroom.

Bomer and my mentor teacher (and me, too!) think that a conversation about student writing begins with “what’s good.” (This is how I run my GED classroom- I find what’s good before I start to show how their writing should better play the game of the GED test, and I wonder how much that contributes, if it contributes, to some of the responses in the writing task above. After reading Bomer, I’m starting to talk about my student’s writing in a way that acknowledges their “specific writing gifts” (Bomer 16). It was so much fun seeing how talking about their sentences and ideas like Bomer does just makes their faces shine! “I can write?!” they ask in joyful uncertainty. But I digress.) The focus isn’t correction, isn’t the “red pen [marking] all over it” (Bomer 16), but instead, because “our responses to young people learning to write matter more than we can ever know” (Bomer 17), the focus is finding what’s good, giving some validation, and then and only then, in the words of my mentor teacher, “making it suck less.”

But part of the answer to making writing suck less isn’t easily forced into the public-school classroom. As Kittle and Bomer and many other researchers and teachers of writing have found (and likely knew all along), writing is better when it feels real and relevant. To this end, my mentor teacher shows an invested awareness of what each student cares about. (“It’s so hard to get [student name] to see anything other than dirt bikes wooshing across his brain,” she tells me of a student I had just finished workshopping with. He wrote well and never mentioned dirt bikes, but I have a hunch as the months march on, knowing his passion for dirt bikes may prove useful in making a connection and keeping him motivated.) But, as Bomer acknowledges, student writers will “read and write texts for different readers and purposes” (60). We can help them almost enjoy trudging through academic writing by using “joyful and jaunty words” (Bomer 85) to discuss their writing, words that come from their real worlds of movies and video games, and create a discussion on their writing together (Bomer 87). I think that shared investment is where we’ll find writing maybe doesn’t “totally suck.”

And this begins where everything in school should begin- with meeting the student where they are.

Bomer, Katherine. Hidden Gems: Naming and Teaching from the Brilliance in Every Student's Writing. Heinemann, 2010.