Day 3 Blog: Community & Seeing Others Write

Creating a Community of Writers in the Classroom

When it comes to creating a community of writers, there is no perfect formula.

Write Now

• You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.

Mimic the Masters

• LOL at the fact that they have never seen a 5 paragraph essay in other pieces of writing – talk about the easiness of the format to grade. I don’t think it matters as much that the writing is there.
• I’ve heard of the skirt theory – originally from a nun. Which is infinitely funnier.

Join the Fun

• My students always (1^st period is dead and don’t jump at the opportunity though) want to hear my writing when we do a 10 minute free write.

Put in, Coach

• Grade in chunks.
• I resonated with the sports metaphor and it totally makes sense.
• Asking the kids to choose one piece of the many pieces they wrote and develop it.

No Time Like the Present

• Students need to develop writing now – it will be useful for the future.

The Right to See Others Write

Okay – the beginning is bags (aka totes, aka hundo aka 100%) me. Megan made me put that in there. “Isn’t ‘figuring it out’ part of what school is supposed to be about?” This was me as a competitive student, not understanding why my classmates just didn’t get it? I talked in a previous post about being able to write with the professor/teacher in mind and navigating their style of teaching and/or curriculum to get that desired A. I thought I had school figured out. I was wrong. There is much more to education than the A. I just learned to improve myself by myself – I’m sure I had a lot of help along the way – I know I did.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, modeling is worth a thousand pictures.

I really like the asking for topics from students, narrowing it down, explaining why you would choose it and how it relates to your life. It explains how you get started which is such a big hurdle for many students.

Good modeling is about strategies and behaviors.

Instead of interrogating right off the bat…

The above quote reminds me of a joke/story told by Mitch Hedberg. He was doing a radio interview, walks into the booth, puts on the headphones and the host asks him, “So who are you?” Mitch thinks to himself, “Whoa, did I walk into the right radio station or is this guy just real deep?” I do not want to make the students feel uncomfortable so on the first days of school (for sure in the first week), I do a historical investigation of artifacts. These artifacts are from my life and they try to piece together the information and figure out who I am as a person. Then we also do a Kahoot which is a series of questions about me and some of my interests.

It is helpful to see how someone else makes the leap from one sentence or thought or paragraph to another.

To quote an esteemed colleague of mine, “I loooooooooove a connection.” I appreciate when writers, speakers, comedians, storytellers become self-referential or make connections to aforementioned piece (most of the time the reader might have thought it was a throw-away line).

Giving the audience something to listen for will help in sharing and revising.

Model that for me Annie. Oh, how I wish you could.

Had I known how brief childhood is, I’d have looked closer.

Too often we overlook these practices because we may think, “Oh, they know that – everyone knows that.”