Literacy Week 4

In Chapter 3 of Writing Essentials, Routman encourages teachers to explore themselves as writers and think about their own writing experience. While reading this chapter I started to reflect my own experiences as a writer. When I was in elementary school I used to love writing, I remember writing chapter books about the Saved By the Bell TV characters in my own spare time. (I actually still have them saved) but then somehow as I got older, writing became less fun and more of a struggle. Creative writing turned into research writing, and instead of our works of writing being celebrated, they were marked up with red ink and critiqued. I remember I began to get anxiety when I turned in my papers (especially during college) because it seemed that every teacher or professor I had expected something different from my writing, and had no hesitations critiquing my work. While some of their critiques were helpful, it also broke down my confidence and instead of being the confident creative writer I was when I was young, I became the anxious writer who would visit the writing center for every paper, and would hold my breath when receiving my grade back from that paper.

In the first few chapters of Writing Essentials, Routman encourages teachers to celebrate student's work, and to also let the students see thier teacher struggle with writing, or watch them in the writing process. In Chapter 3, Routman poses a few questions that will help teachers show their students how they go through the writing process, so that their students may be able to become better writers by seeing how others cope with things such as writers block, or creating ideas. One of the questions for teachers to reflect on is the what exactly do you do to plan, to get started, to continue when you get stuck, and to complete your piece? Since I have anxiety when it comes to writing work that is going to be turned in, I have to brainstorm and almost have an epiphany of what I am going to write about. I know that sounds kind of silly, so I am going to give an example of this, and this would also be an example I might tell my students if I was teaching a middle school writing class, (I would not use this with my second graders). When I was applying to Education Programs the applications required personal essays, and one of them was basically the question of "Why do you want to teach?" I thought long and hard about what I was going to write, and was stuck on how to put into words my thoughts. Then one night at around 3 am, I woke and it came to me! I was going to call the personal essay The Game of Life and I was going to talk about how when I was young and played Milton Bradley's The Game of Life, I would always cheat and steal the teacher card as my profession. Then as I got older I realized that in my real "game of life" that I wanted to teach, and it was something that I had known all about myself since I was little. This is the basic idea that came to me in my sleep and of course I woke up, grabbed and pencil and pen and wrote down everything that had come to my mind during that time. Then I went back to bed and over the course of the next couple of weeks, when I would be doing my daily runs around Greenlake or I was at the gym, I would focus on how I was going to write the rest of this paper. Running for me is a way that I can brainstorm my thoughts for papers, and most of the papers I have written I have developed during my morning runs.

I realize that some of my students may think this is weird that I randomly think about my paper's topics and have ideas come to me while I am working out, but these are times for me when I am able to reflect and think about those kinds of things. I think that this may be helpful to some students who think about school as they are going to bed, and they can maybe start to make it a habit of reflecting on their writing or homework before they go to bed. People brainstorm ideas in all different ways. Once I have brainstormed my ideas I like to bounce them off of my friends, family, and fellow students to see if my ideas are going in the right direction (since I do have anxiety about my ideas being way off base). I think that students should recognize that they can help each other with ideas about their writing and maybe they can inspire one another to be better writers and help each other a long the way. I do realize that sometimes having partners to bounce ideas off of could stump creativity, but I'd like to encourage my students to be positive to others ideas and hopefully this would not be an issue.

Another question posed by Routman to consider is the writing process. I am the type of writer that needs to be inspired first, and I try to get my rough draft down on paper and then leave it for a few hours/days depending on my deadline. I like to continually come back to my writing and revise and edit it. I also find that I get some of my best writing done in the early morning when I get up, and that I am a useless writer at night. I think that it is important to encourage my students that if they are stuck when they are writing to stop and come back to their work, and to have others look over their paper for mistakes that they may have missed in their writing, but to not get discouraged if they do try to critique their papers as well.

I think that in order for teachers to be able to teach writing to their students that they must first reflect on how they are as a writer, what worked for them when they were in school, and what did not. I think it is important to emphasize that writing for some people can be difficult and that it is a very personal process for each person does, meaning that each person has an individual process or struggle they must go through as a writer. I think it is important to celebrate student's work, and for the teacher to let the students how they generate ideas and let them know that writing is a struggle for everyone, even their teacher whom they most likely see as an expert in the area of writing.