Writer's Workshop

After school today we had a training about teaching students to write. Most of the talk was about demonstrating the skill in front of the class so the kids could actually see how it happens. The woman also wanted to stress the fact that writing is not formulaic.

For years people have taught children to write by telling them that they have to have five sentences per paragraph. That there has to be four paragraphs. Writing like this did help kids get started but it was never taken past that point. Children are barely ever allowed to just write about their lives.

We tell them to write but we don't let them just do it. Even for the assessments that I have to give them for this school district is prompt driven. The last one was, Write about the best gift you have ever received.

I thought that my students would do really well with this one. I was shocked when I read their work and found that most of them had barely passed. They answered the questions but did not do a good job writing. They didn't add details, vivid verbs or honestly, put much thought into it. They just answered the question.

I know that I was not comfortable writing for most of my life. I took a great writing workshop about four years ago and it opened the door for me. I didn't share what I wrote except inside the classroom and it's now lost in an ocean of moving boxes. Even this blog was difficult when I first started.

I was never good at journal writing. I was never taught to just pick one thing and write about that. Add detail, background and give it life. My journal entries are all pretty much the same, "Today was boring and I don't have anything to write about."

The posts here that I get the most feedback on are either about funny little things that happen in my life, usually involving poop of some sort or the ones where I am philosophical. These posts are the ones that usually happen when I am least thinking about writing and just trying to tell a story or just get my feelings out.

I now feel like a writer. I tell the kids at school that I am a writer and that I spend time writing everyday. They have no idea that it is on a blog because frankly I do not want them to know.

Sometimes that can be the hardest part about my writing. When something happy, funny or strange happens to me, I think about writing it here. There are times that I catch myself, almost telling someone at work that I'm going to blog about this or that I blog about such and such last night. Being a writer but not admitting it to anyone.

I want my students to reach the point where they are writers. I do not want them to go for so much of their life and not be able to share their ideas.

I just wish that I could do a better job of conveying that to them.