Blog Post Assignment #3: All Writing Springs From Something to Say

I just finished binge-reading the first five chapters of Penny Kittle's "Write Beside Them," and I can't believe I've waited so long to read this book (though it doesn't help that it's so hard to get your hands on - thanks, Amazon). I wish I had been given this book before I started teaching writing to my kids at the tutoring center. I feel like I have been perpetuating the problem that Kittle references when she talks about how standardized testing encourages learning writing skills, or all skills for that matter, on a superficial level. The tutoring center where I work is focused on test scores and sales, and emphasizes Kittle's thought that this kind of culture only has the product in mind, instead of getting the kids to learn to use the whole process to give form to thoughts, ideas, stories, etc.

I connected with so much of what Kittle wrote about, from her initial hesitation to sit down and write, to her ideas about being authentic with your students so that everyone is learning together. As I mentioned earlier, I didn't really consider myself a writer. But Kittle's words gave me encouragement: it's not about being a writer, it's about being a person who is trying to write. Our kids need to see the process, and see us going through the process with them, to show them how to work through it to get a narrative on paper. Our own insecurities can be used to empower our kids, and that is enough to get me to write with them. I often felt disconnected from the assignments that I was told to give my students, mostly SAT-style essays or overly-guided literary analysis, and a lot of that was not having worked through the assignment with them. Granted, it was also because I disagreed with the way I was being told to teach - but that's a thought for another blog. Kittle needed to do the writing to know what to teach, and that's definitely something I know will help me with my students.

I'm currently working with a few students on writing, and I plan to have them start writing notebooks immediately. I think that the opportunity it provides for rehearsing, a space to just think about your writing, is something that could really benefit them. And if I can get them to expect to write in this notebook each time we meet, hopefully that will get them to think about their writing ahead of time like Kittle's students. I love that Kittle included so many examples of quick writes, as I can apply those directly to my classroom. The most important concept that I've taken from the reading so far is to just start writing and keep writing.

"I think with any writing, you just have to start." 

- Penny Kittle

My biggest takeaway from the Elinor Fuchs article is that reading a play is unlike other reading. We need to look at the world of the play as something separate from our own, and consider all of the elements of that world before event starting to think about the characters. According to Fuchs, when consider the world, or planet, of a play, we have to recognize that it is not something that can fit neatly into our own experience. With this in mind, I took on the task of reading The Humans. Admittedly, I did not go into this reading with much enthusiasm. I share Jaime's thoughts on reading plays, but went into it with Fuchs' advice in mind. Maybe it's just this play, or maybe it's that I haven't read a play since high school and I'm unfairly basing my opinion off of a struggle to get through Shakespeare, but reading The Humans was not terrible. I was actually drawn in and didn't put it down. I did exactly the opposite of what Fuchs' advocated, I was drawn in by the characters and their realness. Real life is messy, and hard, and beautiful, and the conversations jumped off of the pages for me because they reflected real life.