subject: Writing That Excites And Educates: A Class Novel [print this page] Snapshot: May of my students' senior yearSnapshot: May of my students' senior year. They are compiling their final portfolios, the last of the seven they have done since sixth grade. Each year, there are slight variations to keep this final reflection process new and engaging, but the senior project is different. Rather than creating a portfolio to hand to the teacher to read, seniors compile their favorite writings from any class in any year of high school and write reflections about them.
What do I see going into many of these portfolios each spring? What do seniors choose as one of their best writing memories from all of high school? Small brightly colored books they wrote in ninth grade. They laugh as they reread their and their friends' chapters, talking all the while about how fun it was to write Clearance MBT Shoes these novels. I smile as I listen because I am hearing students talk about how much they enjoyed writing, and I know how much they also learned about the craft of composition.
Our ninth-grade English course is Introduction to Genres. The course's essential questions are directed at students' writing skills: What do we learn from the "masters" about how to write well? How can you use these tools to make your writing "masterful"? We have many students join our school as ninth graders, so the writing-intensive focus of this course helps those who need it to "catch up" to the writing comfort our students develop in lower and middle school. This is a tricky propositioncrafting a class that both challenges and encourages experienced and newer writers.
As the ninth-grade English teacher, I knew I needed to start the year off right. Syrene Forsman's words in Roots in the Sawdust: Writing to Learn Across the Disciplines played in my head: "I have to remember that 'learning' is allowing, not forbidding, a newly discovered rock to be fitted into the wall, the construct, of the student's reality. Learning may require moving some older rocks around, or even out of the wall. Teachers can't forcibly pile a semester's worth of new rocks into their students' minds. Each mind picks through the rocks, quickly or slowly, to rebuild or enlarge the structure that is that person's image of the world". How could I help each student continue to build her or his own writing wall?
I had spent the summer of 1997 participating in the Capital Writing Project, the Richmond, Virginia, chapter of the National Writing Project. My mind was filled with authentic writing experiences of my own as well as goals for students' writing:
Practice more studying and mimicking of MBT Chapa authors to develop my students' individual writing voices
Make writing a more meaningful process by having audiences other than me, the teacher
Use more effective peer revision
Overriding all of these goals was the most important one of all. I had just spent a fabulous summer rediscovering myself as a writer and the joy I find in writing. I wanted my students to experience writing as a joy, too.
