Passion Leads to Writing*

Before I start, the star on the titles means that this post is in repsonse to a class assignment! ( Thanks Margot for the idea!)

When I read the first five chapters of Katie Wood Ray’s book, I found myself going back and re-reading important sections. She crammed so much USEFUL content in each of her chapters. I found myself trying to remember everything before I even got to this blog. For example, Who knew that there was a difference between writing workshop and the writing process? . I have always heard those terms in and out of classrooms but I had never stopped to think about their actual definitions. It makes sense though. The writing process is having where students take a piece of writing and go through the necessary steps such as prewriting, drafting, revision, editing, and publication in order to complete a piece of writing, whereas the writing workshop is more of an open-ended exploration of writing itself. The way I like to think about it is through this analogy: The writing process is to traditional teaching as Writing Workshop is to Inquiry-Based Teaching. This is because in Writing Workshop students are able to take writing into their own hands by asking questions, researching answers, scrapping drafts, start over, publish, etc. Basically they students can write without pressure. It makes me wonder why we as teachers tell kids “ Okay you have 40 minutes to write, I want you to spend 10 minutes pre-writing, 20 minutes writing, and the last 10 minutes editing. DO NOT go on to the next step until I have given you the 10 minute ‘okay’ to move on.” That is not writing in the real world. Aren’t we supposed to do our students a favor and PREPARE them for the real world? What author do you know ( if you know any) sits down and puts time limits on their creative writing piece. Yes they may have deadlines but majority of the time a writer writes, takes breaks, scratches an idea, writes some more, goes on a walk for inspiration, leaves the work, and comes back to the work later. Ir we truly want our kids to be a writer then we need to treat them like one and give them the “as close to real-life” as possible writing atmosphere.

One of the ideas that Ray stated that I am in full agreement with was “One of the main goals teachers have is to help students find good reasons to write. These teachers feel that nothing else matters if students aren’t finding writing projects in which they can become deeply involved.” If a child is not interested in something, then how is he or she going to be passionate on writing about that topic? When I was in fourth grade, we had to write a report project on another county. I REALLY wanted to write my report on Spain because ever since I was four when my dad taught me how to count to 10 in Spanish, I loved Spanish and Spain. Well, I was ready to tell my teacher that my report was going to be on Spain however she then put a stipulation on our writing country of choice. It had to be a country where our ancestors were from. I was very sad. That night I must have asked my mom and dad a hundred times if they were absolutely sure no one from our family came from Spain. I even then started asking about other countries such as Mexico but to no avail, none of my ancestors came from there. The next day, I wanted to lie to my teacher and say my great great great grandmother came from Spain but I knew I just couldn’t lie. I decided I would settle on doing my writing report over Germany because it was close to Spain and I did actually have ancestors from there. However my teacher then told me that I couldn’t do my writing report on Germany because Jacob was doing his on Germany. UGH! So frustrating. We would both write about different things so what did it matter? I ended up having to do my report on Lebanon. Don’t get me wrong, Lebanon is a nice country… I guess.. but I wasn’t passionate about it. I ended up completing the writing report assignment however to this day I cannot tell you one single thing about Lebanon. The lack of passion led to an almost non-existent involvement in writing the report. Therefore when I have my classroom I want to make sure that I instill in my students the idea of being passionate about something; anything because it is that passion that will make them great writers.