Teaching Writing

"Begin at the beginning and go on until you get to the  end and then stop."

Our book club choice this month is Alice in Wonderland  by Lewis Carroll or any other children’s classic we had not read. I admit I cheated a bit because I had read this book but I thought I had not read Alice through the Looking Glass and so I got a paperback with both of them. It turned out that I had read the second one too but had forgotten both the plot  and the fact  that it was the source of the quotation I used at least once a week –the one above– when I was a teacher of writing. So many times my sixth and seventh graders had told me they didn’t know where to start and this quotation was always my answer. It was not that I thought linear writing was superior. In fact, I spent a lot of time in the seveth grade year teaching the students the interesting art of flashbacks, but when a writer doesn’t know where to start, the beginning, or perhaps I should say the perceived beginning, is an excellent starting point.

When I first started teaching writing to middle schoolers, I taught children in both the sixth and seventh grades. This meant I had the same students for two years. Every year I would hold a writing fair a la the ubiquitous science fairs all schools hold. Students in both grade levels I taught would choose one piece of writing they felt good about  for display. They got together in groups to illustrate each other’s work and to create interesting ways to display work. {I was a big fan of group work!} Every year I would ask an outside-our-school  teacher to evaluate these works and leave comments for the students. One year an eighth-grade teacher friend of mine from another school did this and afterwards she commented on something I had not really noticed until then. She said that to her there was a huge difference between what the sixth graders wrote and the work of the seventh graders. On the whole, she said, she perceived the sixth grade work as ordinary but the seventh graders just shone in comparison.

Now, I had not actually thought this out deliberately, but when she said this, I realized that I spent most of my teaching time with the sixth grade encouraging fluency and very little on teaching writing techniques. The sixth grade wrote and wrote and wrote. Verbal diarrhea was not only encouraged but insisted on. If they had disagreements in my hearing, they wrote about it . If anything unusual happened, {like the one year we had snow–this was Mississippi, folks!} we  stopped what we were doing, went to the window and looked at it, discussed it and then back to our desks to write about it. {I use "we" delibrarately. I did the writing assignments, too.} If they were having a Terrible Horrible No-Good Very Bad Day * they wrote about it. Pages and pages and pages. Fluency. Teaching technique before a writer was fluent, I had discovered, was a waste of time.

But, when I got the same students again for a second year as seventh graders and they  were fluent in pouring out words on paper —  then they were ripe and ready for learning writing techniques. They were excited about learning to think of their reader and to anticipate what questions he or she would be asking. They loved flashbacks so much that I actually had to restrict the use of them! Because I taught them how to use transitional devices in moving the reader smoothly from one paragraph to the other { for example,  picking up a key word in an ending sentence and using it to begin the first  sentence of the next paragraph}, they thought it was fun to pick these things out of the books they were reading. {And so did I. We actually had several huge sheets of paper up on the wall where they copied what they had found and identified it! And, yes, I added to it also! }

Now, where am I going with all this? Well, I am not sure. However, one of the ways I use my diary is to encourage myself to be fluent. In witing like this, in writing I am now putting into the "Introspection " chapter, I am being a sixth-grader who is just practicing fluency.

As Humpty Dumpty said in Alice Through the Looking Glass,  "Begin at the beginning and go on until you get to the  end and then stop."

Yes!

*Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No-Good Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst

Until later….