Give 'em Something to Write About

Writing is inherently interesting.

I am of the belief that there is no inherent reason that students should dislike or fear writing.

Writing is difficult, but it isn’t misery.

The goal is not to make writing easy for students so much as for writing to be interesting and worthwhile. The structure and patterns of writing as it happens in school often makes writing much harder - in a nonproductive way - by giving students writing tasks that are essentially exercises in frustration, where interest is limited and the primary focus of assessment is on what is missing from what’s been written, rather than what is present.

When I started using what I call “the writer’s practice” - the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and habits of mind of writers - as a framework for how I thought about curriculum and instruction, I realized that the college students I primarily worked with needed more practice with those last two categories (attitudes and habits of mind) than the first two.

Students had been conditioned to see writing almost entirely as an experience that would trigger feelings of inadequacy and ignorance, rather than as an opportunity to explore their own experiences of the world and share their perspectives with others.

Talking to my students about their experiences in school made me particularly grateful for the different educational atmosphere I had grown up in, in which the writing we did in school - at least through elementary grades - was primarily oriented around our own interests and curiosities which we were invited to share with the community of our teachers and classmates.

My weekend news

In Mrs. Craig’s first and second grade class, the first thing we did every Monday was write and illustrate our “weekend news.” The primary pedagogical purpose of our weekend news was to practice our cursive writing, but it’s also interesting to consider how, as an act of writing, our weekend news was embodied inside a full rhetorical situation of message (what we did), audience (Mrs. Craig and our classmates), and purpose (to share and communicate parts of our lives).

The prompt was the same every week, “What did you do over the weekend?” We did our work on that old broadsheet newsprint paper with four or five lines for text on the bottom half and a big space for illustration on the top.

My handwriting received “needs improvement” marks the entirety of my education, (I wrote previously about how typing unlocked the world for me), and my drawing abilities were nonexistent, but I relished the Mondays when something had happened over the weekend and I had something ready to go when we were put on task. A handful of us were asked to read our news out loud to the rest of the class, and Mrs. Craig would return them with comments primarily taking the form of audience response, e.g., “That sounds fun!” rather than marking up our (or at least my) innumerable errors. I know this, because while my mom was not an indiscriminate saver of her children’s schoolwork, she did keep a folder of twenty-five or so of my installments that came into my possession when my parents downsized and I had to go claim all of my own crap.

Some of the installments I had vivid memories of - like the weekend we adopted my childhood dog, Melvin - while for others, I had to defer to my first or second grade self as to their veracity. My interpretation of the importance of this work to my own attitudes toward writing is obviously all hindsight, but I believe, either intentionally or not, much of the writing I was asked to do in elementary school that required me to mine my own life, my own interests, my own creativity in ways that made writing, dare I say it…fun.

I had little notion that writing should be anything other than a normal, even everyday activity.

Normalizing student choice and agency

I’m struck by how much freedom I had been given to write as compared to the students I’ve worked with in college contexts who report having been drilled on the five-paragraph template (or precursors to it) as early as 2nd grade, and then essentially repeating those experiences over and over again.

In Mrs. Goldman’s third grade class she asked us to write instructions for making a peanut butter & jelly sandwich, a moment I’ve written about many times (including here), which taught me basically everything I’d ever need to know about how writing works.

In Mrs. Thiel’s 4th grade class some friends and I were crafting insurance policies from scratch as part of a student-generated plan to help reduce the class epidemic of name calling. (A long story that I wrote about that in this post at my other newsletter.)

I still have my portfolio of writing from Mrs. Minch’s 5th grade class which had us writing historical fiction, speculative fiction, limericks and classified ads (among other things). (You can read more about that here.)

6th grade, after I’d exhausted the language arts curriculum, my teacher, Mrs. Chambers told me to read any Newberry Medalist book we had in the library and then write whatever I wanted about them. For some I wrote reviews, others I continued the stories from the end with fiction of my own. Others I wrote what we might even call critical essays, though no one would’ve taught me what that was.

I was extraordinarily lucky to be born into a place with excellent schools and excellent teachers who believed that students should be encouraged to follow their curiosities, and that children might actually have interesting things to say about the world.

Killing learning with schooling

Starting in middle school and then in high school, the fun was over, as instruction was more explicitly geared towards college “preparation,” teaching us templates that would be useful to pass academic assessments like the Advance Placement exams.

Why do I remember dozens of writing assignments from grade school and almost nothing from high school? The only high school writing I recall was when I rebelled against the crushingly dull junior year term paper on a single writer by choosing New Journalism icon Tom Wolfe and then writing my paper in an imitation of his style.

My attention to my work, the amount of rigor invested in my writing dropped precipitously the moment it was so overtly tied to schooling.

The irony is that all of this preparation for college by teaching me academic templates was misguided, as my professors (the good ones anyway) were much more interested in genuine explorations of ideas.

A foundation to build from

Fortunately for me, thanks to my grade school teachers I had a good foundation in how to approach a genuine rhetorical situation, and abandoning the templates I’d been handed for the AP exams proved to be no problem once I was in college.

My attitude toward writing had been dinged by schooling, but not destroyed.

The students in my first-year writing classes often had no previous positive experiences to draw from. The idea that writing could be interesting and empowering was largely foreign to them. Writing had been a performance of “good studentness,” rather than an opportunity to think or acquire knowledge or share their perspective.

Much of the early work in those first-year writing courses involved convincing students that I was genuinely interested in what they might have to say, and that writing was a great way of learning something new.

I told myself that I’m not going to make every post here about generative AI, but let me say it’s not surprising that students turn to the technology as a way to avoid work that seems both unpleasant and pointless beyond the grade.

If we want students to be engaged with writing, we have to let them actually write, the way the teachers of Greenbriar School did with me.

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One of the reasons I got involved with Frankenstories was because playing the games is fun, and fun is nothing if not engaging. Check it out for yourself.