Through the years and yesterday, these are the things that helped me become a better writing teacher:
Not owning a microwave
Tai Chi
Bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 99
Fishing
Listening to the cable company’s “on hold” music
Stairs
Sipping hot tea
Okay – obviously, I didn’t become a better writing teacher after I wrote the list, but here is why I wrote the list and what I learned from it. At a writing workshop, we were asked to write whatever came to mind when we saw the word “slow.” The list above and the reflection below is what I learned about teaching writing.
In the early 2000’s, (apologies to those AP Language students), I assigned multiple first-quarter essays, requiring evidence-based responses from complex texts that we revised 666 times. I taught my students to read De Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America
closely, which garnered great in-depth discussions. They asked good questions and made keen insights. I thought they were ready to write artfully crafted essays that explored nuanced ideas in the work. They weren’t. Soooo…..more essays. More practice. More grading. More stress and burnout for my students and me.
I needed answers. I turned to education researchers, site and district colleagues who were excellent writing teachers, and a professional organization of teachers teaching teachers – the National, California, and Great Valley Writing Projects.
Of the many tools they helped me add to my writer’s toolbox, this is the one idea that released my students and me from essay purgatory: Teach just one sentence. Don’t start with essays. Teach the well-crafted sentence – then paragraphs – then essays. Slow. Deliberate. Mindful writing.
Note how much you can teach students to do with a sentence.
Arrangement
. Word order that mindfully impacts meaning. Where writers choose to situate words within a sentence can change readers’ interpretations.
“Only I drive a truck.” – just me nobody else
“I only drive a truck.” – not a car or other vehicle
“I drive only a truck.” – a mere truck
Ideas
. Crafting sentences modeled by great writers helped students understand how to study good writing – how to pack a world of ideas into a sentence.
“Half my life is an act of revision.” – John Irving
“Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.” – Ayn Rand
“A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” – Sidney Sheldon
Punctuation
. Play with punctuation within the context of a sentence to change its meaning. Punctuation has personality. Have students note how the authors in their texts use colons and/or commas. Books such as
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
aid punctuation play.
“A woman without her man is nothing.”
“A woman: without her, man is nothing.”
Cohesion
. Cohesive sentences flow. They glue ideas together. They follow the something old + something new formula of writing sentences. Often students do not consider that they must not get so excited by the new idea in the second sentence that they forget to grab something old from the first.
Bob likes cheese sandwiches so much that he eats them every day. We went to the zoo and monkeys stared at us.
Bob likes cheese sandwiches so much that he eats them every day. The day we went to the zoo, Bob couldn’t resist eating his cheese sandwich in front of the hungry, staring monkeys.
Something old from first sentence: day, Bob, eating cheese sandwich
Something new in second sentence: zoo, hungry, staring monkeys
I could go on. Ask your students to write one sentence using the color green, using one comma and a colon, using dialogue that begins with the letter S. Make it fun. Make it interesting. Make it mindful.
Writers learn to do a zillion things with a sentences.
Then they string great sentences together to form fantastic paragraphs.
Finally, they string great paragraphs together to write excellent essays.
That’s it. Reducing the stress I had created around teaching writing meant I had to unlearn some bad teaching habits. More was not greater. Less was. Big was not better. Small was. Fast did not move us faster. Slow did.
And the last time I checked, Turlock Parks and Rec stopped offering the Tai Chi class, but the rest of the list is still with me. Either stress out in traffic or enjoy an audio book. Ride upstairs quickly or burn a few calories. Get hot food instantly or savor the smells of good food to come. My list reminds me of the power of teaching writing slowly, deliberately, and mindfully.
