Working Through the Words

I never got the chance to write about Christensen’s work with Narrative writing and honestly, kind of missed out on that. Since this was the first chapter of Christensen that we actually read together, I felt like it was a really powerful chapter to start us off on. Whenever I have heard anything about meeting standards or anything like that, I have never thought of teachers using narrative writing as a means to reach those standards, and I don’t think Christensen had that in mind as she was teaching her students, I think it was more about making sure her students learned empathy and that their writing was meaningful. They had an audience in their classroom and learned that their writing could make others relate to them and feel like their world was not so isolated. The idea of actually getting students to share such personal moments in their writing is definitely something I want to explore in my classroom. Although, some of Christensen’s idea did give me a bit of anxiety, e

Again, Christensen really blew me away with another chapter in her book Teaching for Joy and Justice because I just find myself amazed by the awesome ways that she is able to really dive into teaching writing. Growing up, I always used the same formulaic writing that Christensen talks about with her students: Five paragraphs, intro, three bodies of evidence, and then the conclusion. Plain and simple and to the point with everything I ever wrote for school. I felt like if I tried to break out of this formula, I would get a failing grade because I wrote too much or I wasn’t being concise enough for my teachers. That’s probably why I never kept any of my papers from high school or ever felt like they had any meaning to them. It wasn’t until I hit college when I really started to understand that this “formula” had given me a base to work off of. I needed to get my reader’s attention with the intro, I needed to provide evidence even if it was more than just three paragraphs, and I needed to

Poetry has never really been my favorite part of studying English and taking ELA classes. None of my teachers even remotely seemed like they were interested in poetry in the slightest, making most of the lessons seem like it was more obligation to the curriculum more than anyone actually enjoying poetry with their students. The only time I ever had a teacher actually care about poetry was when I knew that they had actually participated in poetry slams and wrote spoken word poems to share with their class. Granted, it was for a creative writing class, but we spent an entire month just on poetry and during that month, I tried really hard to think of poetry as more than just a bunch of choppy little sentences, but it was hard when my entire history had painted them as such. In the past few years, programs like Button Poetry have really made me appreciate poetry as an art and really made me see it as more than just Shakespeare’s sonnets or e.e. cummings lowercase spellings. A

I’ve been going to the Rhode Island Writing Project since I was sixteen years old (only missing one because I could not get the day off from work). I have presented at them, worked on helping create pamphlets, and overall, just being apart of the Writing Project culture for five years. This year, however, was a whole new experience for me. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was there to become an educator. I have known for a long time that I was going to be a teacher, but going to these conferences before was more of me going to talk to teachers about what their students need while I was a student. Now, it became my responsibility to listen, to become that educator who needed to listen about what student need now that I’m almost five years out of high school. Troy Hicks actually followed me back on Twitter which is really awesome because after we’ve spent the time reading his book and actually hearing him speak, I feel like he’s sort of a superhero in the educatio