My Thoughts
If I had seen this video sooner in life, I may have felt a little better about my childhood education. I could have shown everyone and yelled, “See, it wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t spell! Blame the Romans, the Vikings, the Normans and all of the people English has stolen language from!” And it really wasn’t my fault. The English language makes no sense when it comes to sounds and letters. Sounding out the letters helps when reading, not spelling.
I have often wondered if teaching the history of English would help students with their reading and writing. I don’t know if it would make anyone a better speller, but I do think it would help students to understand how our language has formed. We learn about how the United States came to be in history, we learn about the discovery of evolution in science, so why not learn about the history of the English language in an English language arts class? I think it would provide students with a context to further understand the world that we live in today. It would give students an idea about how influential their language is on the rest of the world, and how much English has been influenced by other cultures. It would teach students that we do not live in isolation from the rest of the speaking world, nor have we ever been that way. These are lessons that would have been helpful to me as a child who couldn’t spell, and as a high school student, beginning to learn how connected the world really is.
The events in middle and high school I remember the most were the ones that caused the greatest freedom and the greatest frustration. As I have said, I probably could have written for ages on all of the writing I did during school. But the events I have described show the things that I wanted most from my writing education, freedom and explanation.
Whenever creative writing was a choice, it gave me the freedom to choose my subject. I was able to write what was on my mind, not what my teacher assigned to be on my mind. It was something I wanted more from my education, because, as teachers like Nancie Atwell (1998) and Linda Christensen (2009) have stated, choice is everything for a student. Choice gives a student the freedom to write what they are passionate about. Both Atwell and Christensen ask their students to branch out and to try different styles, but neither teacher tells a student what they have to write. The students are allowed to follow their passions and to write what matters to them, and because of that the students are willing to put in huge amounts of work to perfect their writing. That was something I was never asked to do outside of my creative writing class. Sometimes I would get to choose the topic, but I would have to use the books we read in class, or I would chose the books but my essay would have to relate to a theme discussed in class. I was given the appearance of choice, but never the real thing. That made it very hard for me to care about anything that I did in middle and high school, which is probably why I did not keep anything. Why would I want to keep a paper that I had no personal involvement with?
Often, when I cared about a topic, I didn’t know where to begin writing. I felt abandoned by my teacher and had no one to ask for help in my writing. The ten-page history paper I was asked to write was one of those times. I loved learning about NASA and the space race; it was something I had always been interested in. But when it came time to write about space for ten pages, I was at a loss. Mrs. Cotter did not scaffold my learning; she did not teach me how to move from the two or three page essays I was used to writing, to the ten pages she was asking for. Linda Christensen (2009) tells her readers, that she “teach[es] [students] how to write by guiding them through the essay-writing process” (p. 121). That was what I needed as a tenth grader. I had never written an essay that long, and I needed Mrs. Cotter to guide me through the process in such a way that I knew what I was doing every step of the way. I needed to know that she was right there next to me whenever I had questions. Instead, I felt lost and had to scramble to come up with my own explanations. I had to find my own way through the ten-page assignment, and rather than writing something that I was really proud of, I wrote a paper I hated on a subject I loved.
When I entered college the issues of choice and scaffolding began to change. I won’t say that they have gone away completely, but there is a difference. For almost every paper I write there is some form of choice. Often it is the same kind of choice as the essays I had in high school. I am able to choose the topic but not the books, or I am able to choose the books but not the topic. Then there are the classes where I am able to choose everything. Those times make up for the papers where the choice is superficial.
I have also discovered that in the places where the writing is completely up to me, I am also given the most help. The teachers and professors that I have had who understand the benefits of choice also understand that sometimes students need to have scaffolding. And from those teachers I have learned the amount of scaffolding I need with my writing and how to ask for it. That is the biggest change I have seen with my writing over time. As I have received a greater amounts of scaffolding, I have been able to develop my writing further and have learned what I need as a writer and a learner of writing. Choice I has allowed me to explore new subjects while at the same time exploring my past writing. The ideas of choice and scaffolding have played a huge role in my writing over the years, whether they were available or not, and I have learned many lessons from that.
References
Atwell, N. (1998). In the middle: New understandings about writing, reading, and learning (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann.
Christensen, L. (2009). Teaching for joy and justice: Re-imagining the language arts classroom. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools.