Every day, for two hours a day, I led my young students through Reader's and Writer's Workshop. I was trained not to address my kids as "students" or "class" but as "authors" and "readers." We gathered "seed ideas" in our Writer's Notebooks. We crafted "small moment" stories, personal narratives, and memoirs. We peer edited. We "shared out."Now he advocates for a more structured curriculum.
Gathered with them on the rug, I explained to my 10-year-olds that "good writers find ideas from things that happened in their lives." That stories have "big ideas." That good writers "add detail," "stretch their words," and "spell the best they can."
Teach grammar, sentence structure, and mechanics? I barely even taught. I "modeled" the habits of good readers and "coached" my students. What I called "teaching," my staff developer from Teacher's College dismissed as merely "giving directions." My job was to demonstrate what good readers and writers do and encourage my students to imitate and adopt those behaviors.
In short, I presided over the reading and writing equivalent of a Cargo Cult.
I am no fan of free self-expression myself, but I am less sure than Pondiscio that it is a disaster. I bet there was some kid who went through his class and actually did find his or her voice, and is now a thriving rapper or a cool street poet. My experience has been that no method works for everybody and almost every method works for somebody. Of course, we shouldn't be designing the fifth grade curriculum to reach the one potential artist in a hundred kids. But faced was a room full of restless, bored kids from neighborhoods saturated with poverty and vice, to whom proper grammar seems about as useful as orbital mechanics, who wouldn't want to try something a little more fun and engaging?
The evidence seems to be that, on average, kids from poor neighborhoods need more order and discipline in their lives, and especially in their schooling. But that turns school into a dreary, hateful place for many of them, and that is a high cost to pay.
The Readers and Writers approach to teaching writing works far better than the "here's how to structure a sentence" approach. I speak from almost 40 years of experience as a high school "English" teacher.
ReplyDeleteFirst come the ideas, the excitement about expressing them in one's own words. Only after the ideas are out there on the paper, tweaked, and comfortable does one enter the "editing" phase.
That's where MUGS (mechanics, usage, grammar, spelling) come in! Without first having free expression, one has precise and pedestrian verbiage. With first writing, *then* editing, one can find jewels.
I learned that as a student teacher. Augustine Pillo (known as Bobo... a rather Michelin man of a 9th grader) leaped at my assignment to recast the Romeo and Juliet story in some other time and place. He wrote a grand Western, where Juliet was an Apache or some other people and Romeo a calvaryman. It was energized, it was dramatic, it was quite publishable in the school magazine (in charge of my master teacher)-- except that it had no punctuation at all, and some really grievous spelling.
So I made a deal with Bobo: you come in before school to work with me on editing this story, and I'll see Mrs. Speece publishes it. For two weeks Bobo met me 45 minutes before the start of the school day. We worked on punctuating and paragraphing dialog, on spelling, on verb tense agreement, on person agreement, etc etc etc. We talked about *why* one used MUGS in the standardized way.
Bobo's epic love story was published to much acclaim and astonishment. (Bobo was in 9-16, which was #16 in the "intelligence-grouped" structure of the 18 9th grade classes.) And yes, Bobo actually learned MUGS; his writing after that point was much more accurate.
I wish I knew what had happened to Bobo... but that is one of my favorite memories of touching a student's life.
Side note: for some years, our department was required to include a purely MUGS section on the final exams. One year, I taught to the test, directly from Warriner's. The next year, I simply taught MUGS in context. The results on the MUGS section were identical across the two years. MUGS learned in isolation remain in isolation; they don't become a natural part of a person's writing toolkit.