Professional Ponderings

Real life application is important to many students, since they then have an audience besides the teacher. I loved Williams’ examples of pen-pals, and I love writing letters myself. Below is the link for IECC. it is the Intercultural E-mail Classroom Connections’ website. Here teachers can connect their classroom to others around the country and the world. Pen-pals (electronic or regular) can be set up and projects can be created or worked on with other schools as well. This helps give students a purpose and an audience for their writing.

http://www.iecc.org/

The writing process. These three words have always brought anxiety and a sense of impending doom to my life. I love to write but I am the type of person who waits until the very last moment then dashes out an A paper and doesn’t even bother to look at the comments when it is returned. Although this technique has gotten me through high school, two bachelors degrees, heavy on the writing (in English and strategic communications) and most of my teaching license program it has not helped propel my writing forward.

When I read through the Williams’ chapters and Carney article more bad memories came back to me. These were memories of the times when I did create drafts, only to have them riped to shreds by my peers- not my writing style, or even my horrid spelling (since I thought that a rough draft did not need to be spell checked since in my mind that was the point of the process); but instead I was personally attacked.

Granted the negative feelings that I had, and to some extent still reluctantly have, about the writing process and peer editing have to do with my bad experiences. However with these in mind, and the fact that I want to use the writing process and think peer editing is a fantastic way to go through papers, how can I make it work? How can I make sure that my students do not have the adverse reaction -almost an anaphalatic shock, in need of an epi-pen reaction-that I have to the process?

Is it even possible to teach seventh graders the peer editing process and have them take it seriously? I am not doubting their ability or their mental prowess at this age, simply if it is an effective strategy.

I think that the most important thing is to make the phases or stages of writing clear. To help students understand that they don’t have to write a perfect draft the first time and like Williams and Carney said, it is not a personal attack or an attack on the writing to edit it.