Week #1 - Blog #2

Having learned at an early age how to write I experienced the positive encouragement of parents who were excited to see me write.  I was thrilled to find that same sense of excitement and fun about writing in school.  I therefore came to school with a love for writing and that love continued as long as I was allowed to write.  

But the transition was difficult as I moved from a home environment that allowed me to produce good writing and therefore learn the mechanics of the writing process to a school environment that offered the traditional writing classroom.  We were taught lessons about how to produce a good piece of writing, wrote in our desks, completed a first draft by ourselves, edited by ourselves, and turned in the final draft to our teacher.  Analysis of the final paper usually ended with a red scrawled "great work", "good job", "needs work", or the dreaded "see me".  We knew exactly where we failed in the writing process, but we were islands unto ourselves.  We didn't work with the teacher or wit each other while we were writing.  Our only sharing of writing occurred at that dreaded moment when the teacher called your name after the final drafts were passed back.  Those papers garbed in the red "great work" were shared.

I believe that I came out of that process still loving writing because I usually had the "great work" stamp of approval.  Besides I was a ham and loved to get up and share the work I had written.  I learned the clearly defined structures of writing and performed well on typical tests of writing.  David and Yvonne Freeman perfectly described my classroom in their text, Essential Linguistics:  What You Need to Know to Teach Reading, ESL, Spelling, Phonics and Grammar, when they said "In a traditional classroom...students are given the topics for writing, and they are expected to complete the writing in a fairly short time".

I experienced the acquisition view as a young writer at home and truly feel that I now apply that same view in my classroom.  Utilizing Writer's Workshop certainly allows my students to "produce good writing and acquire knowledge of the writing process" (p. 29) as they engage in authentic writing tasks.