You ever meet someone who’s had their entire life planned out? From what they are going to do tomorrow to what they are going to do ten years from now. Me? I’ve never been like that, in fact in some ways I’m kind of the exact opposite. Only within the past two years did I figure out what I really wanted to do and that was teach. Now if you knew me at the time I declared this you probably would have been scratching your head, see I was never one for school, I spent most of my time in high school dodging classes to grab an extra lunch period. So when I told my family I wanted to become a teacher I think they all thought I was a bit crazy. See that semester I had taken a few English classes two of them taught by the same professor. These Classes I found really interesting and the professor pushed me to ask questions and to be a better learner. To be honest this really stuck with me, up to that point I don’t really think I had ever had a teacher like that. All of the sudden I was trying much harder. I realized then that’s what I wanted to be like. I wanted to be a teacher who could inspire students to be the best they could be, I had always loved reading and decided to go into teaching literature to accomplish my goal.
My Philosophy on teaching has been carefully cultivated during my time as a student, I take those lessons with me and add to them with every class I take. I have learned from my classes that students respond to meaningful assignments. These are the assignments that they know matter, that help them grow and strengthen them to take on the world in the future. I’ve come to realize just how important writing is, not just any old writing though, writing that is meaningful and realistic to what they will face in the real world once they leave schools, authentic writing. So what kind of assignments would be good authentic writing assignments that will help inspire students? Well one that I really like comes from the pages of the book “Continuing the Journey 2” where there is an example of real students making a real difference in their school. In a William V. Wright Elementary young students wrote to their lunchroom supervisor asking to change up the menu since they were very tired of the same old green beans. They wrote these letters with the help of their teacher and because they took this approach the school was very willing to makes changes. I’ve spoken about this in other blogs that I’ve written such as “Strategies In Authentic Writing” and the reason I make note of it again is because I think its just so darn cool! These are young students who are experiencing for the first time that they can make a difference by just writing! I think they will always remember this moment that they made a difference in the world albeit a small one but hey its a great start!
Authentic writing is the act of doing writing for real audiences about real topics, not just doing writing for a teacher. Academic writing is an important form of writing, and is highly valued in academic circles, but it is not the end all be all when it comes to writing. In fact after schooling very few adults will ever preform academic writing ever again, so why are we teaching only that type of writing? In fact in the blog post “Writing in the Work World” we see that it’s very important that students be introduced to a variety of different forms of writing since there are so many different types, such as presentations, reporting problems in code, or even a police report. I’m not lying when I say that a lot of adults don’t know how to email their boss, or struggle to send a letter to a family member. This is because in schools we don’t teach the writing that we will be doing most in the future. As a teaching who plans on teaching writing I want to make it my goal to make sure that my students leave my class with the knowledge of how to write in the working world. Now this doesn’t mean that academic writing is useless, in fact it sometimes is what will help students get into colleges to be able to achieve higher level learning, so of course it’s not something that educators should ignore but instead focus on while teaching students other things that will help them further on down the line.
As teachers we want students to be authentic in all areas of their lives, and the best way to do that is to give them ways to be authentic in their everyday school assignments. I can’t tell you how many times I did a high school writing assignment not caring one bit about what I was writing, only that I would get a good grade. The article “Keeping it Real: Valuing Authenticity in the Writing Classroom” explains that in order to get students to be more authentic in the classroom we have to provide them with assignments that are authentic and interesting.
I think the best way to form authentic writing exercises is by thinking about the sort of situations students are going to come across in the future. For example not all students are going to be doing long in-depth analysis of novels down the line at their jobs but they are going to all have to create a resume and along with that a cover letter. Why not take a few classes to explain how to create compelling ones maybe even have an assignment where each student has to create a mock resume along with a cover letter to get into a fake job? I’m sure some students would be overjoyed to skip the hundredth reaction to The Great Gatsby (even though I adore this book) and work on something they are going to use in the future. As the National Council of English teachers says in their post “Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing” “Writing is not just one practice or activity”, we have to create varied and meaningful assignments that students will look back on and know that they learned something, and they will want to take that knowledge on to help them in the future.
A lot people don’t realize this but we are all writers. It’s true, have you ever written a list, or a long winded twitter post? Then congrats your a writer! I want to help students realize that they are writers and that they are writers no matter the platform and manner of their writing, it’s all valid. I want students to realize this and take pride in their writing. In order to do this I think that teaching a very wide variety of genres of writing is crucial. At times I think blog writing and twitter posting is swept under the rug and considered writing that has no meaning, but I think that couldn’t be further from the truth. Teacher’s need to impart a love and respect of writing in all forms to their students, and show them that any writing that they do is important, and it makes them writers.
Being a teacher is tough, but being writing teacher can look to be downright impossible sometimes. Even so it’s such an important subject, we are teaching students that can their writing can change the world. Letters and documents in all forms have led to changes in many different places, these changes are so great that it has led to how we live now. That’s why teaching writing is so difficult, writing is full of passion and intricacies, but its all important, and in life sometimes the most difficult things we do are the most important.
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