L.++Online+Questions+&+Responses

My Online Questions & Classmate Responses

My Online Questions:

1. Of the assigned readings from this semester, which one did you find to be the most valuable and/or practical for your current or future career and why? 2. Which of our class activities helped you the most to grow as writer and/or a teacher of writing and why? 3. Which of the in-class free writes would you like to revisit and/or revise and why? More specifically, which one did you personally find to be the most engaging or inspiring? Explain. 4. Ten years from now, what is one thing that you think you will remember about this class and why?

Classmate Responses:

1. Murray and Gallagher's books have helped me see what it means to write and be a writer from different angles. I look forward to using both of them in my future classroom with my students, not only as mentor text, but as main texts for required reading. They had so many essential tools for writing that it's hard not to use them! The writer's notebook helped me grow as a writer. I have always kept journals and wrote blogs, but this is a different form of keeping my thoughts all in one place that I am not afraid or ashamed of showing to my future students. I want to use it as a way to help communicate to my future students that even I sometimes have trouble writing. I will use it to help build a teacher-student relationship that will aid in fostering a writing community in my classroom. In regards to my freewrites, I think I would like to revisit any poetry I have done because I am looking to create an anthology. Also, poetry is not easy and I love a challenge! The most inspiring piece I wrote was about a single dad having to do everything on his own and take care of his son. It was told in such a way that the ending was unexpected. I would like to continue that freewrite and turn it into a short story. Ten years from now I will remember this as the class that catapulted me into getting my Master's an hopefully and ultimately a published writer.

2. A combination of Questions #2 and #4: I'm going to have to agree with Charissa with these questions. My personal writing has always been VERY personal (obviously, duh), and I never considered sharing these pieces outside my immediate family. When I was a junior and senior in high school, I was facing a huge identity crisis and a slight breakdown (okay, I was a bit dramatic, but I was in high school); that was the time that I discovered writing as a form of therapy. All of a sudden, I was writing pages and pages of expression and verbal healing. It was how I coped. I started to share these pieces then with my English teacher, and she suggested I submit a few for publication. To humor her, despite my low confidence in my writing, I submitted them. And to my surprise, my favorite piece was selected for publication. That was when I realized that I truly did have something to say. And the more experienced I get, the more I understand the power of sharing and how it can strengthen my voice. Sharing these pieces in class (some extremely personal and dear to my heart) have reminded me of the benefit of getting that stuff out. As a workaholic and a "schoolaholic", I've let my freewriting time fall to the side. However, the day I shared my piece about my abusive boyfriend was a day that I will never forget. That's obviously something that I don't share with a lot of people, especially after knowing them for only a few weeks, and to talk about something that traumatized me for a long time through my writing created a level of comfort for me. I shared the piece with my mother (obviously, that topic is a hard one for us to discuss), and she cried. She cried because she said she was reminded of the 4 am phone call I made to her that day, but she said she also cried because she could tell writing it gave me some healing. And she was right. It was almost as though writing about it lifted some of the darkness from that night. It inspired me to start writing about other events in my life that caused me distress and emotional pain, and writing about those times has helped me reached an odd sense of clarity and acceptance surrounding those events.

3. In response to question 4, I suspect that I will not be able to attribute them to this specific class ten years down the road, but there are various skills and practices I've developed this semester which I am already putting to use and will likely still be doing a decade from now. I remember names by repeating them. I remember jokes by retelling them. I'm sure that in ten years I will remember many things I learned in this class because I will have been doing them for that long.
 * The underlying concept of the 5-min. free write -- "Just Write" -- was an epiphany for me. I have a strong inner editor and usually spell-check, proof-read and otherwise revise each sentence as I write. Forcing myself to push past the inner editor to get words on paper has shown me that there is so much more to say and discover by writing that way. I have already shared this observation with several students and admonished them, when staring at a blank page, to "just write!"
 * <span style="color: #404040; font-family: Georgia,serif;">Many of the insights contained in Donald Murray's Write to Learn have found their way into my head, most notably the practice of 'thinking like a reader' when revising papers. I used this concept in both my mini lesson and in my WPP to show students how to improve the clarity and appeal of their work.
 * <span style="color: #404040; font-family: Georgia,serif;">I have always sought to model what the students are expected to practice, and this conviction has been reinforced by both the book I read for my précis and the use of mentor texts in our class.

<span style="color: #404040; font-family: Georgia,serif;">4. To answer #1: I agree that Digital Writing Matters was the most relevant and interesting to me. Gallagher was useful for his classroom ideas, but a lot of what he actually had to say was uninteresting or not particularly useful. Murray's text read like a stereotypical grandfather talks. Not a fan. I think that the discussion on the value and validity of digital writing is both worthwhile and incredibly applicable in today's classrooms. I think that discussion needs to be opened more as every school I've been in has been largely conservative in its view of technology, much to the detriment of the school and its students.

<span style="color: #404040; font-family: Georgia,serif;">#2 - the free writes helped the most, hands down. I got away from writing after college, and it's been really cool to get back to it and to have an audience. This type of writing has really challenged me to use words efficiently and quickly.

<span style="color: #404040; font-family: Georgia,serif;">5. Question #2. I'm bordering on being the annoying repeater of previous answers, but learning to a) produce non-academic writing and b) getting the guts to share that writing were two of the things I know will help me in the future. Even as a grad student, I now know that it's okay to write something other than an essay filled with heavy prose and tons of MLA citations. if I feel like writing a rant in my notebook one day, I can do it. As for sharing, it has helped me immensely. I was always careful to share anything I had written because I was worried about the feedback or criticism I might receive. It's the most immature position I could have had, but I did, and I'm happy to finally be past it. I still get a little nervous most of the time before I press the "tweet" or "post" buttons though so I suppose I've still got some courage to muster. <span style="color: #404040; font-family: Georgia,serif;">I also really enjoyed this class's ability to open me up to different kinds of technology. I cringed at the thought of having a Twitter account before. Now, it's one of my favorite resources. I look forward to teaching students the importance of these outlets because I know that growing up with these things will only allow them to take technology for granted. Teaching students ways to approach these tools is a relevant concern for educators right now, and I'm anxious to join the fray.