Reading Reflection

There's so many readings to write about, that's it's difficult for me to select specific readings to respond to. The academic readings, even the more anecdotal research ones, were interesting in hat I'm an English teacher, but face the same trouble that most academic writing does: dryness. It's rare that I've found academic writing with "life" in it. However, I'll attempt to address those two here, though I'd rather be discussing the King or Lamott pieces.

In the first week's readings I found myself grappling a lot with the Nagin article, "Learning to Write." I found its description of the history of writing instruction to be worthwhile and good reflection for me as a former K-12 student, and current educator. However, my notes in the margins were often in response to what I saw occurring in my own classroom. What are my students struggling with? Does it align itself with what Nagin is describing? Furthermore, what is Nagin discussing that I myself have tried to articulate or teach, but did it have access to the current discourse at the time. Referencing Hillocks, Nagin poses the argument that "writing should be a form of inquiry" and that approaching it this way has the biggest gains for students. This idea is something that I've been working to incorporate into my curriculum planning more--making sure that there is a larger, investigatory process, that students are addressing that is the actual driver of the unit of study.

There are many ideas to consider in Write Beside Them but the one hat stuck out to me is the idea of story. I mentioned in an earlier class session (and my brief intro) that I often view life as a narrative. What we (humans) are engaging with in life is the living out of a narrative that overlaps, crashes, and merges, diverges, etc. from other narratives. I find this idea present in the idea that when we are writing, what we are actually doing is attempting to tell a story, and that this is the case regardless of the type of writing we are doing. I'd like for this to be something that I can bring to my students--an idea that we are writing our stories and so have a great deal of say in what happens.