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I’m really looking forward to the upcoming summer institute!
Any Authentic Audience! This is what I highlighted first. Why write unless someone will be reading this? You are reading this aren’t you! That’s why I am writing now. You are now my mentor as well. I am taking a risk at writing and I will be building my inventory of words this week. These are all things that were outlined in the introduction. I will make sure that the words I use with my students will enable them to explain their writing to one another.
Mentor Chapter
I felt the words hit home on page 10 “Our classrooms are filled with students desperate for adults who care. . .” I had to stop here with the thought because this is so important in my school. Few children have both parents in the home. They struggle to get noticed in various ways. I will try to lift them up through their writing and comments I make during conferencing or in front of the whole group. I am their mentor!
Yikes! as a mentor I need to know the sound of language use it skillfully. But wait! I have my husband, the english whiz, check all my grammar on newsletters or notes home. How can I do it all in the classroom? I must work on it this summer and set the bar high for myself. I want to be the example the students need, look up to and try to emulate.
“Most students write far far better than they will ever know.” page 14 This was so obvious during our poetry unit this year. My fourth graders had me in tears at how eloquent their poems were. I moved from first grade to fourth and was astonished at the capability of my students. Now it was my chance to be the mentor and show them where the great writing occurred and how to spur them onto even better things. A good writing teacher challenges students to excellence. That will be my mantra this year. I also will open myself to the possibilities that my fourth graders can write new and original work. I will be honest with them and try to open their eyes to the fact that they may be a better writer than myself. Ouch! But I will get over it:)
I want the children to take risks with words, form, structure and the process. I want them to try something they have never tried before. I will point out to them when I am modeling something new myself.
I am passionate about setting aside writing time as well as time for sharing the work. The students seem to be just as passionate. If I am gone and don’t write it into the lesson plans, they will ask for sharing time.
I truly enjoy sharing the responsibilities of conferencing in my room with our literacy coach twice a week. We do a tag team on those that we need to motivate. We try to know when and how to help the struggling writer. Most times we are successful. However there are those times when a student just gets a name and date on the page. i have learned from Nurtured Heart to accept that as a success! We are gentle as Fletcher advises and choose our words thoughtfully and carefully.
This book was a very easy book to read with the exception of chapter three – a love of words. My first instinct was to read over the words and come back to it when I was finished with the article, just like I tell my kids to do when they come to a word that is unfamiliar to them. However I tried to read some of the words in the middle of the article, and i’m pretty sure that what i was saying was not the way the words were pronounced. So I had to go back at the end and use a dictionary to find the meaning and pronunciation.
It was interesting though to look at how I read and how connections were made to how I read and write. On a side note, it also made me want to learn new and exciting words.
Incidentally the text I made a connection to in this particular chapter was one of the books that we used at Stratton this year for Battle of the Books, Donovan’s Words. Can’t remember the author though sorry!!
Even though the book is geared towards writing, it also lends itself immensely to reading and teaching kids to read especially in the primary grades. And with reading naturally comes writing.
And in the writing we do, and teach kids about,
no one ever stops to discuss the lyrics of the words we use. I really like reading the second paragraph on page 33, and the author writes about twenty month old Emma who fell in love with the word Ludlow.
I think it would be an interesting project if everyone would think about one word that they like because of the way it sounds. My word is challenge, because for me its a challenge to say challenge.
My favorite word is “PEACE.”
Peace brings me peace. I think that we all need a lot more peace in our lives.
I know we’re not supposed about what a book isn’t (sorry, Sarah) but I found myself a bit disappointed in What a Writer Needs because it wasn’t as good as another of Fletcher’s books, Boy Writers. I found this book a bit self-indulgent in terms of the heavy reliance on examples from his own writing—without providing a deep sense of how the writing happened, which to me is the value of using personal examples. (I didn’t care for his “student days” examples coming primarily from collegiate creative writing classes, either; I get that we’re supposed to take what worked about them and apply them in our own circumstances, but it just seemed a bit too much). I also was a little put off by the use of examples from his consulting experiences, particularly the ones that he admits are the work of kids that just happened to be quite talented. How they did it is of more interest to me than simply sharing what they did.
That said, the book does have much to offer; first and foremost is the attention to craft in student writing. I’m afraid that many secondary teachers, as I do, delight in exceptionally well-written prose, but are so focused on genre conventions, interpretations, and ideas (to say nothing of hounding kids simply to submit written work in the first place), that we don’t take nearly enough time to talk about how to write well. Fletcher’s distaste for exercises is one I share, but it’s difficult to talk craft within the context of each specific writer’s work when there are just so many writers to respond to.
More appropriate for secondary teachers then, I think, is the idea of being a writing mentor. Talking about yourself as a writer—within your discipline, as a professional educator, as a member of a family and a community—is an important way to send the message that writing matters as part of life construed generally, not just as a school-based activity. Sharing your own writing and using it to demonstrate lessons on the frustrations and challenges—and necessity and utility—of revision and fine-tuning for craft seem an essential part of that mentorship identity.
I wrote in my margins at the end of that first chapter, on mentorship: “Use our expertise to see the qualities of goodness students cannot.” The midwife in his example helped him see what was going well with the process of the birth of his son; similarly, we can use our knowledge of successful writing—grappling with ideas and experimenting with language—to bolster students’ sense of competence when they get bogged down in what seems to be going badly.
Ouch!! Your first thoughts are HARSH!! So, I wonder why I find that they sting me? Maybe, I am such a newbie that this book started my wheels going? I really enjoyed the mix of examples. I took pleasure that they were from his writings, that he showed me how to enrich one aspect of writing, how to make something deeper. It spoke to me, a novice. Maybe, this is a good example of how people at different places on the continuum have different expectations and needs. You have a greater frame of reference and more depth of knowledge while I am still at point (0,0).
Hi, Laura–
I really apologize for any comments that ended up stinging you; I guess this is a good reminder to me that our identities in relationship to what we read are as significant as those we have to what we write. I do want to clarify that I do, in fact, think that the examples of student work are fantastic–we, as a profession, need to keep acknowledging the crucial role looking at student work has–it’s just something about them coming from consulting experiences that doesn’t sit well for me.
I also think he had lots of good ideas–he, in fact, inspired me to write the poem I wrote on my blog–I just thought this book would be as captivating for me as his other book was!
“What a Writer Needs”
As this is my first book about actual writing, I found myself stopping to mark in the book and write notes about the many interesting things Ralph Fletcher has to tell us. I have wanted to write for several years now, and my hope is that this Writing Project will vault me into action. I have found many important ideas in the book that really speak to me about writing.
The first comment that jumped of the page at me was on page 2- (yes, in the introduction!) In one paragraph, Fletcher talks about how writing instruction cannot be like a recipe book, (so he is bringing cooking into the discussion of writing) and then he compares writing with art! The part of this paragraph that speaks of art and how an artist creates a painting can be like a writer is really enjoyable. I am certainly not artistic at all, but the comparison made sense to me- writers certainly are artists- they just use a different medium.
I also certainly understand Fletchers thoughts about how to learn to write- “by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you”. (page 4) I believe this could be the most important topic in the book for teachers- students will be more involved, more connected to their writing if they care about the subject. I have used this in my history classes for a while, but not with any real understanding. Now, I know how critical this is to successful writing. If we can assist students in finding a subject they believe is important, the writing becomes more than ‘ an assignment’ it can become part of them- TALK ABOUT BUY-IN!! If we as teachers simply continue to ask students to write about things that we enjoy, or think are important, we are going to continue to get lifeless, boring, and just plain bad writing.
– an example from history class- If I ask students to write about World War II- I should encourage them to do some research about some aspect of that war they want to learn about. Maybe they had a grandfather (or other relative) that fought in the war. Maybe they want to learn more about the weapons, tactics, and battles. Maybe for them, researching about life back in the United States is more to their liking. Maybe a story about the first volunteer nurses, or the women who volunteered in many of the other areas- who knows, unless I give the students those opportunities.
Another important topic from the book is from page 16- and, I think this also correlates to the “Ubiquitous Writing and Learning” article. Teachers need to be open to ‘other’ types of writing- again, writing can take many forms, and we need to appreciate new forms. Simply assigning another ’5 paragraph’ paper could very easily defeat many young writers. We should allow, within some institutional guidelines, the students to explore various aspects of writing kind of like us here at the Writing Project. Many of these new or different ideas may not be for us, but any of them might appeal to our students. Let them explore- we may learn from them!!!! (how dare I say that!!)
One last thought for this blog, then on to other things…
On page 17, Fletcher states that we must redefine success at school. Instead of always insisting on, “Did you get it right?” we should ask the students “Did you take a chance? Did you try something you’ve never tried before?”
In some leadership programs I have been involved with, this is called, ‘stepping outside your box’- so, we should model that behavior, and allow students the same opportunity… Boy, if my students could see me working with a Mac, and the video camera, and the editing, and …!!
I have so many things to say about _What a Writer Needs_, I am not sure where to begin. I know that the purpose here is not to be negative, and overall I am enthusiastic about this text, but I have to get a few things off my chest first. Call them pet peeves. Call them OCD. Call them beefs. But let me call them out.
Page 36. Luckily for me by this point I was hooked on Fletcher’s voice, so I was willing to forgive. But in telling the story of the mud puppy he notes the name has internal rhyme. It does not have internal rhyme, it merely has assonance, the repetition of a vowel sound. That is not technically internal rhyme.
Then there is a typo on page 116. About one third of the way down the page, it says “the” when it should be “they.” I would overlook this sort of thing in a first edition. After all, no editor can’t always catch every single error. Still, I find myself a bit bewildered and even miffed to find a mistake like that in a book that has been widely read and surely reprinted since its copyright in 1993.
Actually, I think maybe I start with my grievances because I am not sure where to begin with what I like about this text. Despite the fact Fletcher’s true focus is on creative writing, I see so many things that translate into more academic, expository writing. (And this shows personal growth. I am aware of the day I would not have kept reading because “I don’t teach THAT kind of writing.”) Let’s start with the first page when he says “Teaching writing is hard work.” Amen to that. I am glad that he goes on to give workable ideas for helping with that hard work, though.
On page 17 he notes “But schools today don’t go nearly far enough to encourage students to take risks in their learning.” Although I want to think I encourage students to take chances, I know deep in my heart I don’t do it nearly effectively enough. I am so restricted by the restrictions and expectations I place on myself. I tend to fall back on the familiar myself, so why should my students take risks. I don’t — at least not enough. I need to be more daring, especially in light of the changing face of literacy in the digital age.
Related, I think, is the comment on page 25: “How can we encourage students to internalize their own high standards for writing? Are we willing to allow those standards to differ from our own?” I need that pasted on my grading hand. I catch myself often ready to comment on a piece of student writing with ideas that fit how I see topic without relaxing to see how effectively the student has seen it.
I am not sure I can list all I liked. “The writing becomes beautiful when it become specific.” That I will post on the wall of my classroom. “The bigger the issue, the smaller you write.” Details. I hold a mantra in my class:”The narrower your topic, the more you have to write about.” Focus is so crucial. Fletcher says the same thing in the chapter on time. Finally, “The writer must have something to say.” How often do I give assignments that inherently give the students nothing to say?
I am not sure that Fletcher comes up with any life-altering ideas in his book, but he states so many common sense ideas about writing that I find myself consistently reminded of what good writing teaching entails. I made many notes, and I am stealing some of the activities he relates and using them in my class.
I had heard much about _What a Writer Needs_ in the past two years. Most comments were highly favorable. At the NWP convention, plenty of people recommended it to UIWP. I see now why they did. Fletcher has produced one effective little book on teaching writing.
Quick Comment…
I had forgotten the comment about the mud puppy having internal rhyme. When I read your response I had to laugh. When I was reading Fletcher’s book, I looked at “mud puppy” and tried over and over to rhyme it. I thought to myself, “maybe I do not understand all of the nuances of rhyming?” Thanks for setting me straight!!
I taught a poetry unit to my sixth grade students, so I feel the need to chime in on the internal rhyme – assonance debacle. The way I learned it, and the way I taught my students, was the following.
I can easily remember them because they are in alphabetical order: Alliteration, Assonance, Consonance, Rhyme, and (separately) Internal Rhyme.
Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words. My students remembered the example “big blue bus”.
Assonance is the repetition of sounds in the middle of or inside words. An example of assonance would be the example from Fletcher’s book- mud and puppy. They both carry the “uh” sound in the middle.
Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds at the end of words. The example we remembered as a class was wind and sand- both have the hard “d” sound at the ends of the words.
(Regular) Rhyme is the repetition of sounds at the ends of words- rose, prose, tank, bank, drive, hive, etc. This is of course the most commonly used element of poetry in middle schools.
Internal Rhyme (as was taught in our book) is the creation of rhyme within lines of a poem. So if the line poem looked like this:
The mud puppy was my bud
Then it would be internal rhyme and assonance, but just mud puppy itself would be assonance, I believe.
When I saw this in the book I actually wrote “assonance” above this section of the book. Now, if you would have asked me this a year ago, I would have had no idea, but it is true what they say, you really do learn more through teaching others.
Now, this is also why I am so frightened to write a book myself. I know how critical I can be of other texts, and I do not want people to say, “doesn’t she know it should have been ‘intents and purposes’ and not ‘intensive purposes’?!” (This one I didn’t learn until two years ago- how did I miss this through all my reading and studying?) I feel like I would need to preface my book by saying, “This is not perfect. Deal with it. Take from it what you will, and leave behind what you do not find useful.”
Scott,
I had the opposite reaction to Fletcher but this was the first book that I have read by him. Funny that while packing up my classroom, I found the same book on the shelf-untouched this year. I moved into the room last August and am still getting to know what all was left for me.
Thank you for pointing out secondary versus elementary point of view. We are always striving to get words on paper and not really worried about genre, interpretations or conventions. We just want thoughts at my grade level. Excellent writing skills. I envy them and will try to emulate you.
Thank you for assigning this book, What a Writer Needs! I was hooked from the beginning on page 4 when Fletcher talked about authentic purpose, “You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you.” It made me think about the assignments I give my students; I need to restructure several of them.
Fletcher hit me again on page 25 about sabotaging risk-taking by our students when we subtly or blatantly set narrow parameters on what constitutes “good writing”. The dangers of writing are huge: misunderstanding, ridicule, failure, rejection. Add to those the frustration for my verbally competent adolescents having to use a very limited Spanish vocabulary with which they cannot begin to convey their ideas. Some don’t bother trying. Others blow me away by their intensity of effort not seen in other class assignments.
I just love how Fletcher expresses ideas, such as talking about safe topics and risky topics, on page 28, “I would rather take my chances on the thinner, though possibly richer, ice of a subject that is more unresolved.”‘
In Chapter 3, Fletcher validated this exciting truth which I have been fearfully hiding for years that I am a writer, perhaps a writer-in-waiting whose time has come. On page 32, he says “writers obsess over words…their sounds…have pet words, favorite and worst words, words imbued with other associationsa and personal meanings.” He’s talking about me!!!
In Chapter 4, there’s a reference to Donald Murray’s description of writers as “bottom feeders” needing to include plenty of physical details. (I’ll never forget my trauma at being marked down on an early paragraph in grade school for using insufficient adjectives. You can be sure that my next paragraph assignment had twenty-some adjectives in one sentence. Some writers are sensitive.) Again and again, Fletcher encourages writing from experience. On page 47, “the writing becomes beautiful when it becomes specific.” Perhaps the gem I will most remember from the book is his quote on page 49 from Richard Price, “The bigger the issue, the smaller you write.” Wow!
All the samples of student and personal writings beautifully supported Fletcher’s points and topics. (I want to read many of the children’s books and novels he quoted from!) I liked that the book is not a collection of exercises to do with students, but there are some ideas worth trying. On page 63, Fletcher explains JoAnn Curtis’ flash-drafts for helping students with content-area writing. Beginning on page 132, he describes focus timelines and dramatic versus narrative summaries. On page 144, we are encouraged to write what we see, not what we are supposed to see. I will also use the line on page 124 about focusing on “one slice of the pie” rather than listing in sentence form all the events of a day, vacation, or whatever.
Finally, I was empowered by Bill Martin’s assertation about the essential importance of voice, on page 79, that “to really own information, to truly enter into the life of a story, poem, or novel, a child must take the words of the text and transform those words in some way.” It is what we require students to do in World Language learning using Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS) methodology when we have them do “retells”. (Hmm. Perhaps I have found my presentation topic and some support for it.) This transformation of information for me meshes with the importance of using student writing examples to encourage the use of different writing strategies to become part of “class culture” (See page 125.) Peer pressure made positive.
I feel indebted to Fletcher for writing the book I needed to read. I sighed with relief at Chesterton’s quote on page 79 that “If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” I’m going to post it in my classroom and then have explaining to do!
Reflections on “What A Writer Needs”
Coming from a complete non-writer point of view. I surprisingly enjoyed this book. It gave me insight to myself as a “writer” and as a teacher. I have over heard people talk about books that, “were an interesting read,” or a “quick read.” Now, I know what they are talking about. Fletcher’s sprinkling of student and personal examples to explain techniques and types of writing were well chosen and entertaining.
I related with his thoughts on a teacher’s role to his/her own students…
1. We can have a deep and significant role in how students perceive themselves, as seen in his own personal experiences with his first grade teacher…“your judgments bore deep holes in my soul.” Our words will literally define the ways they perceive themselves as writers. 2. We must speak to our students with an honesty tempered by compassion. Students can see through fake praise and understand when you have let them get away with mediocre work. 3. But, he goes on to explain that the environment we create in the classroom plays an essential role in the risks that they will take as writers, which ultimately affects the development of their writing. “The best writing classes I visit are taught by teachers who work hard at creating an environment where children can put themselves on the line when they write.”
As a teacher I have experienced a shift in our required curriculum. We now need to cover an ocean of material an inch deep instead of exploring topics in depth. Even though we recognize that this process is academic suicide, we still push on. Fletcher explains how this same idea is detrimental for a writer too. “Too often in classrooms we give children little squirts of language. We squirt at them, and they squirt back… Schools today do not go nearly far enough to encourage students to take risks in their learning… Novice writers often go through a great deal of turmoil, an ear a rich experimentation, before attaining any degree of confidence as a writer.” We need to give students the time to go deep!! This ties in beautifully with another resonating point that Fletcher makes. “I have noticed that the writing becomes beautiful when it becomes specific, concrete. The bigger the issue the smaller you write. Focus does not mean writing shorter pieces. The crucial aspect of focus is that getting narrower allows the writer to go deeper, to get under the surface of a story by delving into one particular part of it.”
These ideas seem like something concrete that I, as a non-English teacher, can take back and share with my students. My final thought/fear as I enter into this “adventure” (the difference between a vacation and adventure is the margin of safety, Fletcher) this summer is that most of the writing samples that Fletcher used from first through eighth grade are far better than what I could ever do. Here’s to hoping I survive, and find a small voice without freezing to the face!!!
What a Writer Needs
Ralph Fletcher
Blog Post: Stephanie Labayen
I found this book to be incredibly practical and wonderful. Without overtly giving lesson plans or “this is the right way to teach writing” essays, Fletcher gave me more ideas for lesson plans on how to teach writing than I received in most of my college education. Much like we discussed with Scott’s demonstration on genre theory, Fletcher stresses the importance of writing with an authentic audience for a purpose. He also stresses the importance of real writing- writing to find your personal voice and not mimicking the voice of the teacher.
He talked a lot about how teachers can hold great writers back. He reminisced his time as a students; he realized how much emphasis he put on his teacher’s approval. Often times, he was crushed when his work did not receive praise, or instead was ridiculed for this work. He said to these teachers, “your judgments bore deep holes in my soul” (11).
Ben Mikaelsen is the author of the popular junior high novels Petey and Touching Spirit Bear. He visited Unity Junior High this year and told us his literary narrative. He was born in a third world country in which education was not valued. He struggled with racism as the only light-skinned boy in his Latin school. He was called dumb and “estupido”, and he believed he was. When he moved to America he thought life would be easier, he had even learned English, but he was mistaken. The American children were just as cruel and relentless. He went through school believing he would not amount to much. Eventually, through perseverance, he found himself in college. He could not spell. He could not construct a sentence. It was a nightmare and impossibility for him to write a paper for a college course. It was the teacher of his creative writing course that changed Mikaelsen’s life forever. His teacher gave him and F on an assignment and told him he needed to see him after class. Terrified, Mikaelsen went to speak with his teacher. Instead of being lectured on his poor grammar and mechanics, his teacher told him how wonderful his story was. He told him, with help, he could be a phenomenal writer. His teacher began to tutor him- teaching him to spell and use proper conventions. Eventually, Mikaelsen became the famous writer he is today.
Mikaelsen’s story demonstrates perfectly what Fletcher is trying to tell teachers- don’t judge and grade solely on conventions. We can find great writers in the most unlikely students.
One of Fletcher’s students wrote an amazing story, and he asked her “Did this all really happen?” The student, Annie, admitted that she contrived the whole story form her imagination. To this, Fletcher replied, “Well, you’re the best damn liar I’ve ever come across. Keep writing!” (16). Similarly, Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, said during his seminar that great liars are the best storytellers. He told a story of when he was a boy. He said to avoid the Vietnam War he ran to the Canadian border. He told a story of how he sat in a boat, fishing with an old man and discussing life. He had to decide whether or not to cross the line. Shortly after the story, he told us he had fabricated the story. Yes, he had conflicted feelings about the war, but he never had gone to the Canadian border. He made a point of saying that a story does not have to be true to be real. His fictional tale thoroughly described what he went through- making the story more authentic than what happened in real life (he went to war).
It was this notion- the notion of lying in writing- that gave me an exciting lesson plan idea. I thought, as an icebreaker for the start of the year, I would expand upon the game “two truths and a lie” in which students give three facts about themselves, one of which is false. In my version, I want to turn into a writing exercise. I want them to write the most amazing story about themselves that they can think of- fiction or non-fiction. They are to contrive a story that they will then share with the class. The class will then have to guess whether the story is true or false. The activity will be centered around the conventions of story writing- including details and expanding upon thoughts- to fool their classmates into believing their story is true, or amazing them with true stories that seem false.
I also like that Fletcher challenges original teaching practices. One of his colleagues, when speaking of outlining as pre-writing, said, “Are you kidding? Listen, would you ever get on a bus if you didn’t know where it was going? Would you?” (21). Fletcher discusses how doing just that- riding the bus to who-knows-where can take you to the most amazing places, to incredibly pieces of writing that may not have been the same if they were contrived in an outline. I want to take this notion further and teach my students many approaches to writing. I want them to learn to outline. I want them to try free writing. They can try to create new text using various graphic organizers, brainstorming, or verbal writing in which they must verbalize everything before they write it down. I want the students to discover what works best for them. Some students may prefer to outline, but they should be able to discover their own writing process.
A few more lesson plans ideas Fletcher gave me were the following:
• Creating a story from one word
o I want to give my students one word. Perhaps there will be three groups with three different words, but each student will be given one word. They will then write a story from that word- whatever they can think of. They will then share the stories and see how differently we think. They will see how many different ways and how many different directions words can travel.
• Adding to their Reading, Writing, and Speaking Vocabularies
o It intrigued me how (although not cited, as pointed out by Gail) he said the general knowledge of vocabulary in our students has drastically decreased. I thought it would be cool to, like in middle school, keep a high school word wall. I thought it would be exciting to offer extra credit opportunities for students that used these challenging words in our class or in their assignments- as long as they used them correctly.
• Safe vs. Risky Topics
o I would like the students to write about a “risky” topic. I want to provoke their thoughts by asking them about the last time they cried, punched something, or laughed so hard liquid came out of their nostrils. I want to evoke great feeling in the authors so the same feeling can be demonstrated and found in their writing.
• Fresh Language (Page 144)
o I want to teach my students to avoid using clichés, which all writers do at some point in their careers. I want them to try to, as Fletcher says, “stalk their inner voice” to find language that is particular to them and not the rest of the world.
• Formal vs. Informal Writing
o I want to give them topics and audiences, and they need to write quick responses to practice informal and formal writing. For example, write a letter to Barack Obama telling him what you think about the BP oil spill or write a review on yelp.com about your favorite restaurant (thanks, Scott).
Stephanie,
I like the idea of two truths and a lie in writing three stories. I will use a version of that in my class of fourth graders during our unit on adjectives. This might come back in Monday’s presentation. THanks for the idea.
Just to share… I loved Petey!! I cried and cried. I read this book with my daughter years ago.
I am so going to steal the “Two Truths and a Lie” idea. I start my class off with a research project called “My Story in the World.” I have been wanting to add a creative element to the end of the unit. Your idea fits perfectly!
This is why I love UIWP.
Steph,
I also have to comment on the Tim O’Brien reference. It has been nagging me since I read your post. First, I fell in love with O’Brien’s writing in grad school when a friend gave me _Going After Cacciatto_. I used it for years as an example of a killer opening. And the story you referenced blew me away when I read it because it so accurately hit all the emotions I felt when I signed up for the Draft during Vietnam.
I have a colleague who teaches _The Things They Carried_ and she has the students write a “True War Story.” She gets amazing stories from the students, and, like O’Brien,” you are never sure where the non-fiction ends and the fiction begins.
At the end of the chapter on “Mentors,” Ralph Fletcher remembers taking a class with Peter Bien at Dartmouth. The course compared James Joyce and Nikos Kazantzakis. On the last day of class, Bien, “a balding, bespectacled man and leading authority on Kazantzakis, put down his notes and spoke to [the class] directly, ending with a pleas that [they] ‘keep reading, keep buying books.’” The course was over; the students were beside themselves; so they gave their teacher a standing ovation. [If you want to see what Dien looks like, go here: http://web.me.com/billbuschel/Graffiti/Welcome_to_Graffiti.html. He’s still an active scholar.
What a writer needs, Fletcher suggests, is a teacher who is passionate about ideas and presumably his subject. There is a quality about Fletcher’s story that reminds me of the movie Dead Poets Society, when John Keating inspires his students to a love poetry. While I remember enjoying the film, I am aware of how romantic it is. You can watch the trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Ly4DGYAEE
I know Bien was passionate about his ideas but I wanted to know what he did. Fletcher’s narrative does not tell us much about particular practices. The only image he gives us is that of Bien pleading with students to keep on reading—and to keep on buying books.
I think many of us have had teachers who meant so much to us. Maybe we did not give them a literal standing ovation but we might have wanted to do so.
I’ll confess I never got a standing ovation but I have had classes where I sensed that students were becoming as engaged with the material as I was. I wonder if the passion is for the subject or ideas—or is it a passion for the student. The way Fletcher describes it, Bien’s sense of humor was “fine,” his scholarship was “impeccable,” but what really mattered was his “passion for ideas.”
Maybe a passion for students and their learning and a passion for ideas are not so different. Maybe you need both.
A dear friend tells me the story of her son learning to play classical guitar. His teacher was an accomplished musician. One day she asked him if he ever just listens to music with her son. The teacher was taken back. As a teacher, I presume, he saw his role as teaching (and not listening, savoring, etc.). The message I get from this story is that we need to allow time for students (and for ourselves) to enjoy writing.
Time is a very precious thing in public schools. With more and more emphasis on testing and increasing standardized test scores, we have little time to open plan.
From the first chapter (“Mentors”), I highlighted the following sentences:
“Most students write far far better than they will ever know (p. 14).”
“Risk allows children to outgrow themselves (p. 17).”
“Even the most skilled young writers can absorb only a certain amount of this fire, a limited amount of direct instruction, at any given time…The fuse we light is a slow-burning one (p. 18).”
I think the point Fletcher was making was that as writing teachers, we need to point out what students already do well. I see the importance of teacher as mentor in this case. Just as we need mentors to guide us through unfamiliar territory and, sometimes, to push us forward, students need mentors who will help them to take risks.
In the second chapter (“Freezing to the Face”), what sticks out to me the most was the reality that many students write to the teacher’s expectations. They try to figure out what the teacher wants and then do their best to stay within the confines of the assignment. Fletcher encourages teachers to allow students to “internalize their own high standards for writing.” This reminds me of Hannah Kim’s literacy video. She developed her own high standards for writing as she wrote throughout her life. As she wrote, she found her standards, her voice, her identity. I think Fletcher is proposing that there is powerful writing potential in young children and teachers need to point out and encourage students to develop their potential.
“A Love of Words” was one of my favorite chapters. It reminded me of one student I had last year in fourth grade. She just loved words – new words, strange-sounding words, quirky words. She would write them in her writing composition notebook to use later in her writing. I used to think that students who did not use complex vocabulary in the classroom did so because they did not enjoy words, but found that when we played vocabulary games, or explored root words, they would be fascinated with words!
In “The Art of Specificity”, Fletcher proposes that “writing becomes beautiful when it becomes specific.” There is power in using significant details to say what writing about bigger events cannot evoke.
Fletcher’s explanation about “voice” was helpful to me. I cannot write about something if I don’t first read about it and think about it for a while. However, when teaching my students to write expository texts or research papers, I have found that they do complain throughout the research process, especially about taking notes, and paraphrasing the information. Fletcher quotes Zinsser: “students should be learning a strong, unpretentious prose that will carry their thoughts about the world they live in,” which means they should believe in what they are writing. We should be able to hear their voice in their writing. I think I want to focus more on helping my students get to this point. How do I do this?
“A Sense of Place” resonated with me the most. All my memories, internal images, conversations with people from the past, reside within the places I have lived and traveled through. Fletcher put it well: “Place is an excellent starting point because places live in the deepest parts of us. In one sense, we never leave them: We soak them up, carry them around, all the various places we have known (p. 114).” That’s great: “we soak them up.” That is how I feel about the places I have lived in – I have soaked them up, they have become a part of me, and they live deep inside me. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can see my home in Kenya, a map of the roads in Nairobi, the market, and the tea and coffee plantations. If we could get our students to connect to the place they live in and write specifically about it (place and details) in their own voice (or internal voice), I wonder what that would evoke? I’m curious to know what my students notice in their homes or around their homes – the objects, insects, noises that only they notice, think about and tuck away inside their minds. When my co-teacher and I first taught a unit on “personal narratives” to our fourth and fifth graders, our students complained that they had such boring lives. Some of Lucy Calkins’ lessons taught students to notice the “small moments” that happen in their everyday lives – raindrops collected on a spider web, a puddle of water, a bird’s nest – anything that made them stop and notice for a minute – and write about it. I felt this lesson was so irrelevant for my students because they had already made up their minds that no one was interested in their small observations. We read some personal narratives and modeled this for them but they were still uninterested. Maybe it’s partly due to television and the internet.
I liked this book quite a bit. It made me think about what might be happening with my students when I ask them to write. It also gave me some new ideas about how I as a teacher can be supportive of them.
One of the first ideas I got from Fletcher’s book is about the importance of teachers serving as “mentors” to novice writers. Whenever anyone shares something they have written, they are taking a risk and the best way to respond to that is to point out something they did well. Buoyed by recognition of their success, writers who have much more to learn are then likely to be more open to hearing suggestions about what they might do differently. As Fletcher says:
Even in a ‘bad’ piece of writing, the mentor reaches into the chaos, finds
a place where the writing works, pulls it from the wreckage, names it,
and makes the writer aware of this emerging skill with words. Careful praise
of this kind can fuel a writer for a long time. (14)
This is an approach that I would like to intentionally incorporate, as my own tendency has rather been to focus on all the little things that need to be improved – often overwhelming students with my own perfectionism rather than giving them something of their own to hold onto and build from.
Fletcher does go on to point out that being an effective mentor does not imply praising whatever the writer does just for the sake of nurturing good feelings. One of his points is that good mentors do have high standards, but the way in which respect for those standards (and respect for the efforts of novice writers) is communicated makes all the difference.
Other qualities of effective mentors, according to Fletcher, are the ability to honor the distinctive writing styles of our students (especially when they differ from our own), the ability to encourage students to take risks (and to take that into account when evaluating their writing), and the ability to see the big picture (including the fact that all writers have “off” days and sometimes may just need to get one particular assignment or story “behind them”). These are all things that I would like to work on in my own teaching and interactions with students around writing.
A second point of Fletcher’s book that I found very helpful was his discussion of how small details can be used to “evoke big issues.” One example that Fletcher gives is from a piece he wrote about a quadriplegic doctor, Joseph Panzanella, and his relationship with his wife. The detail Fletcher used to illustrate the Panzanellas’ connections with each other was the fact that she woke up every two hours every night to turn him in bed, so that he would avoid getting bedsores. From that detail, Fletcher was able to structure his whole portrait of this couple’s connections with each other. As Fletcher points out, writers who succeed in using small details effectively have certain characteristics:
…[they] are not afraid to let their readers get close to the raw materials
of their stories. They trust that, given enough specifics, the reader is wholly
capable of making the leap from the concrete to the larger issue. (49)
In my own teaching, I have seen that some students already have a sense of the power of specific details to make a larger point in a more subtle way. But I wonder how I might teach this awareness to students who do not already have a sense of the power of details – maybe by asking them to identify specific details from the sources they would use (a primary source, a text or a film) and to brainstorm together about how that detail might be used to make a larger point.
In a similar vein, I found interesting Fletcher’s discussion of students’ ability to play with time in their writing. When I have my 12- to 14-year-old students write on historical topics, I often impress upon them something that a visiting journalist once observed about how she crafts stories: “Chronology is your friend.” In other words, when you are trying to tell a coherent story about something that happened in the past, one of the basic organizing principles is to recount what happened in chronological order. For my students, figuring out this order when writing about events that they did not personally experience is often a challenge in itself. But it can be a necessary first step to telling a story in a way that others can follow.
In some respects, the difficulty of managing and using time effectively in writing may be developmental. As Fletcher observes:
Children have difficulty controlling time in their writing because they simply
do not see it as an element to control. They are oblivious of it. (123)
He goes on to point out that children have to learn that time as it has actually unfolded is different from time as used in a story – and that as writers, there are different ways we can intentionally use or “play with” time in writing (thinking about the future, dwelling on the past, and not just giving a blow by blow account of what happened). Becoming aware of this distinction can then free young writers to play with this dimension, just as they may already be doing with other parts of their writing.
One of the strategies for playing with time that Fletcher highlights is the choice to focus on a particular part of an experience in order to tell a deeper story.
The crucial aspect of focus is that getting narrower allows the writer to go
deeper, to get under the surface of a story by delving into one particular
part of it. (133)
This echoes Fletcher’s earlier emphasis on the power of specific details to evoke big issues.
There are many other parts of Fletcher’s book that I appreciate. The way he talks about the different examples of student writing included in the book is a good demonstration of the mentor’s ability to see strengths in any piece of writing, no matter how elementary. I like the inclusion of the lists of books that one can use to illustrate different aspects of the craft of writing in the back of the book, as well as the suggestion that picture books be used, even with older students, to identify the features of particular parts of writing.
Finally, I found myself agreeing with several of Fletcher’s basic contentions, including the following:
You don’t learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises.
You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you. (4)
…many writers actually discover what they have to say in the process of writing
it. The writer’s challenge is to keep this sense of discovery intact; this keeps
writing fresh and vibrant. (21)
What a writer needs
How is it that writing “textbook” can grab my attention? That is what I kept telling myself as page by page of Ralph Fletcher’s “What A Writer Needs”. The writing is just what is needed to break down the writing issues that plague many of the classrooms today. I feel that Fletcher uses a matter of fact writing style to convey that writing is for everyone, and he definitely uses examples to that fact.
Writing sample after writing sample draws my amazement. The fact that many of the writers are elementary school kids is amazing. There is depth and scope to their writing that I cannot even begin to realize and I am 35. I look at the examples, especially on pages 57 and 58 of the book. Fletcher is able to turn a few simple lines by a young girl into a great poem just by asking her a couple of questions and details. It is amazing to me.
I wonder how it is that I can relate some of these tactics into my classroom. Is it really that easy? What can I do to improve my abilities as a teacher to be more like Ralph? The whole concept of a mentor is what I see as the key.
As a first year teacher I was assigned a mentor to help me get used to teaching and be a sounding board for me. I think that a mentor or sounding board is what I need. Maybe there is someone at the institute, we shall see.
I enjoyed reading “What a Writer Needs.” I do have to admit that I did find it limiting in that the focus seemed to be more toward fiction writing than is my preference. That said, I found the first chapter to be superbly written and extraordinarily applicable to my own teaching, both inside and outside the classroom.
The focus of the first chapter is mentoring. Mentoring in the classroom is challenging in that you must simultaneously focus on task completion, classroom management and actual instruction at the same time. Much of the mentoring I do, both formal and informal, occurs outside of the classroom.
I’m a particularly effective coach and mentor when working with my extracurricular science competition (ExploraVision) teams largely I am afforded two luxuries I don’t have while working in the classroom. First, I have extra time (we perform ExploraVision activities during lunch, after school and on the weekends). Second, I am afforded opportunity to work with small groups of motivated students. I have previously established positive relationships with the students and we know each other well prior to the onset of team/prototype development.
Fletcher divides the mentor role into six components. The following paragraphs address each of his points regarding what I currently do effectively. My next entry will focus on how I can improve beyond what I currently do. Fletcher’s sixth assertions are stated and addressed below.
1) A Mentor Has High Standards
ExploraVision competition is a competition in which students work together in teams, comprised of two to four students, to develop a technology they think will be significant twenty years in the future. ExploraVision is the world’s largest technology competition, with 14.000 to 20,000 students participating each year. Because I’ve coached several national winning teams over the past fifteen years, the bar for incoming teams is very high. Students can see past winning team projects early in their team development, critique those projects, and then use critiquing skills they develop throughout their own process of technology prototype creation and final presentation.
2) A Mentor Builds on Strengths (and Interests)
I meet with each team for about 45 minutes each week as they go about selecting their technologies of focus. I serve as guide, providing text-based resources in addition to online resources dealing with current and developing technologies. I encourage the kids to get to know their technology(ies) well and make them their own. The kids become authorities regarding those technologies and take ownership in them. At that point they are successfully able to meld their interests in developing early prototypes of the technology that they collaboratively develop.
3) A Mentor Values Originality and Diversity
Originality is key in prototype development. I know that the kids and I are more creative as a team than any of us are individually. The kids come to see that as our conversations continue and as initial prototype drawings and sketches are developed. All interactions are positive and upbeat. Since everyone plays a role in project development throughout the process, the group as an entity makes decisions, and the final resulting prototype is always something that is well beyond what any of us initially visualize.
4) A Mentor Encourages Kids to Take Risks
There is no such thing as failure in initial prototype development. The kids realize that early on in the process. Development is a playful process in which we, as a group, continually modify and massage the developing prototype, optimizing function, efficiency and potential utility.
5) A Mentor is Passionate
There is no better game than one in which people work together to develop something, whether it be a technology, an ideology or a society. The classroom is used for development of factual knowledge and current understandings of realities. The extracurricular teams serve as opportunity for all us to take our knowledge and collective creativity to go beyond anything that currently exists today. Much of my reinforcement as a teacher comes from being able to accompany my students on the next step beyond what occurs in the classroom.
6) A Mentor Looks at the Big Picture
In the end, we collectively work to establish a prototype of a future technology, examine the strides required for its incorporated technologies to become a reality, project technological strides that will be required in the next twenty years, and present both the positive and negative consequences that will come about when the proposed technology prototype becomes a reality.
How do you take a lengthier book and try reflect on it in one gulp? This will be interesting…
With my head hanging low, I admit that this is the first Ralph Fletcher book I have read. And yes, the only reason I read it was because it was required reading. I know his name, respect him as an expert in the field, and have read excerpts; but never a whole book. His style was easy read.
As I reflect I’m asking: Is this a book about what a writer needs? Or is it about what good writers already do? I feel that Fletcher takes the vantage point of what those who write well and judge what successful writing is. We need a standard, but I wonder if Fletcher was taking ALL writers into consideration? Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t feel the emphasis on what all writers really need. Writers need language development. We’ve got way too many kids without oracy skills, lacking vocabulary development… whatever name or names you want to put with it. It begins much earlier than any one of Fletcher’s “essentials” or “crafts”.
That aside, I did pull many things from the book that validate what I do in the classroom, as well as offer up new things I will use to guide my writers to develop their craft. I look forward to delving into his lists of mentor texts he provides in the Appendix.
I was thinking of that same question, Wendy–”Is this what writers need?”–but you’ve figured out the follow up so well–”Is this what good writers already do.” Thanks for helping me come to terms with that.
Are you sure it wasn’t given to you at some point in Unit Four Schools? I found a copy on my shelf but maybe it was a CB give away and not Unit 4. Fletcher fits nicely with Calkins, don’t you think?
This book, indeed, supports our efforts with Lucy Calkins. The mentor section alone validates why I start each and every conference with something that particular writer is doing well. On the occasion that it is difficult to find something, I always lean on the “You have certainly chosen a topic that is meaningful to you!”
“Assonance is refrain of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase “Do you like blue?”, the /uː/ (“o”/”ou”/”ue” sound) is repeated within the sentence and is assonant.” Here’s the phrase I found on Wikipedia. And we discussed this at lunch a little today – slant rhyme? near rhyme? And I’m not just defending Fletcher – just intrigued as only an English major will be. A crucial difference is also that “mud puppy” does not have the same sounds at the ends of word – does it have the leeway to fit into the idea of “rhyme”?
Ok, Judy. Now we get into dueling definitions. The sources I found on line — for the most part — indicate “rhyme,” of whatever stripe, must move from an accented common vowel sound through the same following consonant sounds. “Mud puppy” doesn’t fit by that definition, which is, of course, the definition I cut my teeth on. Most of the sources I found for “assonance” point to similar vowel sounds but dissimilar consonants. One source I saw noted that assonance is controversially linked to internal rhyme, so we are not alone in this little debate.
And since our colleague Laura has weighed in my favor, we can’t chalk it up to crazy English-major obsessions.
As a whole, I enjoyed What a Writer Needs by Ralph Fletcher. Often when I read non-fiction I have to sit down and take it in small doses. A chapter here, a few paragraphs there. If I don’t take the time to digest the book, I have absolutely no idea what it was about. This book was a very different read. It was clearly non-fiction but his prose style held my attention more like a novel might. The liberal use of student work and examples also helped to make this book easy to understand and very easy to connect to. I found that I finished it in about two sittings.
As I read, I also underlined more in this book than I normally would. One of my first underlined passages comes early in the book when Fletcher says, “We need to redefine the success ethic, not just in writing classes but during the entire school day, to mean not only ‘Did you get it right?’ but also ‘Did you take a chance? Did you try something you’ve never tried before?’” (17). This question touches on a topic that we discussed yesterday (I can’t remember if it was in a small group or with everybody!). Writing is a process that helps you explore and learn about a topic. Writing does not have to be an end product that demonstrates and proves what you know. I think that this often gets lost in the classroom. Students are scared to take risks with their writing. It seems very appropriate that this quote comes in the “Mentor” chapter. Mentors are the people who truly know your writing and who are able to see and point out when you are taking risks and when you are playing it safe. I feel like having a writing mentor is something that needs to become more common, especially for younger writers who may not be as sure of themselves.
A little farther along in the book, I underlined a few bits about TV that I found confusing. Fletcher says that TV’s influence is “insiduous” and quotes the novel The Art of Fiction by John Gardner, “Many student writers seem unable to tell their most important stories – the death of a father, the first disillusionment of love – except in terms of TV. And … TV is false” (26). This quote really threw me. What does he mean that TV is false? Fletcher does not explain this at all, he simply agrees with it. What does he mean when he says that students are expressing stories in terms of TV? Does that mean that they are expressing them in short 30 minute chunks? That they are using stock characters? Is there a laugh track involved? What? All of this seems like it could be said of written fiction too. The definition of fiction is that it’s something false. There are many deep, meaningful TV programs just as there are many trashy novels. I’m just not sure what he’s getting at here. Did anybody read this differently or have an idea?
I also enjoyed the chapter in part one, “A Love of Words.” I love to play and fiddle with words. I enjoy just hearing and tasting and rolling new words around. Unfortunately, like many I am guilty of occasional drill and kill vocabulary in the classroom. I tried to mix it up by having students draw pictures of words, act out words, and use words in their own writing but ultimately I knew even as I was teaching these lessons that the students were not leaving the classroom with any more love of words than they had when they first entered (unless they were already a word-lover). I really like the idea of encouraging students to attach more emotion to words by identifying favorites and just discovering new words without endless worksheets. The students may not remember all of those words after Fletcher’s favorite word lesson but they do leave the room with an increased feeling of appreciation of the fun words can be. I feel like positive experiences such as this are going to do more for kids in the long run than vocabulary exercises. I can actually remember doing this activity as a Freshman in high school. My favorite word that year was “imp”.
I didn’t underline much in the second part of the book. This half was interesting but Fletcher didn’t say much that struck me as revolutionary. What did capture my attention in this part were the many wonderful student examples he used. I think that peer examples are a good way to show students different elements are writing. It seems like it would be so much more effective to take an excellent story that a student had already written, read it to the class, and then explain, “See what he did here? He started right in the middle of the story just as the car chase begins and it’s getting exciting. Writers call starting in the middle like this ‘in media res’” rather than explaining what in media res is and forcing students to try and duplicate it. In the first example, students could be encouraged to play with an idea because they liked it and their peer’s use of it impressed them. It seems like a more organic way of developing a concept.
The last idea from part two of the book that I want to mention is Fletcher’s theory of “write small about big things”. This idea really stuck with me. All too often students write as if they are answering a question. They write just enough so that you can tell what is going on and then they are done. They don’t seem to realize how important it is to really dig in with details and reflect on a topic. I found myself guilty this year of yelling, “MORE DETAILS” at my students pretty regularly. I think this is something that many English teachers do. Unfortunately we don’t always take the time to explain why more details are needed. Just what do they add? Explicitly showing students how you can use small details to make important points sounds like something that could be a great help in student writing. I would love to figure out or find a lesson plan that does this well.
What a Writer Needs helped me to examine my own writing and teaching. As a writer the explanations and concepts in part 1 gave me new ideas to work with. The second part of the book didn’t seem to have much in it that couldn’t be found elsewhere other than the examples but it is a sort of handy reference book for teaching parts of writing. This book did help me to step back from thinking about my students’ writing as a finished product and instead consider their writing more as a form of play where they need to explore before they can begin to reflect on being a writer.
I think we had pretty similar responses to the book, Jen, and I had forgotten about the TV slam. To me, it came off as sounding merely old-fashioned–I like how you call his logic into question.
This was a revisiting for me. Ralph is an old friend. Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he is one of my writing and teaching mentors. I’ve read this book before – and often refer back to it while teaching, but not for a long time. I was surprised that on this rereading I was much more critical. Before I begin tearing the book apart in keeping with standard response protocol perhaps I’ll say why I value Fletcher’s work so much.
The first thing that springs to mind is that he is a writer. This may appear a simple point, but it is important to me. Many professional development books about writing bore me, but his work is a pleasant reading experience. It is not just this, however, he is also an experienced teacher of writing and it is the combination of these factors that I appreciate. Related to this point I love the way he shares both his own writing and children’s writing – both of these practices I believe are essential in the classroom. (Although I do find it frustrating that he focuses so much on personal narratives.)
Fletcher writes, “Young writers are deeply vulnerable to teachers’ appraisal of their stories, poems, or essays. We must speak to our students with honesty tempered by compassion: Our words will literally define the way they perceive themselves as writers.” Fletcher’s words are a powerful reminder of the huge responsibility that we share as educators. He specifically chose to put this chapter at the beginning of his book, and I believe this was a good choice. What we say and do matters, unfortunately, sometimes immersed in the busy everyday chaos of teaching it is easy to forget.
From an emotional point of view this chapter on mentors made me feel a little angry and upset. Where were my mentors at school? I felt jealous of Fletcher who appears to have had all these wonderful writing teachers. It seems outrageous to me that it is not until the graduate level that I have found wonderful writing mentors. I feel deeply grateful that this has happened for me. I wish great mentors for all students.
Fletcher also chose to place the chapter, “Freezing to the Face,” which is about risk, early on in the book. Again, I believe this was a good decision because writing and risk are so integrally connected. His distinction between safe and risky topics is a useful way to present topic choice to students – although I think you can choose a safe topic and write in risky ways or visa versa. The questions that Fletcher poses – “ How can we encourage students to internalize their own high standards for writing? Are we willing to allow these standards to differ from our own?” – provide important points to reflect upon. There are no easy answers and I appreciate the fact that Fletcher does not try to convey that he has it all worked out.
The chapter, “A Love of Words” also initiated a strong emotional response from me. He talks about how as a child he would keep word lists and trade them with friends and how in high school he admired teachers with the most remarkable vocabularies. Again, I could not help but feel jealous of his educational experience. Words and spelling were so closely linked in my school that I came to despise words. If you used big words, people made fun of you.
I’d like to write more. I’d write to like a lot more. But for now I will put this post up.
This was a revisiting for me. Ralph is an old friend. Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he is one of my writing and teaching mentors. I’ve read this book before – and often refer back to it while teaching, but not for a long time. I was surprised that on this rereading I was much more critical. Before I begin tearing the book apart in keeping with standard response protocol perhaps I’ll say why I value Fletcher’s work so much.
The first thing that springs to mind is that he is a writer. This may appear a simple point, but it is important to me. Many professional development books about writing bore me, but his work is a pleasant reading experience. It is not just this, however, he is also an experienced teacher of writing and it is the combination of these factors that I appreciate. Related to this point I love the way he shares both his own writing and children’s writing – both of these practices I believe are essential in the classroom. (Although I do find it frustrating that he focuses so much on personal narratives.)
Fletcher writes, “Young writers are deeply vulnerable to teachers’ appraisal of their stories, poems, or essays. We must speak to our students with honesty tempered by compassion: Our words will literally define the way they perceive themselves as writers.” Fletcher’s words are a powerful reminder of the huge responsibility that we share as educators. He specifically chose to put this chapter at the beginning of his book, and I believe this was a good choice. What we say and do matters, unfortunately, sometimes immersed in the busy everyday chaos of teaching it is easy to forget.
From an emotional point of view this chapter on mentors made me feel a little angry and upset. Where were my mentors at school? I felt jealous of Fletcher who appears to have had all these wonderful writing teachers. It seems outrageous to me that it is not until the graduate level that I have found wonderful writing mentors. I feel deeply grateful that this has happened for me. I wish great mentors for all students.
Fletcher also chose to place the chapter, “Freezing to the Face,” which is about risk, early on in the book. Again, I believe this was a good decision because writing and risk are so integrally connected. His distinction between safe and risky topics is a useful way to present topic choice to students – although I think you can choose a safe topic and write in risky ways or visa versa. The questions that Fletcher poses – “ How can we encourage students to internalize their own high standards for writing? Are we willing to allow these standards to differ from our own?” – provide important points to reflect upon. There are no easy answers and I appreciate the fact that Fletcher does not try to convey that he has it all worked out.
The chapter, “A Love of Words” also initiated a strong emotional response from me. He talks about how as a child he would keep word lists and trade them with friends and how in high school he admired teachers with the most remarkable vocabularies. Again, I could not help but feel jealous of his educational experience. Words and spelling were so closely linked in my school that I came to despise words. If you used big words, people made fun of you.
I’d like to write more. I’d write to like a lot more. But for now I will put this post up.