Blog 3 Student's Choice

This week's readings provided a lot of insight for me about how to create an effective classroom. Graves tells us that "the writer must find his or her own subject" (Graves 115). He later goes on to describe that "if young people do not care about what they are writing, if they do not own their own work, or better, if their writing does not possess them, then it profits little to lecture on parallel structure or rhetorical strategy or whatever" (Graves 115). I completely agree with this. Why do teachers make their students write about something that does not interest them what-so-ever? Is it really benefiting them? Some people may argue that with repetition it will only increase the students' writing proficiency. For those of you in EDUC 416, you know that my favorite quote from last week's readings was, "Just doing something doesn't automatically make us better at it, especially if we do whatever it is under duress or unwillingly or without concern for effectiveness, the way too many students approach writing. I just think of my own children when it's their turn to do the dishes or when they are told to clean their rooms. Though they may have done both chores many times, simple repetition doesn't always make them better at either of them" (Dean 6). If we follow Murray's ten elements and grant our students the silence needed to write about whatever they want to write about, then we might be surprised with the results.