Too Much to say...Never enough blog space!

In the case of Spandel, I would like to say that I agree with teachers writing along with their students. My God! What an idea! It comes as a complete shock to me, because I never had a teacher write with me or share any of their writings with the class. I'm shocked because it's so simple and effective, yet this method of teaching (simple as it is) was never imlemented in any of my classes throughout my many, many years of education. After the initial shock wore off, I realized that I would have loved to read some of the work from my professors and high school teachers whom I had idolized growing up. I remember thinking that my English teacher in high school was brilliant. However, this was only because she was the authority in correcting my work. I just knew that in order for her to do that, she must've been an expert on the subject.

Now that I'm facing the same challenges that she did, I think differently. I never knew her at all. I think that a teacher sharing their writing with their class is critical in teaching at least one important lesson; that teachers are human and fallible as well. We place so much emphasis on teachers being brilliant, well-rounded and appearing so much more knowledgable about writing, that there is much segregation between students and their mentors. I always feared handing in my work to her, because I knew that she would (brilliantly) criticize and "edit" my papers, and I was always writing as if she were my only audience--always trying to impress her. Years later, I now know how human she actually was. She made many mistakes throughout her career as a teacher, and many of us didn't learn perhaps what we should have. She spent a lot of time making us believe that she knew more than we did, and we believed her, because she had more symbols and fancy punctuation habits than we did. And for that we lost our faith in her and ourselves. How brilliant was she?

If I would have been able to connect to her through her own writing, I believe our relationship would have been completely different. Instead of learning how brilliant she was, I would have learned how to create masterpieces in composition and would have expanded my horizons in writing, with possibilities not previously thought of. I would have had an actual teacher, a friend who could spark my creative lust and eradicate the fear of exposing my inner speech. I wouldn't have been afraid to open myself to her in return, and would have had more confidence in my own writing because I'd be learning from her on two different levels, through her eyes and her methodology. I do believe that teaching is a team effort (where students and teachers are considered equal). We all know that teachers learn from their students as well as the students learning from the teachers. How then, can teachers remain so distanced from their students? And wouldn't we be more confident in our teachers ability to teach if we had an understanding of their gift? After all, having confidence in a teacher's ability to teach is crucial for students because they have to trust that this person not only knows the material, not yet having mastered it completely, and that they are willing to continue to polish their talents. We have to teach learning and we have to learn how to teach.

In school, I was raised with the idea that once you graduated college, you knew everything, or at least much much more than your students. How sad, and how untrue. We need to impress upon our students that the idea of teaching is about continuously learning, as a team, in an open and creative atmosphere which will allow our best efforts to flourish. As the book and some others in our class already stated,"Good writers are not always good editors..." I wholeheartedly agree.

As for the idea of writers writing for their own "style and preference", I have one question: How do we not? I mean, how do we keep our own individual ideas separate from a piece of writing? We have to be in there somewhere, right? Otherwise, we might as well have robots writing our papers for us. And yes, we all do have our own way of composing, brainstorming for topics and methods of learning. However, when I read about Teachers implementing different styles and techniques into their classrooms, I don't wish to give them credit for the idea. Rather, I automatically assume that it'd their job to teach that way and should have been doing so all along. It's almost as if people are debating as to whether to adopt the strategy. Diversity in writing is the only strategy--and it shouldn't need to be discussed, just an automatic delivery. I can't say that every teacher I ever had used the old paradigm in their classrooms, or that they diidn't influence my creativity in writing, but I do know that the newer models of today are a hell of a lot more influential and effective. When you find something this good, you don't question it, you just use it--period.It seems sometimes as though teachers today are trying to influence other people that the new methods of teaching are effective and worthy of acceptance. I say, no explanation necessary. It works and we can prove it by the thousands of kids across the country right now tht are actually learning to love to write, and doing it effectively. Case closed...