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Moving Beyond the Teacher
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.Daniel Hudson Burnham
Write about a dream or plan for your future.
Choose an audience for your writing: yourself, your parents, your boss, or your best friend.
Share your experience with a partner. Discuss how the audience you chose impacted your writing.
“As a communicative act, writing is undeniably a social event between the writer and audience. In addition, writing is also a cognitive act, one often accomplished by an individual writer whose audience is only as immediately present as the writer’s imagination, knowledge, and experiences allow.” p. 115MacArthur, C. A., Graham, S., & Fitzgerald, J. (Eds). (2006).
Handbook of Writing Research. New York: The Guildford Press.
Things we write each day
Who is the audience?
How does the audience impact the writing?
Write about a way someone has helped you.
Who was your intended audience for that writing?
How would it have been different if you were writing to the person who helped you? Or to their parents or boss? Or at a ceremony as you introduced that person to receive an award?
“By the end of elementary school, students seldom write unless they have to and then only because it “counts.” p. 266
Graham, S., MacArthur, C. A., & Fitzgerald, J. (Eds.). (2007) Best Practices in Writing Instruction. New York: The Guilford Press.
“In many classrooms, children often write to an audience of one – the teacher – on a topic defined by the teacher, for a reason specified by the teacher. In such situations, children have few opportunities to develop their own goals and little invitation to do anything other than report their existing knowledge.” p.116MacArthur, C. A., Graham, S., & Fitzgerald, J. (Eds). (2006). Handbook of Writing Research. New York: The Guildford Press.
So, you know about silly bands right ? and how popular they were last year and how they are just occasionally found at the dollar store now ? Well, that is kinda what happened to my blog (and a lot of other Crozet blogs as well.) Last year in fourth grade all of Ms.White’s lit class loved our blogs. I was on them 24/7 and loving that I could put stories out there and have the whole class read them.
Then the fourth grade teachers heard us talking about how much we loved our blogs and then they told us that they could become one of the things that we did for the daily five (which I hated) and took all the fun away from blogging. This year I came back to school ready to blog but that was not to last. I was told that the 5th graders would be taking a writing S.O.L test and that put a lot of pressure on me, but there was more. Then I started to take mastery for writing and got so many suggestions from my teachers that it took the you out of writing because I felt like I was under pressure to remember all the things that they had put on my shoulders and that was just terrible. So again I felt like blogging was testing how smart I was and if there’s one thing I hate, it’s that. So now I write on my blog when I have to but never for the heck of it. So, in conclusion, writing, what I once loved to do, ruined my blog.
You can hear the leaves crunching under your feet and you feel the magic. It’s like breathing in the immortality, and that’s only part of the magic. The heart of the magic is the fairy tree. A beautiful tree even in the winter, it has white blossoms in the spring. It has bending branches going all around the little lake that is in the heart of the tree canopy.It seems like I’m in a dream when I visit the tree. My sister comes to the tree also but the magic must be shared with more than two people. So my dad and my mom come in sometimes also, but most of the time it’s just Eleanor and me. We work more than we play down there, so that it can be even more beautiful than it is already. (Under the tree, we have some ponds and we get the stuff (like sticks) out of the pond.)We have some trees down there that we call the X trees where we learn to ‘play like fairies.’ We have a place we call “big rock” the place where we learn ‘to work like fairies’ and then there’s the fairy tree, the heart of the magic. Can you guess the different world in my back yard now? If you guessed fairy world that’s right!
I always like to ask the students questions related to blogging and working online. This year’s exam was no different. As I have in the past, I had a question on the exam that asked the students how they felt about publishing our work to the world.
“How do you feel about producing media for a public audience? Does it make things different knowing that the things you produce will be placed online for anyone around the world to enjoy compared to just keeping them in the classroom?”
As in the past when I’ve asked a question like this, there was a variety of answers. A number of students commented on being nervous about this, of being unsure of how people would react to their productions. A lot of students said they were motivated to do their best work by this happening. While encouraged by these answers, none of them were new. I had heard these things before. What was interesting on this exam was the number of students who answered this question by saying that they felt sharing their work online was the default option. They mentioned things they had put online throughout the school year both in the classroom and outside. Sharing their stuff was what they expected. http://www.evenfromhere.org/?
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