Teacher as Reader and Writer

I have enjoyed and learned from our literacy readings this quarter.  The Routmann book and the Elbow article have given me a lot to think about and they will help me teach writing to my students.  Both emphasize the need for students to write frequently and for sustained periods of time so that our students write fluently and effortlessly.  They also emphasize that writing need not always be graded.  And when it is graded, you need to be careful to look at the whole as well as the parts and focus only on what the writer (or class) is working on to move forward and improve. I love Routman’s continued modeling in class of “this is what good writers do”.

I am thinking that if your teachers do not employ the writing techniques recommended by Routman and Elbow, you will likely need Lamott to help you write when you are an adult.  In my writing group this week, I learned that not everyone loves Lamott as much as I do.  I understand that she can be depressing, irreverent and somewhat repetitive.  I also know that as pre-service teachers we are not exactly her target audience, but despite all of that, for me she has been magical and what I needed to help me write.  I have laughed at her black humor when she described some of her bad days when she sometimes had the urge to “drink gin out of a cat dish” and “grab her infant by the ankles and swing him around her head like a bolo”.  Only on hearing the perspective of others did I realize that this might be viewed as “whackadoo” by those saner than me.

Lamott says that she wants her students to “see the bleak unspeakable stuff” to turn the “unspeakable into words- not just any words but if we can into rhythm and blues”.  The writers who can do this are the writers we want to read and compare notes with.  They take us deeper into ourselves by letting us see deeper into them.  So  perhaps it says a whole lot about me that I find myself “comparing notes” with Lamott and empathizing that we all have bad days, but we pick ourselves up and move on.  The book gave me insight into her struggles with writing and allowed me to look at my own writing in a new light.