"Recess on a Page" and Writing on the Walls

In chapter 3 of his book, Mechanically Inclined, Jeff Anderson writes that composing text is the most important activity that students can do. Anderson's main suggestion for allowing students to write is to implement writing journals into the class. He fully details the sections and content that should be present in the students' journals. Though I thoroughly enjoyed his description of all of these sections, I want to spend the majority of this time discussing the first section of the journal and how using this method affects students.

The first section of the journal should simply be for writing. Anderson says that this should be the largest section in the journal and that it should never be corrected by an instructor. It is a safe place for the student to document their thoughts and freely write. The writing section is described as "recess on a page." I really like Anderson's thoughts about providing a writing journal for students. He writes that teachers can allow for personal reflections in this section or even give specific prompts, which may consist of only one word that are meant to serve as inspiration for the students. Students are then given the opportunity to share their writing, but they don't have to if they do not wish to. I particularly like the way that Anderson presents the journals when he has his first class of the year. He reads to the students from a moving memoir about bullying and asks them to use their journals to discuss bullying in their own experience. This not only serves as a way to get the students writing, as everyone has had experience with bullying, but also leads into his class policy about bullying. Students are prompted in a creative way to think about bullying and it reminds them of the ugliness that goes along with it. Most importantly, Anderson has begun the process of creating a writing community in which students are able to respect each other and their writing. 

Anderson also discusses some rules that go along with the writing journals. He stresses that pages should never be torn out and that students are to make their own corrections at later times. Additionally, he discusses that when he has students doing a free writing exercise, they are told that the only way that they can do the exercise incorrectly is to stop writing before he tells them to end their thoughts. 

One of the other sections of the journal is a place for students to record "Gems," which are full sentences or paragraphs that they find in anything that they read. Anderson writes that this creates a way for students to appreciate grammar like it is art. This concept also pairs well with Anderson's earlier discussions about creating a literature-rich environment by pulling sample sentences to share with the class to teach grammar. In this case, students can share their own and feel even more connected and important in the process of understanding and learning grammar in context. 

In chapter 4 of Mechanically Inclined, Anderson introduces the idea of skipping wall posters, and instead hanging large sheets of butcher paper from the wall in order to create wall charts of what students are learning in the class. This hands-on approach allows students to watch teachers add to the list, add to it themselves, and use the list in class as a tool for reference. Anderson points out that this tactic is not only helpful to students, but also can help a teacher who is not fully comfortable memorizing everything that they have taught. I really like this idea and think that it applies to all kinds of learning types. Anderson writes that mechanics is a visual skill, and I think that this is a very fitting way to help students visualize concepts. Additionally, students are able to add to the list using sentence strips. I think that the idea of letting students add to the list really portrays the idea that everyone is there to help each other and learn together. 

The other reading for this week, chapter 4 of Weaver's Grammar to Enrich & Enhance Writing, alerts readers to the fact that sometimes integrating grammar in writing is not enough. Even if a teacher is having students write sentences of their own, these must be connected to a broader purpose, along with being further discussed. Weaver writes that students should have the opportunity to examine grammar in a way that they are considering context, purpose, audience, and possibilities. Without fully discussing and applying grammar in writing, students are left disconnected, still believing that grammar is a separate subject and not applicable to reading and writing real literature. A particularly interesting example given is that of a teacher taking a paragraph from Lois Lowry's The Giver and changing the grammar to make the sentences short and choppy. The students are able to discuss the effect of this type of punctuation and allowed to change it. After creating their own versions, they are presented with the original paragraph and asked to discuss why Lowry made the decisions she did and how this works for the text. I really liked this example and think that it further demonstrates that grammar and how it works in writing is a type of art form.