Identifying Your Writing HEROES

Who were your writing champions as you went through the formative years of learning? Who do you recall as a writing hero; a teacher who promoted writing through their own actions?

Sadly, it wasn’t until I reached my tertiary education that I actually encountered such a person. The late Tom McCabe encouraged me to become editor of the college newspaper. He talked about writing in a way that previous teachers had conspicuously failed to do. He re-ignited my passion for writing poetry. He talked with passion and authority about the joy of writing.  He was a stand out champion for writing!

I certainly had teachers who stood out as beacons for literature and reading. People such as John Harris, my Grade 6 teacher,  who read the poetry of Henry Lawson and A B Paterson with great enthusiasm. He also introduced us to the work of Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling. His reading was intoxicating. He had a way of taking the listener with him as he read. He made Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, come to life in my mind.

In high school John Simpson and Fred Male were passionate champions of great literature and poetry. We were exposed to a wide range of literary models for which I am now eternally grateful. I recall reading, ‘Prisoner of Zenda’, by Anthony Hope Hawkins, ‘Hawaii’ and ‘Caravans’ by James A Michener, ‘Robbery Under Arms’ by Rolf Boldrewood  as well as the works of Shakespeare and the poetry of John Keats and Elisabeth Browning because of their efforts to shape their students as life long readers. I also read a series of detective novels by Arthur Upfield. Upfield's books featured fictional Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte('Bony') of the Queensland Police Force.

But for all their efforts around reading, and for their consistent urgings for us to read, I do not recall them having the same voice for writing. I wonder how students today think of us in this regard? Do they see us as teachers who champion both reading and writing? Have we influenced them to such an extent that the siblings of the literature family have a place in their future plans?

Do you have a writing champion that stands out in your educational journey? I hope you do. Things have improved dramatically for me over the years, I now have several writing heroes. How fortunate is that?  

Developing A Writing Kind of Life

This post first appeared on Two Writing Teachers as part of the Summer Guest Blogger Series. I really like the journey the writer, Ruth Metcalfe, has embarked upon. I felt it was worthy of sharing. I encourage those of you who have made the important step of developing your own writing life to read about Ruth's discoveries. It may instil greater confidence to continue...
*Follow the links to discover more.

GUEST BLOG POST: My (Wanna Be) Writing Life–and How It Changed My Work with Kids

Posted on Friday June 10, 2011 by guestteacher

Ruth Metcalfe infuses her classroom with joyful and purposeful teaching. She is passionate about teaching and learning, and loves thinking about how theory looks when put into practice in the classroom—the place where theory and practice meet. In her 20 years as an educator, Ruth has taught first, second, and fourth grades and provided professional development and coaching at both the building and district level. She has also served as a literacy consultant, presented at local, state, and national conferences, and co-authored Building Bridges From Early to Intermediate Literacy, Grades 2-4.
Ruth lives with her husband and three children in northern Indiana. This school year, she was lucky to teach and learn alongside 23 first graders.

I have a confession to make. I don’t talk about my life as a writer. Or at least I didn’t until this year. It’s difficult for me to think of myself as a writer. Yes, I know that’s strange coming from someone who has published “for real.” I’ve tried. I started journals and writer’s notebooks. I talked the talk in my classroom; however, I wasn’t really backing it up with action.
About a year ago, I joined a writing group. Ruth A. has posted about our group, and it’s the best thing I’ve done as a writer. It has made me pay more attention to my writing life and how I could talk about it like I talk about my reading life. It has impacted my classroom practice. It’s still something I have to think deliberately about and I will probably always feel more like a reader than a writer. The difference is that I have made my writing life more visible. I also took some deliberate action—one thing at a time over the course of a year.

• I started blogging about my professional life (http://teachingwithjoyandpurpose.blogspot.com/).
• I started a blog (http://slicesfromthesofa.blogspot.com/) for slicing on TWT and did the SOLSC.
• I learned that I prefer to have different notebooks for different purposes.
• I talked to some of my colleagues about my writing and encouraged them to write.
• I wrote what I asked my kids to write.
• I started carrying a small notebook.

Sharing my writing life is making a difference in my classroom. I was able to pull out my idea notebook to show F. when he commented that he started, but didn’t finish a lot of stories because he had lots of ideas he didn’t want to forget. We got out my idea notebook and I showed him how I use it. We stapled together note cards to make him a tiny idea book. It worked for him, and he taught three

other kids how to use one—he even made them idea books.
I started verbalizing what I was doing when I made lists, jotted reminders or took notes so the kids would see me doing these writerly things. Soon they started doing them too, and writing became a more natural part of our classroom lives. I showed the kids my notebooks and talked about how I used each one. Several kids started carrying their own notebooks to and from school. C. would run for his observation notebook when it started to snow, during thunderstorms, and when our seeds sprouted.

Our comfort level grew together. I talked about my writing group and how our workshop was sort of like that in some ways. I shared how I was growing as a writer when we talked about how they were growing as writers. During the SOLSC, we bonded over the shared experience of learning to pay attention to the world, identifying possibilities for writing, and remembering things like writers do. We shared the agony of days when that little blank box felt bigger than we were. I started responding differently to my kids—writer to writer—and they started responding differently as well. We felt like a true community of writers.
The important thing to notice is that when I deliberately started acting like I was the kind of person who does writerly things, and when I talked to others about my writing, it impacted my classroom practice.
Recently, Ruth A. posted about how often we as teachers teach kids to plan for their reading lives, but how we almost never do the same for writing. She’s right. Reading plans seem natural to most of us—after all, it’s easier for many of us to think of ourselves as readers than it is to think of ourselves as writers. Maybe we need to start by making writing plans for ourselves.
So this summer, I made plans for my writing life. I plan to continue blogging about once a week on both blogs—slicing should be easier than usual, since I love to write about family life or things I notice outside my windows. Summer is good for that. Blogging professionally will be a bit more challenging, since I mostly reflect on things that are happening in my classroom. However, since I do have some professional reading planned, I’ll blog about what I’m reading and thinking.
I set a goal to write at least once a week in the notebook I use to write about our family. It sits out where I can see it and is next to the spot where I sit with my coffee in the morning. I’ll continue to carry with me the tiny notebook for ideas and the one I use for lists and the other stuff of day-to-day life. I’ll meet with my writing group and plan to work with some poetry ideas that are in my head but not on paper, and will work more on the story idea that came to me this spring. They’ll ask to see what I’ve been doing, and I don’t want to show up with nothing.

How about you? What plans will you make? I know it’s not easy, and you may have started many times before. Start small, but keep starting. It’ll make you a better teacher of writing and when you talk with your kids about your writing life, you will become a true member of the community of writers in your room.|
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Stone Poetry- Assisting Writers to Build Vocabulary and Text Structure Knowledge

I recently read a newspaper account of an approach to poetry using Lego blocks used by Daniel Donahoo that was highlighted at the Emerging Writers Festival in Melbourne. Donahoo glued words to individual Lego pieces and then constructed shapes that served as 3D poetry. The poetry created is both a literate and visual art form. Donahoo photographs each word sculpture and then posts to various internet sites and venues around town. Donahoo’s first experiment with Lego poetry was to print out the words to Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ and stick them on Lego blocks assembled into the shape of a large dragon like creature. As I read this, I wondered where I could take the idea of three-dimensional poetry…

I settled on using washed stones and combining them with the deconstruction of original poetry pieces. Because I chose to work with stones, I decided to choose short pieces of verse. Imagine working with John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ you would need a truck load of gravel!

A search through my poetry collection unearthed Charlotte Zolotow’s delightful books of short poems, ‘Seasons.’ I selected ‘My Shadow’ a poem containing a mere twenty words. I then wrote each word on a separate stone with a permanent marker. Following this, I presented the stones in a container and trialled them on a willing participant.-In this instance, my wife and colleague, Vicki. The aim of the exercise was to use as many of the words as possible to create a poem. You are faced with using only the words that are available, -and using them to guide your word creation.

The stone poet works to create an original poem, using their own line breaks and as many pieces as they see fit. It also challenges the ‘writer’ to consider language construction when juxtaposing the words available. The economy of words one associates with poetry is emphasized in the task. The fact that opportunities for a range of student responses is possible, adds to the open ended nature of the task. Every participant is able to experience a measure of success.

Following the creation of the poem, Vicki was curious to view the original and compare the two pieces. Both of us see potential for extending the vocabulary of students in this exercise as well.

Working with second language learners was a further motivation for pursuing this type of activity as it emphasizes text structure and encourages vocabulary development.

If you try this, I would be pleased to hear how it went…