Writing community and the teacher's roles

Teachers have very high social status in China, and also in many other eastern countries. Everyone respects teachers, not only in schools, but also in the society. Many girls wish to be teachers for teaching is a well paid, well respected and a very stable job, plus, this profession may possibly bring them a good husband – men always want to marry a woman with over three months’ vacation each year. And the men, themselves, also enjoy the stableness, good salary and the power in the classroom this job may bring them.

In the classroom, teachers are regarded as the absolute authorities, who are supposed to be the major source of the knowledge. Teachers need to know everything, and are supposed to be able to answer all the students’ questions; otherwise, they are not doing the job and will lose face in front of their students.

According to whole language philosophy and Boice’s article, teachers need to reexamine their roles in the classroom; they need to readjust themselves to be not only facilitators, but also co-learners. Frankly speaking, I was more fascinated by this idea that teachers could, and should learn together with their students than I was relieved to comfort myself that teachers do not need to know everything.

However, at the same time, I realized that we, as writing teachers, seldom write, or say, seldom write together with our students, not to mention we share our writings with them. Why wouldn’t teachers share with students their own writings? On the one hand, teachers should be superior than their students, and reading their own writings out aloud to the whole class might be thought of as showing off in front of a group of lower-leveled learners; on the other hand, probably due to the fear, and the embarrassment, even the teachers wouldn’t have sufficient confidence and courage to share their articles.

After I came to the U.S., I was surprised to find that not only we were often asked to write, and share with our peers, the classroom teachers would now and then share with us their writings, even though it was just an improvised paragraph she finished while we were writing. I was amazed not only by how good the improvised article was, but also by the teacher’s willingness to merge into us students as a writing community. I felt we were connected and our distance was suddenly shortened.

Um…I am thinking of overcoming my own fear and sharing one or two pieces of my own writings with my future students. Hopefully I won’t be too nervous or embarrassed to have my voice trembled…

Writing workshop and peer response

In my memories, I don’t think we had the experience of sharing our writings with our peer learners and receiving feedbacks back in school. Writing is always regarded as an individual thing; no matter it was a weekly journal, a diary, or an academic writing that the teacher assigned.

Yes, back in middle school days, some good articles will be read aloud in front of the whole class by the teacher, but that was just for the appreciation purpose – to allow the whole class enjoy how beautifully the article was written. Gradually it turned out that we admired that writer much more than we appreciated the article. No further comments were invited from the rest of the class, and that article was regarded as the final product – a model article.

Back to my own teaching days, I also assigned writing tasks, on specific topics. But due to the big class (I had 120 college students in one Reading and Writing class), most of the time, my young writers’ reader, and their only reader was me. Occasionally, I would find one or two outstanding “model article”, which conveyed creative thoughts and refreshing air; which also carried a plenty of common mistakes that many other students may make while writing in English. Having got the permission from the writer, I would copy and paste the article to a Word document on a computer to share with the whole class, and also read aloud in front of them. Although the writer’s name had been hidden, and the students were very active in “pointing out” the mistakes, I felt something was not right... Yes, the poor writer’s face was getting redder and redder – he/she was embarrassed to some degree. Although I was still inviting students to appreciate how the paper was structured and how carefully some particular words were chosen, my students’ attention had gradually transferred from “appreciating” to “error correcting”. Will the young writer still be willing to “share” the writing with the rest of the class next time? I doubt.

This Tuesday, we had a writing workshop. We were still using one “sample article”, and the comments from the rest of the class were invited. But this time, our aim was not to “fix the article” or to correct the mistakes; instead, we were to tell the writer what we saw and what we felt about his article. I truly believe that it was a healthy way to encourage the growth of a writer by letting him/her hear the voice directly from the readers, realizing his/her own strengths and weaknesses. It is a community where people trust each other and are honest with each other...

I will definitely adopt writing workshop and peer response in my future classrooms, to build up their confidence in writing, and to help them become a better writer, and, of course, I hope I could be given a smaller classroom.

Imagination

Boice mentioned in his article that what is as same important as motivation to help writing is imagination. While I was reading, I couldn’t help asking these questions: Where does imagination come from? Is it something we were born with, or something that we need to train ourselves to be good at with?

My husband used to say that I was one of the most imaginative people in the world, because I would always have the wildest and weirdest dreams during the night and to tell him when I woke up the next morning. But am I an imaginative writer? If you ask me to answer this question, I’ll never admit it, because just like many of my students, staring at the topics which were irrelevant to my life, and holding the pen in my hand on the blank paper for couple of hours, I still, couldn’t generate anything creative or interesting to write about. I would and could write up an article freely and fluently only when I, myself, had the life experience about the topic. To be precise, this type of articles does not belong to the academic writing category. They are often journal like articles restating what I had gone through, which left me deep impression.

Does imagination have anything to do with artistic ability or handcraft making type thing? If the answer is yes, and imagination does require a lot sense of art, then probably I’ll include myself to the non-imaginative people section, because I am always clumsy doing those kinds of stuff.

Boice’s article also talked about how information collecting may help generate imagination… I kind of doubt it…I’d rather say it is the information that we collect and take in that help with our thinking -- to think about a wider range of matters, which we perhaps pay little attention to, and to think about a particular issue more deeply, more critically. Could that also be termed as Imagination? Is imagination part of our thinking process? Why each time when I look at the word imagination, I could only think of something wild, unreal, and non-existent in this world, which we create only in our mind?