Keeslers Writing World

I went to the "Teaching the good stuff in the middle conference this last weekend. I really liked the two keynote speakers. The first one was a woman by the name of Linda Perlstein who wrote a book called Not Much Just Chillin: The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers. She studied middle schoolers and the things they do in and out of school in order to try and understand what is going on with them. Perlstein looked at the relationship that middleschool children have with their parents and why they don't understand each other. The middle school student has a lot of developing and changes going on during this time and parents don't understand what's going on with their children. She worked with many children and found that a lot of them use Myspace and other weblogs to get their thoughts and feelings out.
The second speaker was Anne King. Anne spoke more about the stages that middle school kids are going through. She had a great presentation and used a lot of humor to relate the information to everyone. King stressed the fact that middle schoolers is normal despite our often confusion with what they are going through. She also compared middle schoolers and the stages they go through to that of young infants and children in terms of their needs.
There were also three breakout sessions that I went to on various topics. The first breakout session was called "Normal is Only a Setting on a Washing Machine." This session featured Ms. Jacque Melin and discussed Differntion Strategies. Melin believe that it's important to assess students before teaching to discover what exactly they do know so that if a student has no experience with certain things, we as the teacher can help them out. Also this way we don't cover material that they already know. Most of Melin's presentation focused on different ways to mix students up so that they could help each other out and benefit from each others strengths and weaknesses. I think this is an awesome way to teach! I think that students should benefit from each other and learn from one another and not just the teacher.
The second breakout session that I went to was "Writing Across the Curriculum: Making It Work in the Real World." The presenters for this session were Kari Scheidel and Nancy Patterson. This session talked about how to use writing in all aspects of the curriculum in order to help students apply what they have learned. I really liked this session. I thought it was great that Scheidel had students writing and doing literature circles at a young age. Typically you don't see some of this until at least high school and I really thought that it's a great idea to start doing this early.
The last breakout session that I went to was a group discussion that was led by Tina Greene and Tim Reeves. This session was about ways to manage the middle school environment. Both speakers are vice principals and both have very different systems that they use. I really didn't enjoy this session as much as the others because it was more for people who were already teaching. I guess it did give me a few ideas, but I think it was far more useful to those who are already in the field and dealing with students.

I really enjoyed Anne Lamott's excerpt from Bird by Bird. I think the reason that I liked it so much was because I feel like she identifies with amatuer writers. She's basically telling us all that every writer goes through much of the same things. They have trouble starting the paper, their writing is shorter than they expected, they write horrible first drafts. I think that to many this is kind of relieving to hear because some of us have taken writing classes or had that teacher that expected that every word of your paper be absolutely perfect. I think it's very important to let students know that we all go through these sort of things and that they need to just sit down and get things on paper. Then go back and fix it up some. Their writings don't have to be perfect the first time and that they need to utilize others and the opportunity for polishing to make their writing great.
I know that I often can't plan to write a paper. I need to just sit down at the computer and start writing. I think this is very important for studetnts to realize this happens and it's ok. I as a teacher shouldn't expect that my students are just going to sit down and have their paper all planned out and that it's perfect. Some of the greatest authors have went back and edited their work years later. This is an important fact that students should know. It shows them that writing is a work in progress and that no writing is every perfect. There is always going to be room for improvement in anyones writing.
I believe that through experience with writing students will be able to plan or write a paper with less and less difficulty. For this reason I intend to take time out of my class each day for students to just write a journal of whatever they would like to write about. This won't be graded other than for participating in it. I know that we do this in our class, but I never really did spontaneous journals in high school and I think that it could be very beneficial in helping students with their writing.