A Classroom of One’s Own
As scary as it sometimes
seems, I will one day have a classroom of my own. I will have the eyes of
dozens of children and students trained upon me and expecting ME to be the
authority figure, to teach them something. It
terrifies me, but that’s mostly because I haven’t done it yet. I haven’t
had to teach an entire class how to write. Hell, I’ve never taught anyone how
to write so how am I supposed to know how to start now. For me the prospect of
teaching writing is like “learning a sport entirely with coaching and no actual
play.” I know all the little tricks to writing, but I’ve never practiced
imparting that wisdom to another person. By the way that particular quote comes
from Nystrand, but I didn’t read that. I found it in a very inspirational
little paper by Larson and Maier. Larson was observing the extraordinary
classroom of Maryrita Maier, a teach r who believes that “all her students were
fundamentally authors [who] contributed to an overall atmosphere of excitement,
perhaps even a magical enthusiasm for writing.” This belief led Maier to create
a classroom where writing wasn’t some assignment that you had to complete
because the teacher told you to. It wasn’t so heavily structured that there was
only one thing to write about or even one way to write about it. Her classroom
was an experiment in giving students a voice in their writing by making it a
cooperative and ever changing game between her students and each other.
If I was choosing a
model for how I’d like to build my classroom one day, it would be like Maier’s.
I’d want my students to not groan when I tell them that they have a new writing
assignment to do. I want them to be so excited about writing that my biggest
problem would be to get them to stop writing. I want them to experience the joy
of expressing themselves through the medium of writing and to enjoy it with each
other. One might think that I have
already a wealth of knowledge for how to structure an English class through all
the years of schooling that I have had. But I have never had a class like Maier’s.
My English class’s never inspired me to pick up writing as a form of
entertainment. In many ways my English classes actually turned me away from
writing. It wasn’t until college that I have began to see writing as a valid
and enjoyable way to express myself. Sadly, I am not alone in this view. Many
of my fellow peers have their own accounts of horror stories about writing that
make them shudder in a fear that is traditionally reserved for the boogey-man.
I remember my first English class in community college. The gray colored walls
that lacked any flyers or posters to liven up the mood. The dim lighting and
the rows of disinterested students facing and trying not to make it apparent
that they were sleeping while the elderly professor with receding white hair
talked, and talked, and talked , and talked. About what I could no longer tell
you. I do remember from the class one piece of literature that makes me scared
even to this day. VIRGINIA WOOLF’S A
ROOM OF ONE’S OWN. This book was boring, it made no sense, and what’s
worse is I had to pretend that I knew what I was talking about while writing a
huge essay about the stuff that I didn’t understand. A great big thank you to
Spark Notes is needed for helping me get past that one. I couldn’t read or
write about this piece of literature because it didn’t interest me and that’s a
problem that I often hear about from my colleagues.
Maier’s classroom had
the students actively writing about things that they liked, that inspired them.
They were encouraged to share their own personal lives and the teacher even
shared hers in return. This is the big idea, the reason why I cannot draw fully
upon my twelve plus years of schooling. The reason why my peers hated to write
and read so much in school. It’s because we didn’t write about what was
important to us. I remember hearing all the complaints and bitching about the
newest assigned reading that we had to do. I oft over heard how much my peers would
complain about having to start reading To Kill a Mocking Bird. I’d hear them ask
what was the point of reading the Bean Trees? Why are we wasting time reading Of
Mice and Men? What the hell is Shakespeare even saying? These are the same
peers whose faces dropped like a horse whenever the topic of another essay came
up. The peers who sat twiddling their thumbs and staring at blank pages because
they hadn’t the foggiest idea how to start. I remember several English teachers
who had methods that were similar to the Schaffer Method that we saw in class.
The plain, simple organization that had
Topic Sentence
- · Main idea/ thesis
Body Paragraph 1
- · Topic sentence
- · Quote
Body Paragraph 2
- · Topic sentence
- · Quote
Body Paragraph 3
- · Topic sentence
- · Quote
Conclusion
- · Summarize what you just wrote in different words.
I found that I didn’t always have to stay with this method, and often I
didn’t or I mixed it up a bit. But other students stuck to this because they
didn’t know what to write about. They didn’t know how to structure and quite
frankly I’d be surprised if they cared. And just like how teachers using the
Schaffer method generally saw “rapid improvement in the writing of struggling students,”
the students who followed the system were sure to pass the class. They
struggled, but as ong as they followed the formula they would be fine.
I don’t want my class to
be like that. It turns people away from writing and reading and by the time
they get to college, if they even get there at all, and take a GOOD English class
that lets them rediscover that writing can be fun, it’s too late. I will never
be as prolific a writer as I am a reader and it’s because I didn’t get into it
as a child. I consider myself lucky that I picked up voracious reading as young
as I did. Maybe it had something to do with being a loner, a shy kid, but I am
glad I found a joy in reading. My niche was fantasy fiction writing. Stories of
knights in armor battling monsters and demons. Of space battles that challenged
how I thought about the universe. A lot of my morals, values, and outlooks that
I hold dear come from the books that I continue to read. And yet I could never pick up writing for
myself. I wouldn’t consider myself a bad writer. In fact, sitting here in my
chair pounding at the keyboard at night writing this essay I must say that I am
proud of my skills. But I don’t write a lot for myself. I remember, on several
occasions, sitting in my room and promising myself that every night I would
write in my journal. I bought myself a nice bounded composition book and for a
few nights I was diligent and wrote down a few pages. But something always happened
and I skipped a night. Sometimes I had to stay up a little late and do that math
homework that was due. Maybe my family had a party to go to and we didn’t get
back until it was late and by then I just wanted to sleep. And so I’d skip a
night. And another. And another. And another until it became clear that the
journal I had promised myself that I would write sat on a shelf, never to be
opened until I had to clean my room.
When I began this essay
I thought about all the times I didn’t write for myself. All the essays and paragraphs
that I was assigned in school. All of the boring topics that I had to squeeze out
onto a blank piece of paper. All of the headaches and hardships and late nights
that writing has brought me over my education were the very first things that
came to my mind when I decided to write. And while school still dominates most
of my writing, I am starting to take it back now. The English classes that I
have taken here at Chico have shown me that reading and writing consists of
more than what I thought. It isn’t just something that we do because we are
forced to in class. It’s a living, breathing medium that changes every time its
read or a new thing is written. These classes have given me a breakthrough on
what reading and writing truly encompass. It’s not just the classic and
required books. It doesn’t have to be published and bound between the covers. It can be texts that we send each other every
day. The online memes that speak truth through comedy and sarcasm. The posters that
regale us with how fun their events are. Real reading and writing is alive and
it needs to be shared. I am going to have a classroom of my own one day. Maybe
I will just be a science teacher in middle school, but even in science there is
reading and writing. I need to be able to address the areas that my students
are struggling with and inspire them to want to write and enjoy what they
write. That is what I will try to accomplish when I get my classroom. I will probably
fail the first time, but failure can be a good thing. After all, even Maier
didn’t get it right the first time. And she might have been more terrified than
me when she first began.
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