Raise or Raze?

When considering teaching students audience and purpose, it has always been a point of contention with me…not the actual terms and definitions, but the ones outlined for us “preparing students for real-world writing demands vs. providing a sheltered environment for students to experiment and grow.”

While I selected the real-world writing demands as the area that I feel I support the most, I found that, as a teacher in a Title 1 school, I often found myself providing the more sheltered environment for the students to experiment and grow. The students I taught didn’t read, couldn’t read, and definitely couldn’t write very well either. I had them write so much anyway because I wanted to give them the power to use the written word. I have always been a big supporter of the text as power.

While I wanted to have the students write letters, create blogs, and figure out ways that we could somehow get involved in our local community, I instead had to teach the students basics like punctuation, subject-verb agreement, etc. I had to slowly get them writing sentences, and then build on it by having them write narratives. I had them interview each other and then give a oral presentation of that classmate. When they finished that – then I had them write it out. Slowly they began to get comfortable with writing. We didn’t have enough books for them to read anything (honestly, they couldn’t have handled a book anyway) so we read excerpted stories out of the school textbooks.

By the end of the year, I was able to bring in some real-world writing activities. While they couldn’t use computers, we wrote out our blogs on paper and posted them all around the classroom anonymously. I then had students walk around and read each other’s blogs and also write comments on them on the bottom. I did manage to work some things in at the end, even though I wanted to do it all year long. Sometimes the student needs demand something way beyond what the teacher is equipped for and rather than quit (these students had 2 teachers quit on them within the first month of teaching…I was the third one) I saw the need to just be patient and reach them where they were at.