What is writing? This has been the topic of conversation and a resonating question for me this summer. Writing exists in many forms and perhaps more than we realize. Sure it’s poetry and prose, songs, articles and letters. But it is also now text messages, emails, instant messages, blogs, tweets and statuses. It exists with abbreviations and emoticons. It lives in each person that ever types anything on a keyboard or picks up a pen. It is perhaps the most universal thing we have as humans, even over “mathematics” because not everyone can do math, but everyone can write.
The thing that most strikes me is that everyone can write.
Thus, I already have a long list of ideas to take to my classroom to increase student writing. As a language teacher, I should have remembered the only way my students will learn Spanish is to do Spanish. Somewhere along the way “methods” classes beat that idea out of me. The only way kids learn to ride a bike is to ride one. The only way we learn anything is by doing it. Educational theorist Roger Schank says that until we are five, we learn by doing. Then formal education starts and we are expected to learn by memorizing facts and sitting at a desk. We lose part of our humanity that way. I want to bring my students’ dignity back and allow them to do Spanish, not simply “study” it. Through writing and reading and speaking, they will actually learn Spanish and hopefully find a new voice or rediscover an old one.
I am currently rediscovering my own voice:
I was a dreamer
Always singing sweet dreams with my pen
Forever recording the thoughts of a child
Rainbows and animals danced in the fields of imagination
And I, a young dreamer, was helpless to follow
Never did I step back and see the mirage before me
Never did I consider the figments of light anything but real
A dreamer must never contemplate too closely the reality of illusion
I was drawn to words as I was drawn to the fantasy
creations painted from the depths of my soul streaked across my lined canvas
And I, a dreamer, slept awake
Shannon Clegg
