Education

Writing Teacher’s Block

By Anthony Rebora — December 04, 2007 1 min read
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California Teacher Guy discusses the problems he is having in teaching writing to his students. The materials he received at a PD institute, he says, haven’t helped:

I don’t write the way they want students to write. I just write, just let the words flow, and then I arrange and rearrange and cut and paste and hack and chop until the resulting product is pleasing to read. I can’t tell you how I do it, I just do it—and it works.
But all that crap about brainstorming and prewriting and outlining and whatever else they tell you to do? I don’t know how to teach kids to do that stuff. Besides, I work with a bunch of kids who really don’t give a damn about words, except spoken words. Writing is the farthest thing from their minds. How the hell am I going to get them hooked on writing? I’m at a loss. I feel incompetent.

Find yourself in the same struggle? Other teachers have flocked in with some useful advice.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Blogboard blog.