In the interest of full disclosure, I have a confession to make.
I am a writer.
Not a writer like the vast majority of homeschooling-mom-writers, though. Not a curriculum book writer, or a funny parenting book writer, or a touching parenting book writer, or a writer of essays for moms.
No. My ugly confession is that I am a fantasy and science fiction writer. (Among many Catholic/Christian homeschooling mothers, this confession may count as the sort that begins, I like to tear the wings off flies.) I am not a well-published fantasy writer, I do not have a novel to my name, but I do have a few stories that have been published here and there. One of my stories was even included in a "Best of" anthology, once upon time. (Before twins, that would be.)
My purpose in revealing all these lurid details is not to brag or seek attention. But before I start writing about writing, I thought I should give you a little background about how I think about writing. I am a fiction writer, and the skills involved in writing fiction are often very different than those involved in writing expository (nonfiction) essays, research papers, or reports. For instance, I know how to craft a metaphor, or a decent description of, say, snow lying in scars across the land, or maybe even the way a character turns his head. Dialogue is not my strong point, but I can do it. I have a sense of story and a sense of how different people might act in any situation. I have a healthy fear of adverbs. All of these elements of story and style do bridge the gap between fiction in nonfiction in many ways -- almost definitely more often than the techniques of nonfiction writing go the other way -- but I am a better writer of fiction than I am a writer of nonfiction articles or, say, blog posts.
All this is to say that while I have strong opinions about how to encourage fiction writing in my children (basically, to leave them alone and let them write, providing advice when asked), I have often been at a loss as to how to teach them to write an essay or a report.
This has always puzzled me. After all, shouldn't I, as a writer, have more knowledge about the teaching of writing than the teaching of math or science or history?
I mentioned yesterday that I listened to most of Susan Wise Bauer's "A Plan for Writing" audio lectures over the weekend (I haven't listened to her lecture on literary analysis yet, but I have listened to the elementary, middle years, and high school lectures). In certain circles, The Well-Trained Mind gets a bad rap, I think, mostly from people who have tried to follow it in every little detail and burnt out, or from people who envision following it in every little detail and burning out. I just bought the third edition of the book (which includes the basis for Susan Wise Bauer's writing program) because I find myself picking it up every year, mainly to find resources, but also to weigh the advice on methods against what is working and not working in our house at the time. As time goes on, I find myself agreeing more and more with her assessment on how to teach writing, and the audio lectures make the material in both the new and earlier editions of the Well-Trained Mind clearer.
First, I'll lay out the problems I have with most writing curricula:
- Many of them contain really ridiculous and pointless exercises along the lines of, "Imagine you are a pencil." I've written fiction from about the age of 12, but I have always hated these exercises. Why should I imagine I'm a pencil? What reason can it possibly serve? Can't I do something more interesting like imagining I'm a warrior on patrol in the jungles of Serabithia? Why does anyone care what a pencil thinks? In addition, if you are not creative at all I can see how this sort of exercise would make you hate writing. It's not actually teaching you how to write, as in the skills of writing. It's teaching you how to pull meaningless ideas out of thin air so you can finish your work.
- Many writing curricula provide examples of writing whose quality is mediocre to poor, stylistically. It is the sort of writing that exists only in reading textbooks or on standardized tests or in writing curricula. Examples of descriptive writing are usually adjective and adverb heavy and border on (and sometimes topple into) the cliche. I cringe when I read it, and I don't want my kids to imitate it.
- Some writing curricula that I might otherwise choose to use require lots of parental time and involvement, making it very difficult to implement in a large family with lots of little ones.
- More creative writing curricula are sometimes also very unstructured, making them difficult to figure out how to use, OR they provide little preliminary how-to instruction for young writers who have a hard time deciding what to write, planning their writing, or simply putting their thoughts into words.
Now, add to this the fact that my oldest child is a child who, at various times in his life, has had to deal with fine motor difficulties, problems with putting thoughts into words, difficulty in organizing his thinking to write about it in the first place, and very strong opinions about what is pointless, and maybe you can understand why I have often simply thrown up my hands about writing. Sometimes we have consciously let writing go, figuring that he simply needed time to mature. (In many cases, this has been the right thing to do.) And other times my search for the perfect curriculum has left me with no curriculum and an inconsistent approach to writing that I doubt did much more good than choosing an imperfect curriculum and adapting it to our situation.
Next year my oldest will be in 8th grade and my daughter will be in 6th. My daughter is a much more natural writer (she is also a girl, which matters in this case), but I am beginning to feel that it is time for me to become much more organized about teaching (actually teaching ) writing to both of them. While SAT and college application essays are beginning to peek over the horizon for my son, lessons I've learned with him (the oldest is the guinea pig kid, right?) have convinced me that I need to get my act together a little earlier for my daughter. In the beginning, I was more interested in encouraging my kids' creativity. As I've grown older and gathered more experience, I realize that there are some skills which can be taught and used in the service of creativity. I've also learned how to ignore some grumbling.
Susan Wise Bauer lays out a "plan for writing" that begins with only copywork, dictation, and oral narration in the K-4 years (Charlotte Mason homeschoolers will recognize this part), moving on to short written narrations and outlining in the middle years, and ending finally in high school with an emphasis on original, persuasive and argumentative writing (rhetoric). She would require no original writing until high school unless the student wants to do original writing. (At least this is how I understood what she was saying.) She advocates supporting writing through the explicit teaching of spelling and grammar, focusing in the middle years on diagramming, which will be used later as a diagnostic tool in the student's own writing. This is only for expository writing and not for creative writing, which she does not recommend "teaching" at all. I appreciated this, because my own feeling is that if kids want to write fiction or poetry, they should be supported and encouraged but not forced to do so, and that they will mostly learn by reading lots and lots of good fiction and poetry and writing thousands and thousands of not-so-good words. (One Year Adventure Novel is an excellent creative writing curriculum for teens, but I don't think it should be forced on anyone. It can benefit those kids who like structure, though, and want to write their own novels but don't know how to begin.)
I don't agree with everything she says in her lectures -- for instance, I think that some kids benefit not from year after year drill in grammar and spelling, but in periods of hands-offness and logical summaries of grammatical and spelling rules in the 11 -13 year old age range. (This is one reason I really like Our Mother Tongue.) I don't agree with her approach to getting middle grade students to spell correctly in their writing (e.g., make it really difficult for them if they spell something wrong in a first draft by having them copy misspelled words over and over again). We've seen the most improvement in spelling this year with Gareth since he's been using a hand-held electronic spelling dictionary. Not only does he write more because he can use the dictionary, the spelling seems to have stuck because now his spelling is better even when he doesn't use the device. But for the most part, I think her outline for teaching writing sounds like the most logical I've heard, and I am awaiting the delivery of her book The Complete Writer: Writing With Ease in eager anticipation.
What remains for me is to figure out how to implement such a plan in my house, with my mix of kids, challenges and talents. It sounds simple, but as usual I'm the stumbling block. My available time, energy, and my ability to organize assignments are all deciding variables here.
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