The Writing Process

I love cursive writing. I write just like my grade two teacher who taught me how to write cursively. I thought it looked so grown-up and pretty, I wanted to be just like her. I have always been proud of my writing and enjoyed showing off.  It's too bad that I can't use it anymore. Almost none of my students write cursively and almost none of them can even read it. I had to stop writing at school because it was unfair to expect students to understand cursive writing.  

Printing, to me, is so cumbersome and slow; I can't get my thoughts out fast enough. I can somewhat understand how some students feel about assignments that require that they write things down--that they have all of these thoughts in their head, but they can't get them out of there! In class, we were asked to write down what we ate for Thanksgiving supper using our non-dominant hand. Wow! The focus that I was using to try and make my writing legible made it impossible to think about what I was supposed to be writing about. Here is what I managed to get down:

The steps that are involved in the task of merely writing a sentence is staggering! It is a miraculous mix of manual dexterity and brain power that truly blows my mind when I think about it. This was just one sentence. Imagine what goes into formulating a paragraph, an essay, or a poem!

This exercise really made me think about one student in particular. This student has the most atrocious printing--even he can't read it. However, if you talk to him and let him tell you what he knows, he is bang-on. He and I actually did our learning styles inventory together--we were the complete opposite type of learner. He was mainly hands-on and auditory and I was visual and written expression. This really made me realize that I can not teach students in the way that I THINK is the most effective because it is only most effective for ME.

We need to really know our students and take into consideration the struggles that each student faces everyday in school.Whether it be their learning style or the struggles that they face when trying to put pen to paper, we need to meet the needs of all of our students the best that we can.