Freedom to Write

Gallagher spoke about how students need to be given freedom on writing assignments. He noted that students will not only produce better work, but it will be more passionate and doing tasks like revising will be done well due to their interest level. I fully agree with this and experienced it here at RIC. When I took my senior seminar for English, I took a Victorian Literature class with Russell Potter. When we did our final paper, which had to be between 15 and 20 pages long, he gave us freedom to write about anything dealing with the Victorian Era. Because I was also getting a degree in film studies, I wrote my paper on the rise of the film industry. Many don’t realize that short films were starting to be filmed in the later years of the Victorian Era, so I thought it would be interesting to write about. In my time at RIC I thought it was the best and most passionate paper I wrote.

Another time I loved writing and had freedom was in high school when we studied narrative writing. Christensen talked a lot about how students seemed to enjoy narrative writing and telling their own stories. It feels like a more open form of expression that is also personal. One of my favorite assignments for narrative writing was when we all took an item to school that had a story attached to it, put it in a brown bag, and then we randomly picked items from another student. We then wrote a story about the item and the real story about the item we brought in. My item was the gold ring I wear with five small diamonds on it. It was my grandmother’s engagement ring that my father gave to me after she passed away. Though the classmate who got the ring knew nothing about it, their version of the story was fairly close to mine.

The coteaching article made me think back on my time as a long term substitute for a fifth grade ELA teacher. The teacher taught three ELA classes each day and one Social Studies class. Because the students had fallen behind, the team of teachers and I met and thought about doing a jig-saw activity where the students helped to teach the two chapters we needed to cover. During this time I did little in terms of “teaching” and more helped the teachers with their “lesson plans” and understanding the topic they were going to teach the class. At first I was worried about how it would work, but students were greatly interested in the idea and they were able to present all the ideas well.

Of the Three readings I enjoyed Gallagher the most because I can’t help but agree whole-heartedly. The best papers I’ve ever written where the ones I had the most freedom with. I just wish more teachers would understand this and give students more freedom.