Affective Dimensions of Writing

In reflecting about myself as a writer, I realize that I don't really think of myself as a writer. I usually express myself through a drawing. I have done a lot of landscaping in my day, and when people come up to me and ask me where is this place, or how do I get to this house? I can honestly say that I have never written down directions... Go so many blocks down this road and when you see the big tree on the left, you've gone to far... No!!! I draw a picture. I'm not a great artist but my renderings usually leave the right impressions on people. You know they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well my pictures are worth probably half of that but they still work.

Several times in my life I have had ambitions of being a great novelist. I have even tried writing a few short stories. Eventually, usually within about ten minutes of writing, I give it up because I don't really have anything to tell. My life if pretty boring... go to work... go to school... sleep about 5 hours and do it all over again. BORING!!! So ya I didn't write much as a child. Mostly reports that I only did mediocre on... It's hard to write about something that you just don't care that much about. I know those youth in Asia are cool but come on write a report on it... Give me a break...

Writing assignments that I disliked were many and short in-between. As I said, I never felt like I was a writer so writing was a huge chore for me. Looking back at my long and circuitous career as a student, I think the only paper that I liked writing was a report in my Geology class. It was a history of earth through time. I got to illustrate it. I had pictures of Dinosaurs and Trilobites. It was fun and I learned a lot from it. I just remembered another writing assignment I had in an English class. This one was way fun. We read Huck Finn and had to do a book report on it. But instead of writing it the teacher let us choose how to present Huck Finn to the class. A buddy and I filmed different scenes with us as the actors. It was awesome. And we had a ton of fun doing it. And I think we got a pretty good grade on it too.

This is the part where I tell you how writing is really important for your students. The way to make it fun and interesting for you students is to let them choose what they will write about. But really what I think is that some students will excel in writing and others will not. I wish that I could have had more opportunities to act out the story or draw the history. This will be a great lesson for me when I teach. I'm going to try and give my students that opportunity.