Reflection+on+What+I+Value

Greetings to the Sioux City IWP! I can't tell you how humbling it is to know that a piece I wrote several years ago still speaks to classroom teachers. Thanks especially to Rod for sharing your reaction with me. Thank goodness I am at least familiar with old-fashioned e-mail!

Rod may have shared with you that I retired last May after 33 years of high school teaching. Certain aspects of teaching in the public schools I knew I would not have a hard time leaving. What I had not anticipated was the flood of nostalgia I experienced as I was cleaning out a cupboard in my classroom and came to a shelf containing materials from past IWP workshops I had participated in either as student or facilitator. Flipping through several of the collections of writing from participants reminded me of the communities of writers that became so close during those many summers. I still feel strongly that it was the experience of genuine responses from other writers, more than any other single facet of an IWP, that fostered that sense of community.

Then I came to the journals and folders of my own writing I had kept on another shelf and discovered anew the responses of fellow writers, sometimes scrawled in the margins, sometimes at the bottom of the page or on a separate attached sheet. And so many of the responses were written in green ink--green is still my preferred color when I respond to my college writers at the local community college! :)

The responses we give to one another as writers may be the single most valuable piece of the writing process. I never grew weary of watching students discover that they could actually write and be respected as writers, even after years of believing that they were no good at it. Watching students share their work with others--not for peer editing but because they needed someone else to reach out to with their ideas--was its own reward. Assessment, I concede, is at some point a necessary part of the process, and students wanted my honest feedback when the time came for that step. But it was the responding that continually reminded me that writing is a vital part of what keeps us human. I suspect that part of what has kept me resistant to embracing the full range of technology available to students (such as this wiki space!) has been my fear that we are sacrificing some of our humanity in the name of technology. That fear may be irrational, and I have some time to discover whether that is true as I learn at the community college level to incorporate technology into my repertoire of instructional strategies.

When the opportunity to teach college composition fell into my lap last fall, I had already been teaching AP English Literature and Composition and had felt more than a little pressure to meet the expectations of the College Board in order to validate my AP course. What I discovered as I began teaching college comp. is that even highly motivated high school students in college-credit courses still value personal response. Now that I am moving from full-time secondary into part-time community college instruction, I am looking forward to having more time to devote to responding. There will still be the inevitable assessment piece--I even made it clear to my students when a piece of writing was going to get TLC response and when it was time for the "gloves to come off" when they were submitting a final draft. And I still experienced those small moments when students would understand--because I had the time to respond personally to their work--that their own ideas had merit when they were given the freedom to allow writing topics to find them and the freedom to watch those topics blossom as form was allowed to follow content rather than dictate it. Genuine response allows teachers and students to become a community of writers who are able to grapple with their work, whether alone or together, and find their unique voices.

Thanks, Erin, for the invitation to join in on your conversations about writing. I trust that you will find the IWP experience this summer to be an invaluable part of your journey in teaching and learning. I can't tell you how lucky you are to have Rod as a traveling companion. And I have to add how lucky you are that you don't have to read this response in my own poor penmanship! This aspect of technology I must applaud! :) Keep writing!

Mike Gilbert, Red Oak