"Getting" formula writing in a new way

There were a few places today during Sarah's demo where I felt like my mind was going to explode....in a good way.  So many pieces that just worked for me.

Entering into her demo, I was coming from a place strongly opposed to formula writing.  I wrote about it in this post here from a few days ago, and in my class I work hard to get students into a writing community and out of the formula and structure mindset. So, in a lot of ways, I wasn't feeling too wobbly about structure and writing, about where I stood on the hamburger outline, the five-paragraph artificial school-genre piece, and the rubric-defined model of good writing.  I had an informed stance against it.

 I guess that my feelings against using formulas to teach writing isn't based in my experience writing with them (though I have....a lot time ago).  It was based on what I have come to understand good writing is and the way writing works.  Thinking about how I write, what writers say about writing, and what the scholarly literature says, I'm led to the conclusion that the hamburger approach isn't what writers need.  What I see from my students verifies this, as well. When I used the outline, the structured right way to write model, my students' writing sucked and they hated it. When they had space to write and read good writing, write for an audience and be assessed on process, students enjoyed writing and came up with some brilliant work.

But some stuff happened to me in Sarah's demo that I didn't expect. I re-saw some areas and found new wobbly spots in others.   What did it was the act of experiencing writing in this paint-by-numbers sort of way.   Juxtaposing these authentic SI writing experiences with this Oreo structured writing assignment organizer about persuading someone to eat worms, it hit me, more clearly than ever, just how destructive this type of writing could be.  

As groups went around sharing their outlines and writing, I heard over and over again the ideas of feeling limited, not creative or thoughtful.  One group didn't have an outline and reported difficulty in figuring out what they would say and how they would organize it.  "I hear that," I thought.  It was what I had to do every time that I sat down to write.  I usually have to really wrestle with the words on the page to get them to make any sense, but I do it because the struggle matters.  It's where the meaning is made, and it's a struggle worth engaging in if my ideas can then connect with other minds, or heck, even make more sense in my own.  And it made me realize, again, the importance of my experiences with writing in realizing what writers need and why some approaches don't work.

The formula isn't about the struggle.  It seems to be a way around it, in fact.  A way to make our teaching of "writing" easier. Making assessing "writing" simpler, faster.   This has made me think of all the writing that kids do in this format.  All of the well-meaning teachers who assign it, thinking it's what kids need to learn to actually write well.  And I have a much more clear understanding now of where a student is coming from when they say they hate writing or ask me how much they have to write.  When they ask me to read their paper and tell them what they need to fix. Today I got to feel it, re-see it, and worry even more about it.

And through it all, I also got (way stronger than I've ever gotten it before) that nothing will change if teachers of writing aren't writers themselves, if teachers don't have the space to write and share ideas with other teachers in safe places.  

I'm really appreciating Summer Institute today, the people, relationships, and thinking that has grown in and out of our shared spaces the past two weeks.  This work really matters.