The Road to Success in Writing

The last few week I have been tutoring students (with my Writing class) at Hawthorn Public School.  After the first day I was a little bit discouraged because the student I was working with only wanted me to edit his work.  I had so many great ideas to include into our time together but instead all I was asked to do was edit.

I went home knowing that I would need to get hard at work developing a plan to engage this student more in the next session; but where should I start?

He wrote many essays that presented facts, but there was little room for creativity.  I took this on a as a challenge to develop the most creative tutoring session any student will ever experience in writing!

We started off using the math poetry idea, we took turns writing a short poem about math (without saying the word math) and he had to include a colour and an emotion. He was very sceptical about this activity at first but when he saw the poem I created he became more comfortable because "he expected my poem to be much more sophisticated" (notice how I put that in quotes? My student actually said those words...) When he realized that you do not need to be a genius to be creative he opened up completely and we had a great tutoring session.

We went through numerous creative writing activities and it allowed me to ask him questions about his writing that he could not answer in the previous session together.  By the end of the morning we were laughing and thoroughly enjoying writing together.

This experience taught me the value of sharing work with other students, especially being the teacher.  If you show them what you expect, it takes a lot of pressure off of the student because they will quickly learn that teachers do not expect the students to create masterpieces.  Showing my student the math poem I wrote changed his entire attitude about doing creative writing.  This was a big progress point for us because we had such a difficult time connecting on a writing level on the first day.

I am excited to see what tomorrow's tutoring session will bring! Stay tuned for more posts about my writing life!