Ch. 3 Share Your Writing Life

I really liked the quote from page 35, "Doing the task and feeling competent at it are two different things." Later the it tells how one teacher shared ..."I tried to impersonate what I thought a good writer would do. I finally realized I needed to be me." I personally can identify with both of these thoughts. This chapter was reaffirming for me. I know that I don't write enough and I'm working to increase that, but I do find myself organizing, thinking of my reader and constantly rereading my writing as I'm composing. I liked the idea of "snap shot writing." I will try that in my classroom. In the past I've done "quick writes" where you give the students a topic and ask them to write about it for 3-5 minutes. This exercise sometimes help that student who struggled at the "getting started" stage. They simply needed to write down the first ideas that came to their head, but there again, the students were given the topics to write on and so therefore didn't hold a personal value to them. My goal after reading this chapter is to increase my modeling and thinking out loud with my students.