Cheyenne's Writing Journey

When I was learning how to write essays for the first time, my teacher used formulas and graphic organizers to teach us. My ideas on this have fluctuated over time, going from initially hating it, to loving it, to now feeling wary of it. At first, I did not like having to organize my writing in the formulas and graphic organizers that were given to us. I felt trapped and like breaking away from this would result in a bad grade even though up to this point I had been doing fine writing and grade-wise. I had liked thinking as I wrote and then going back and revising that draft to make sure it made sense and flowed smoothly. Starting the formulas made my writing seem emotionless, dry, and unreadable. After working with these formulas for a couple years, I grew comfortable with them. While I still felt like my writing was not as good as it could be, it made banging out an essay easy. All I had to do was follow the formula and I would get a good grade. It didn’t matter how much ti...

Poetry is something I have always loved. My father loves poetry and even named my brother Dylan Thomas after his favorite poet. He bought me a collection of Dylan Thomas’ work as well as a Robert Frost collection. My copies quickly became worn down with underlining and comments in the margins. My uncle, another man in my world who loves poetry, gifted me with Emily Dickinson’s complete works when I mentioned an interest in her. In school, the poetry lessons were always my favorite. I would eat up everything I read and always feel so wonderful and full of life afterwards. I would (and still do) imagine teaching poetry lessons in my own classroom. I have always thought it more than just the pretentious vocabulary that many educators focus on. Yes, these pieces of the poetry do deserve names and recognition, and perhaps knowing what they are can help students when writing their own. But like Christensen in Teaching for Joy and Justice , I believe that there is more to poetry than th...

What stuck out to me the most from Winn and Johnson was when they discussed adding hip hop to the lessons. Winn and Johnson discuss how Ernest Morrell connects classic poems to modern hip hop that his students would already be familiar with. I was already thinking about novels and poetry by people of color but this opens up the possibilities even more. Students love music and involving their music genres in the classroom is a great way to not only get them involved in the lessons but to help them with their connections to the classics. Jesse Hagopian reminds us how seriously our students take current events in his article “Student Athletes Kneel to Level the Playing Field.” We need to involve current events and controversial topics in our classroom, as well.   Connecting our lessons to what the students experience outside of the classroom keeps them involved inside the classroom. It will also help them develop into conscientious adults. So, what do we do if connecting our...

I had never really thought much about giving feedback to other’s writing. When we had to switch papers in school or if a friend asked me to look over their paper before handing it in, I always looked for grammatical errors and stated which areas I enjoyed, which areas I found vague, and which areas were generally weak. I never really thought about responding to people’s writing differently than this, as this was how teachers had always responded to my work. Elbow and Belanoff call attention to this in “Sharing and Responding” when they state, “For if you simply ask someone to give you feedback or response to what you’ve written and don’t give any help or direction, they will probably just imitate the responses they remember getting from teachers,” (46). After reading this text I realize that I have not been giving good feedback and that it is my responsibility as a reader and writer myself to acknowledge this and do better. While I was not fully aware of all the different way...