Model Misbehavior

Kittle (Chpt 2)

"To teach writing, you have to be a writer."

The mantra seems overly simplistic and something I'd disagree with simply out of spite of its self-confidence.

Abandon writing journals? Blasphemy!

A waste of time? Go jump in a lake!

Writing isn't driving a car. There's no checklist. There aren't multiple kinds of driving and there are universal qualifications for what it means to be a bad driver.

Yet there is something to the idea.

Don't get me wrong. I'm still in a point of thinking Kittle, while a capable narrator in her own right, is taking the wrong approach in many ways by putting crucial and frightening pressure on teachers to take sole responsibility for student writing. Such responsibility puts teachers in an impossible position, in my opinion and I'm not sure that this ever works as successful classroom discussion.

However, if students are able to see that writers do have a process and that such a process is applicable to everyone. It also signifies that writing does not simply occur in a classroom and that a variety of writing contexts call for a variety of modeling styles.

I'm still working this out. Check in later.