Most of my Right to Write writing is too long (and I too lazy) to transfer from my notebook to a post, so I thought I would reflect on one of the Breakthroughs articles. I've perused several and in general I have been struck by many reminders of myself in the "I noticed that what I was doing wasn't working" sections of the articles. It brought even more clearly to my attention that, in spite of the good things going on in Room 203, there are many activities we do that aren't quite meeting any sort of standards of excellence.
Thus far, I have particularly enjoyed Bob Pressnall's "Skeletons Out of the Closet: The Case of the Missing 162 Percent" in which the author addresses the problem students' revisions that usually don't really change anything significant about their writing. This has been a frustrating aspect of trying to follow a writing process with teenagers. You get them to the point of having something on paper, but they are either unwilling or unable to make it into something better. How many times in the past few years have I found myself with such students? It is easy to put the blame on the kids (and in some cases it is entirely on them), but how well do we really teach students how to revise? It's another one of those things that we often take for granted that students will know how to do. Pressnall presents a case for teaching students a method of revision that encourages them to take a skeleton (a few sentences) and add to it all the things you would need to have a complete beast (description, dialogue, etc.). After reading through his experiments with this method I am definitely interested in giving it a try next fall. But the key, as Pressnall discovered, is not giving them too much of a good thing. Luckily it looks like there are plenty of other good ideas in this volume and I bet I'll run into even more during my time with all of you.
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