Teaching Writing

The best time to nudge children toward functional writing is when they are in the midst of doing purposeful work. If a child is preparing a fancy feast, for example, it's easy to say, "You know what you might want to do? You could write a menu, just like they have at fancy restaurants!" Part of teaching writing is to watch for those times when a child's purpose could lead her to write, and then suggest, "Why don't you write that?"Another way to encourage children to write for real-world purposes is to equip them with appropriate paper and writing tools.

Parents who care about their children's writing will want to do everything possible to make it likely that their children receive good instruction in writing. It's fairly rare to find teachers who have an expertise in teaching writing. Years ago, a friend of mine, Don Graves, surveyed 36 teacher-training colleges and found they offered a total of 169 courses on teaching reading, but no courses on teaching writing. This has changed somewhat since but it is still true that many teachers haven't been given a lot of guidance in the teaching of writing. Consequently, teachers usually assign and correct writing, but spend very little time coaching children on the strategies writers use in order to write well. If we are lucky and our child has a teacher who encourages rough drafts and revisions, a teacher who confers with our child about work in progress, then we'll want to mobilize ourselves to support that teacher's influence in our child's writing life.

The third approach to teaching writing could be called a pattern or formula approach, in which youngsters study a genre of writing (haiku, tall tales, the friendly letter). The teacher explains the characteristics of a particular kind of writing, and students are then asked to write according to the prescribed form. Teachers who value this kind of writing do so because this approach allows them to connect reading and writing. Likewise, some students prefer this writing approach because they can lean on the form and structure of a particular genre. Rather than thinking first and foremost about content, these children often focus on following a technique.

As my search for an ontological boundary for writing has suggested, however, writing is just as relative as time. Where we say writing begins is utterly discretionary because there is no absolute starting point for any act of writing. The implications of this statement are troubling for me. It suggests that what we do when we teach writing is invent writing. We believe that writing exists as a discrete and separable event in time and is therefore teachable. But when we look at writing in terms of the problematic nature of time, we realize that we have it backwards: it's not that the act of writing exists and thus lends itself to teaching; instead, it's that in teaching writing we arbitrarily declare a temporal existence for writing.

Ludic postmodernism, in its suspicion of totalizing metanarratives, represents a radical challenge to origins, which are, in essence, metanarratives, structures that precede and largely determine how we know and what we do. If we are to understand where writing begins as origins, and particularly we are to understand the problems with the very idea of origins in writing and teaching writing, then we must examine the ludic skepticism toward origins. The two chief goals for my investigation of archelogical dialectic are to establish the viability of arche for this study of beginnings and where writing begins and to construct a model of beginnings that we can use later in my consideration of writing and teaching writing.