AUSSIE

Blog entry posted June 21st, 2010 by Dale Worsley

I meant to break away from the topic of freewriting this week, but I came across a new one that I can’t ignore.

I was facilitating a Curriculum Design Team workshop for the New York City Department of Education District 25 and 28 Magnet School Program. We always open our workshops with a freewrite. After the two minute silent writing session, teachers were sharing their work with a partner – as per the protocol I described in my June 7 post – when maniacal laughing, groaning and yelping sounds issued from a computer in one corner of the room.

Running workshops is an existential occupation. Should I investigate? Try to get the teacher to turn the sounds down? Ask him to turn them UP and share them? What the heck was this hullaballoo, anyway?

As usual, I took the path of least resistance and just let it go. When it came time for the partners to share with the whole group, Sharon Rosen, of IS 237, read the unrevised, unedited freewrite of her partner from the same school, the iconoclastic Paul Solomon:

Consider the pros and cons of getting a pet hyena. Pros they make really cool noises. I think they are nocturnal so I could leave them out over night & would freak the neighbors. It would probably keep burglars away. It would deter ppl from walking their dogs by my house.

Con. They would require a permit. They really are a pain to take care of. I’m sure they are expensive. So I don’t know.

Sharon’s reply to Paul’s freewrite read as follows:

With pros like this, how could you not get one!

Behind every freewrite lurks a story. This is Paul’s: A neighbor was walking a pit bull in Paul’s yard. (“A nice, friendly pit bull, but a pit bull all the same,” Paul explained.) Paul didn’t particularly appreciate this, hence the fantasies of protecting his yard with a hyena, which led to the freewrite, which was followed by the internet research into hyenas, which, in turn, led to the eerie yelps in the workshop. Interesting fact shared by Paul: Did you know that in some African villages people keep hyenas as pets? Apparently, they make good status symbols. (Don’t let Michael Vick in on this secret.)

You can see why I had a hard time passing up this freewrite.

At risk of messing up a perfectly good stand-alone story with treacly commercials, I offer three observations: (1) The freewrite gave Paul a chance to express his voice, which livened up the workshop; (2) the freewriting led to highly motivated research; and (3) the freewrite contained interesting formal qualities, i.e., it was very strong in what the 6+1 Writing Traits folks label ideas, organization, voice, sentence fluency and word choice.

Okay, Paul’s piece was a little weak in the other traits, conventions and presentation, but hey, it was only a freewrite.

Let’s explore these observations a little more in depth.

1. At first Paul was reluctant to have his freewrite shared, because he was afraid it was inappropriate for the workshop. Being the devil, or at least his advocate, that I am, I encouraged him. How many readers of this blog would disagree that student voice belongs in the classroom and that we’re taking ourselves a little too seriously in education these days? (If you do, let’s talk later over a drink. You can put your hands down for now.)
2. Don’t we want students doing exactly the kind of research Paul conducted? Along with writing, it’s one of the overarching skills students need to succeed in college. For more on this, check out David Conley’s article “Toward a More Comprehensive Conception of College Readiness” published in 2007 by the Educational Policy Improvement Center. (I’ll flesh out this point in a future story about a 4th grader writer’s research into rottweilers).
3. The formal qualities of the writing are interesting insofar as they appear in the freewrite, that is to say, right off the top of the mind of the writer. This is the theme I want to develop a little further. I’ll see if I can whittle it down to the 250 words of room left in this post.

Freewriting can be seen as part of the writing process. Along with mind-mapping, outlining and the like, it is a form of prewriting, which leads to drafting, revising, editing, publishing, celebrating, etc. Just get those ideas out and we can shape them up later, sports fans!

But here’s where things get interesting: the more you go through the writing process, reading and emulating good exemplars, the more your freewriting starts looking like a finished product.

We all remember the concept of “limit” from calculus class, don’t we? (“A value that is approached increasingly closely by a function or a sequence as the independent variable increases without restriction,” as my math dictionary defines it.) Limits allow us to guesstimate the measurement of things that could otherwise never be determined with absolute precision, like the areas under arcs, the orbits of the planets, the trajectories of the bouquets (or are they tomatoes?) people are throwing at me for bringing calculus into this discussion. Well, the more we write (the independent variable without restriction), the closer we approach the value of the finished product the first time out with our freewrites.

Paul has a compare/contrast essay underway in his freewrite. Could he have done that in the third grade? (Okay, Paul probably could, but could the rest of us?)

I heard from his nephew Taylor Kitchings that Barry Hannah, the recently deceased Mississippi writer of quirky fiction, aspired to compose finished drafts the first time out. My wife, Elizabeth Fox, told me that Allen Ginsberg wanted to become mindful enough to accomplish the same goal…

Oops, I’ve reached my word limit.  See you next week. Until then, try a few freewrites. The enjoyment to be derived is limitless, and might have you – or your pet – laughing.