AUSSIE

Blog entry posted June 15th, 2010 by Dale Worsley

Last week I was politely interrupted by my word monitor Gina while giving evidence for the benefits of freewriting. I promised to move beyond the dry research to hear the more liquid anecdotes this week. And so I will deliver.

First a spanking fresh one, from a workshop last week. I had planned a session to introduce the International Baccalaureate’s Primary Years Programme to the staff of PS 201 in Queens. My task was to promote questioning, inquiry, connections – all hallmarks of the programme. (A little more narcissistic than a normal program, obviously, with that extra me at the end.) I had forty-five minutes. I sent the agenda in for copying.

But something was nagging at me. This was all about connections, right? Connections between subject areas, connections to the international community, connections to student interests. I had those covered. But what about the connections between the actual human beings in the workshop?

I contacted the school and requested an extra fifteen minutes – for a freewrite. And it was granted. Within those first fifteen minutes of the workshop, the entire staff was talking, laughing, enjoying each other. They forgot about me as they latched onto each other’s hilarious, or moving, or poetic ideas. Afterward, Joyce Heskial, my coordinating colleague at the school, said people who never got involved with staff development were participating.

I patted myself on the shoulder for remembering what was really important – the relationships between us as we work together for the children. Which sounds altruistic, but a more realistic way to look at it, if I’m going to be honest with you, is that freewriting is about enlightened self interest. I save my own staff developer’s hide by taking teachers’ attention off me and focusing it on their own genius. Benjamin Disraeli articulated this clever secret when he said, “The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.”

Back to the riches of freewriting.

Here’s a student from Virginia Cerussi’s 11th grade math class, a few years ago, quoted in her chapter of a book I edited: Teaching for Depth: Where Math Meets the Humanities. Virginia had her students routinely produce freewrites for their journals. In her reflection on the process, one wrote:

Journal writing makes the transition from English (my 4th period) to math easier. I was very happy that I got to be a little creative in math, which is always straightforward and factual. Also, I don’t know whether there’s any relevance to this but I feel as though I understand more and I got 60/60 on the last test! Coincidence? Not only has my understanding improved, but my grades as well. I’m also finishing my homework a lot faster. I haven’t made my final career decision yet, but I’m leaning towards teaching. Should I enter the field – I definitely plan to use this method. Thanks!

Hope she enters the field.

As for getting thanked by students for allowing them to freewrite, I was preparing for a workshop at Babylon Junior High School not long ago when a student found me in the library to thank me for teaching freewriting to his business teacher, who taught it to him. It made the class more fun, he said, when they all wrote about the jobs they’d had. (Turns out babysitting’s easily as hazardous as, say, alligator wrestling.)

Students aren’t the only ones grateful for the method. Phil Grande, social studies teacher at Babylon, speaking of freewriting in response to essential questions, said, “What was amazing was the connections to the next chapter, which saved me considerable instructional time, and the connections across the curriculum. The kids felt empowered.”

Did I mention my own driving philosophy of education? That its purpose is to empower students by liberating their voices?
Freewriting is where, ahem, Walt Whitman and I share a bond. Okay, Whitman shares a lot more of the bond than I do, but, at least I can connect with him when, sounding his “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world,” he writes in Leaves of Grass:

One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse…
The Female equally with the Male I sing
Of Life’s immense in passion, pulse and power
Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,
The modern man I sing.

Freewriting…freesinging – basically the same thing: the free action of it, the democratic qualities of it, the passion, pulse and power behind it. A form for females and males alike. A modern, All-American form! Where Whitman advocated free verse for our youthful democracy I advocate freewriting for the public schools that are the progeny of our democracy.

You in the back, what’s your question? You sound a little cynical. You say I should stop my own barbaric yawping because with all the standardized tests kids have to take this week, we’re crushing and oppressing the students and there’s no time for such free expression?

Okay, I concede we test too much. Indeed, I worry about it a lot. How much data can we collect before we’re blinded by it, and lose sight of the humans themselves?

I remember a statement made by a news announcer about a moon rock picked up by astronauts during the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing, that it would be “analyzed to its total destruction.” Are we analyzing student performance to the students’ total destruction? That would be a fine kettle of fish, wouldn’t it? To have a pile of data and no student? Not really very democratic of us, is it?

Which makes it all the more important to have the students thinking and writing freely, exploring their minds and the world of ideas with passion and power. As Joseph McCormack, a teacher on the staff of the Bronx’s KAPPA school wrote in his first freewrite, students must learn to “trust their instincts” and we, for our part, must, again as Joseph puts it, “validate joy.”