Beyond School

What a wonderful thing to wake up to this morning in my email (this really should be shared with 20th Century teachers who poo-poo blogging as a literacy-development tool with all the predictable, latently technophobic, arguments). From a ninth grade student:

The post is a connection to your story of your “high school hell.” It’s 3 o’ clock in the morning, and I’ve just realized that I was so immersed in writing my post that I took 4 hours to write 1,192 words. I did a word count afterwards because I was curious.

It feels good to “write”, as in writing something that is not an essay. To admit, I’ve hated writing for years because all I wrote was essays, or hagwon assignments that practically bored me to death. [Note: A "hagwon" is a Korean night school that teaches horribly formulaic, stilted, voiceless, "grammatically correct" writing that Western teachers then have to "unteach."--CB] It’s not fun to write something that is so “right”, as you put it, that has a certain format that I have to go by. However, writing in my blog made me realize how much I love telling my own stories. I think the “3 blog entries a week”policy is great, because I am able to express myself AND improve my writing skills at the same time.

I also read a small portion of your “Beyond School” blog, and you had a post on you “practicing tough love.” I thought ‘That’s real world, the world outside of school. It’s always good to be prepared.’ I realize that I still need to learn to deal with things sometimes. Especially in the time-management area…. I’ll figure it out.

….p.s. I downloaded firefox, the add-on named “answers”, and set up my Bloglines. It is AWESOME. WAAAAAY better than Internet Explorer once I started using it. Much, much more convenient. Thanks for teaching us a great tool.

Four hours of writing for a 15-minute blogging assignment. “It feels good to write….”

To repeat my read-write web mantra: interesting times to be a teacher!

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