A Revised Philosophy of Writing

Having thought about writing for the past semester at the same time as preparing for my next year of teaching which will be teaching a Writing class to 5th Graders, my biggest shift in thinking is to resolve that I need to teach significantly more creativity. Of course creativity is essentially impossible to teach, but encouraging it is not. I believe that students need to be given a real amount of freedom to explore what they find interesting and become more inquisitive and intelligent people. While I began this course thinking that the most important thing about writing was to be confident and accurate, some of these ideas have changed. As I mentioned in my initial draft of an entire teaching philosophy: my philosophy is fluid, constantly changing with things I learn. 

Another thing that I noted: 

"I find myself an active member of the 21st Century (involuntarily) and a focus on using technology to my students' every advantage is something that enables many other smaller elements of my teaching philosophy. This may entail writing essays on Google documents and partaking in virtual conferencing in the classroom to show students right on their screens exactly what to work on, or it could just mean including a lesson in my unit on how to a send a professional email. In either case, I strongly believe that would be doing my students an injustice if I pretended that the classroom was a place for old school methodology and did not expose them to the many ways in which tech is an advantage to them."

This is a thought I continued to pursue and found much more meaning from. I created a project that I think my students will truly find useful and will have a meaningful impact on their adult working lives. I intend to use it in my classroom next year.

While I was allowed to explore aspects of my own identity as a writer, I decided that this is something all of my students would have benefited from. One caveat that I find very important is that this has to start at a young age: once students who have never been given this kind of opportunity reach high school, they will feel unconfident in their abilities and resent being forced to do it. This to me makes it even more vital that creativity starts early in schools.