Linger Longer

Managing a Writers Workshop can be one of the most daunting tasks of the entire workshop experience. Planning is easy...you make these great focus lessons, writing prompts, activities, and creative ideas that you type up and just hope everything works out. Actually implementing what you plan is another thing altogether. One of the points I liked most in chapter 7 was about the teacher holding a strong presence in the classroom. As I read, I imagined a sweet perfume moving around the working students. No one wanted to perfume around for too long....it might suffocate the writers and their creativity. But, if the perfume was absent for a prolonged time, the writers might forget the sweet smell and thus lose motivation for their task at hand. The perfect teacher presence is that that you can always smell the sweet perfume, faint as it may be, but you are never overwhelmed by its scent to the point you need to crack a window somewhere QUICK.
Writers Workshop Kits: The Easy Way Out. I do believe that the idea behind Writers Workshop kits is a good one, but the actuality of it is not. Recently, I've been struggling with my feelings about different organizations that place untrained college graduates in high-risk public school classrooms. This chapter reminded me of this. I see two sides of the story: 1. Just like these organizations, teachers that are buying and using Writers Workshop Kits are trying to do a good thing. They are trying to bring creativity into the classroom. They are trying to give their students options and possibilities in their writings. But, what they're really doing is cheating the students. They're cheating the students because they are giving them a instant Writers Workshop that doesn't take into account anything about the actual students and their likes, dislikes, strengths, weakness, etc. In this same way, organizations are cheating students by placing unqualified young graduates in classrooms full of kids who need help the most. Yes, I do believe these organizations are trying to do good for these children and trying to fix what is so broken in our educational system, but why place unqualified people in the  most desperate places? I agree with Ray when she says that writing workshop kits are highly insulting. They're saying that we can just buy our way into a successful and meaningful writers workshop. It's insulting that these organizations think that any random graduate can effectively educate children when there are people, like my classmates and myself, that have been studying elementary education for years. I digress, I digress...