The future of me

The SI leaves me with bittersweet feelings about my teaching. I look back on my previous students and wonder how much damage I did to them and wish I could re-do the last 4 years. On the other hand, I am thrilled with the upcoming school year, not only because I will be teaching content and literature, but also because I have a chance to work with 3 different grade levels. I will also be able to document their progress as writers as I will have these students 3 years in a row, but unlike English, I will be teaching them different content each year. I can’t wait until my upcoming 6th graders take the Writing Assessment in 8th grade. I am anticipating the data from their scores already. I need to spend some time planning, but I’m hoping to have a file folder on each student, documenting his or her growth over the years. I wonder if any of that could turn into research for the NWP? It would be interesting to see with both Rebecca and me being fellows, how our students will do on both formal and informal assessments. Could we possibly foster new writers in our school? What if we had a revolution at our new school and encouraged many other teachers to become fellows themselves?? What if I could present to content teachers and show them ways to incorporate writing into the classroom? My mind is teeming with ideas on how to use my new knowledge. When dealing with other content teachers, I think I have an advantage being a language arts teacher, but I need to be careful. I want to have solid ideas and documentation of them working before I do any pushing on others. Maybe after a year of working in my new position, I can work with BWP and our curriculum director to encourage more writing across the content areas. Unfortunately, a lot of the skeptics will say, “That works for your gifted kids, but I have regular kids who can barely write a sentence.” I’ll need to use much of the research we’ve seen this summer to convince them that it can work with all students. I also have to work on my tone though so as to not come across as elitist and remember that I was one of the skeptics myself.