Not a Love Letter to Jim Burke or Robin Williams

This is not going to be a love letter to Jim Burke. This is not going to be a love letter to Jim Burke. Okay, now that that is out of the way...let us begin: This man knows how to articulate my love language ever so eloquently. That love language would be writing.

The sheer thought of my first year teaching already has me waking up in cold sweats and it's not even July. What dear Burke does is show how what I believe becomes what I do. Certain writing assessments scare me more now that I’m a teacher than they did when I was a starry-eyed English student. Back then I had it in the bag...now I realize I have first make sure everyone has a bag to put it in...I digress.

I used to think that to be a good teacher all you had to do was care- this is and isn’t true.

Because here was my vision: Dead Poets Society starring me (of course) and all my kids think I’m the #cool English teacher and I make my kids fall in love with reading and writing and we all lived happily ever after. *Record scratch* I realized in this god dream of an English classroom, I had yet to consider how to really go about this other than “care.”

What this caring actually needs to look like is taking the uncomfortable parts of teaching writing (timed essays, the process paper) and giving it a new and meaningful approach and application. Most of this has to do with student led inquiry and student selected reading. Instead of deciding what writing needs to get done, we let our students show us what they can do. From this space, we allow them to emerge as the writers they can be because they have been writers all along. With misconceptions and much to do, teachers and students can find themselves in this space of writing as an impossibility despite its necessity. Yet Burke sees writing as a practicality which is part of its necessity.

Burke reminds us that these mandated writing assessments do have benefits. We’re not making and molding test-takers, but encouraging curious and eager thinkers and feelers who will bet their life that the pen really always was mightier than the sword.

To put it simply, I’ll just quote Burke here: “Why do I do this? For the simple reason that I am not as interested in saying, ‘Gotcha!’ as I am in saying, ‘You got it!’ when it comes to making and mastering the moves of academic reading and writing.”