Weekly Writing Prompt [High School Dropout Advice]

Last week I wrote a short paragraph of the importance of warming up, I feel it's important enough to share again, but think of a daily writing warm up the same as a track and field warm up. We are encouraging our students to work specific muscles, so how important is it to get the juices flowing? With that, here's what I wrote last week: "One of the most important aspects of an ELA classroom is the daily warm-up. Spending at least five minutes on the task of free writing, where ideas are brainstormed, a brief story written, a list of words formulated as a result of seeing, reading, or thinking through a prompt are all valuable ways to help your students warm up. Teach them the skills, give them sentence starters if they have a brain slump day (cause we all have them), then allow them to use any one of the tools available to write without the "fear" of being graded. Beginning is the hardest part. It is our job to give them the tools to simply start...."

Giving students and understanding of the "why" behind a task will help them do it without a lot of complaint. They may not enjoy it, and they'll likely tell you so, but stand firm and put on repeat the reasons why you require what you require. Doing this helps you pick activities with a purpose and an end goal in mind, and if you share those two things with them, they are more likely to do it and less likely to grumble about it.

Today's prompt is another question for student's to ponder and write about what they'd advise on the topic of high school drop outs:

Professional Reading [The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy L. Sayers]

This forty-one page symposium on education inspired me to learn more about the classical approach to education. For one, as a student who went through this particular process, Sayers was especially persuasive, on point, concise, and obviously well educated herself. Overall I was impressed by her experience, ideas, and writing. Just that alone gave me the desire to dig deeper into these lost tools!

Aside from how it affected me, I do believe that this short (and yet deep, thick) read is a worthwhile endeavor for each and every educator. For her goal in education should be shared by every educator, "to teach men how to learn for themselves."

That short explanation of the purpose of education is worthy of remembering, but there was another quote I thought worth sharing (there are many, but I'll leave it at this for now...)

"For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects." p.18-19

I love that last statement! "... they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects." This book was published in 1947 and it's just as much true today as it was then! We are prey to our emotions and vomit words all over Facebook, Twitter, emails, &etc. - words that are emotionally impulsive, uninformed, and unkind. When we learn, we forget how we learned it and whether or not a source was credible. Reading this book was discouraging when I think of how we educate our young, and encouraging knowing that as an educator, I can do something about it. And doing something about it (even in a small group of young people) is better than learning and doing nothing. I cannot stand still after being filled with valuable tools such as this!