“It stinks!”

As some of you know I do Skype vis­its with class­rooms around the coun­try on an almost week­ly basis. The impact, to be sure, varies, but here is a response from a teacher that sug­gests how well it can go. If you are inter­est­ed in set­ting up such a vis­it, please go to my web­site. We’ll start book­ing 2014–2015 Skype vis­its on August 1st.

“Dear Avi,

Thank you so much for par­tic­i­pat­ing in a Skype with my kids at —— Ele­men­tary! As the fifth grade teacher (of 13 stu­dents), we have devel­oped a say­ing, “What would Avi say?” dur­ing our writ­ing dis­cus­sions. In fact, short­ly after the Skype, my stu­dents start­ed a first draft of a “This I Believe” essay. When they fin­ished, I announced, “Now that you’ve fin­ished your first draft, what would Avi say?”

“It stinks!” “It’s no good!” “That if we don’t like it, it’s a good sign!” which then led to, “And now the writ­ing begins.” Of course the lat­ter state­ment was­n’t met with quite as much enthu­si­asm, but there was a cer­tain lev­el of accep­tance (dare I even say, “will­ing­ness”) to take on this new and dif­fer­ent atti­tude towards writing.

For the first time … and I tru­ly mean, first time … stu­dents are will­ing to write 2, 3 and even 4 drafts. Oh the mileage I’m get­ting from using your words! 🙂 So thank you, thank you, thank you for your can­dor and honesty.

Stu­dents also enjoyed hear­ing that you did­n’t have your writ­ing all planned out before you began. I think, too often, we over-teach plan­ning, web­bing and struc­ture that stu­dents for­get that writ­ing is some­thing we all trudge through and that it is an ever-chang­ing, evolv­ing, destroy­ing, and often recre­at­ing process. You can change char­ac­ter names, you can decide to kill off char­ac­ters you don’t like, and you can have “writer’s block” (and many times a day at that) and still pro­duce great writ­ing. Yes, they heard every word you said. :)”