>How badly can a student write in his third year of university attendance? This badly:
>"The largest controversy within the Waco case was where the fire originated from, claiming that the tear gas is not powerful enough to create one. Assumptions were undergoing the process that the Davidians set fire to themselves inside the ranch, due to the fact that the ATF and FBI assured the weapons capability were not powerful enough to do so."
jamesgmartin.center
>Calkins is one of the original architects of the “workshop” approach to teaching writing to children, which holds that writing is a process, with distinct phases, and that all children, not just those with innate talent, can learn to write well. According to the project web site, books by its leaders are “widely regarded as foundational to language arts education throughout the English-speaking world.”
>“What’s most important to me,” explained a project staff member during the open house, “are social issues. I teach fiction writing to teach social justice.” She went on to describe her methodology: “I tell students that they must always first start with an issue—gender discrimination, racism, poverty—not a character. Then we create a character around the issue.” She explained that she instructed children to plot the story from start to finish before setting out, telling them to be certain to alternate between “incident, dialogue, incident, dialogue.” While virtually all professional writers of fiction describe the element of surprise and discovery as central to the process, this teacher takes an alternate view: “By the time children begin to write, they know exactly what their characters will do and say. The point is, there should be no surprises when you sit down to write fiction.”
>The leader then projected copies of student papers on the wall, where we read several stories about bullying, gender discrimination, etc. The stories were impressively written, although they seemed, after a while, to sound almost uniform; without exception, each protagonist was a victim of some kind.
>Beginning in kindergarten, children are to regard books as objects of study. They are asked, for example, to compare two books and try to figure out which characters have a “worse life”; make a “study” of Frog and Toad books; or debate whether Enchantress from the Stars is fiction or fantasy. Children are asked to keep track—on Post-its, or other diagramming material—of the ways characters’ lives resemble their own. Indeed, project methods require a vast array of accoutrements: charts, matrixes, Venn diagrams, page numbers, graphs, reading marathons, bookmarks, book corners, book bags, book celebrations, jazzed up “book talk,” and great discussions about how to live “readerly lives.”
