From John Adams to Mike Schmoker

As noted in a previous post I recently finished John Adams by David McCullough. I am now in the process of reading Results Now: How We Can Achieve Unprecedented Improvements in Teaching and Learning by Mike Schmoker. The HPS principals are doing a book study on this, and so I thought I'd take a look at it. I'm feeling amazed as I'm reading it, because evidently there is very little focus on writing in classrooms today. How did this happen? In John Adams day, that's all they did. Folks wrote letters to each other, kept personal diaries as well as working diaries of their farms or businesses. Historically, it makes sense that this sort of writing went on, it was the sole means of communication. Aren't we lucky that they did this, what a wealth of information they left for us. But how did we throw it out for modern technology? It's as though once we didn't need writing for communication purposes, we just didn't keep up with it. Yet, according to Results Now, it is still vitally important. Here's a quote from Schmoker (pg. 64):

For all our talk about the importance of higher-order thinking we continue to overlook the fact that writing, linked to close reading, is the workshop of thought--with an almost miraculous effect on students' critical capacities. . .R. D. Walshe writes that we "shouldn't hesitate to describe writing as incredible or miraculous . . . a technology which enables thought to operarte much more deeply than it normal does during conversation or inward reflection" . . . writing allows writers to "contemplate thought . . . until it becomes the best thinking of which they are capable."

The italics are mine - I love the idea of writing as technology. Further - Williams Zissner says (pg. 64 again)

Meaning is remarkably elusive . . . Writing enables us to find out what we know--and what we don't know--about whatever we're trying to learn. Putting an idea into writen words is like defrosting the windshield: The idea, so vague out there in the murk, slowly begins to gather itself into a sensible shape . . . all of us know this moment of finding out what we really want to say by trying in writing to say it.

Hand in hand with this is the fact that we are losing the richness of language we used to have. This really came home to me while re-reading Jane Eyre in preparation for the blog book club that a fellow blogger hinted at (you know who you are). The reprint actually has to explain what some of the words mean in the text. Some books still use great language--it is delightful pick up a book that invites you deeper into the story by the lyrical language the author employs. Writing takes time, I'm sure that's a big reason that it fell behind in schools, but also in lives. Why write when you can call? Why write when you can text. (Texting is NOT writing - if it is, we'll soon need a cipher to understand all the abbreviations that are used.)

As I'm writing this, I'm beginning to see that time is the culprit. It takes time to sit down and really consider your words for a note of thanks, encouragement or sympathy. Who of us feels like they have the time to do that, or maybe the better question is, who of us is willing to carve the time out of our schedule to do some writing? Technology is at fault too. We let technology keep us focused on our work, instead of allowing it to free us up to do some writing :-)