Writing to Write: My Thoughts on Yagelski

In middle school, I was the token shy, overweight nerd. I didn't have a huge amount of friends, and as stereotype would dictate, I split most of my time between homework, reading, and playing video games. My abuela preferred keeping me inside anyway; she was always scared I would suffer heatstroke in the middle of the street and be hit by a car. So on one Friday night, I stumbled across a certain website on the Internet. It was the Neu Marvel Universe Roleplaying Boards. Users would sign up for an account, create their own superhero or supervillain, and role play as that character, interacting with other users' characters. I became myself, as I quickly made friends with other roleplayers from around the world. I discovered self-confidence, a voice, my sense of (non)humor, and I wrote.

Oh, did I write.

Unfortunately, the website closed 2011, after ten long years of supporting an elaborate, breathing universe, for reasons I won't get into here. I myself was responsible for, and I remember distinctly, 12 characters by the end of Neu Marvel's run, if you count the super-powered characters' supporting casts. Hours of sticky Coke-stained fingers pounding away at my keyboard well into the early hours of the morning just to make sure my fellow writers in Scotland and Thailand were on the same page. If the site was still up I would link it here. I must have written hundreds of thousands of words, and though none of it is likely to meet any sort of educational standard, Common Core or otherwise, they are perhaps the most influential writings I have ever created. I was writing not to produce, but because I loved it. I was writing because in each of those 12 characters there was a little piece of me I could not express in any other way. I was not judged on quality of my writing, my sentence structure; there was no point I had to prove or nobody I had to convince (though my friends made damn certain I stuck to the canon, that's a serious nerd offense). I felt accepted through my writing.

This is the kind of writing I want my students to be able to produce. Yet how many people see writing like this in school settings? How many of us have the opportunity to do so? In fact, how many of us even feel their school would be the environment for them to be comfortable writing like this? I truly enjoyed the Yagelski piece because it reminded me of one of the reasons I still write today, and want to share that joy. I am studying education, but I am also a creative writing major. In my lesson plans I try to achieve the same sort of freedom and flexible workspace the teacher described in the reading who taught the lesson on "true war stories." The texts in class are not used as the traditional points of analysis, but as platforms and models for the students. They serve as an example for the kinds of themes and stories the teacher wants to draw out of the student. I always try in my assessments to encourage not just writing, but personal writing. I want all of my students to be able to tie the writing they do in class to themselves; to understand they are not creating just a product or trying to trade in a thousand words for an A, but learning something about themselves and the world they live in.I cannot imagine a more powerful lesson or tool for our students to possess; if they learn to love writing, to use it as a way to understand themselves and the world they live in, it would seem to me I have accomplished one of my major goals and duties as a teacher. Does this kind of writing not inevitably lead to strong writing that would satisfy the Common Core anyway? I am not sure, yet I would certainly think (and hope) so.

I have some concerns, many of the same concerns Yagelski voices in the reading. Now with the Common Core, informative texts are more essential than ever in class. I agree that these are important for students to be able to understand, but if they are expected to be proficient only in those kinds of writing (technical/persuasive writing) how can we as teachers find room for the liberating narrative writing I want so much for my students to enjoy? The Common Core standards seem so concerned with the products of the writing, they don't seem to give me much opportunity to teach my students to enjoy writing, as Yagelski puts it, as a praxis. I still want to make this a core part of the education my students receive, yet I am sure there are countless difficulties in doing so. I can see their shadows looming in the fog of the future, I know they are there. I just can't make out what they could be yet.