Reading Reflection #1 My biggest hope in becoming a teacher is that I can inspire my students to see the creative freedom of writing.

I dont want them to roll their eyes and groan every time I handout an assignment sheet. I dont want them to feel the need to speak my language or have their writing blocked by the fear of my presence as the audience. Rather, I want them to view each assignment, whether it is a poetry project or a simple book report, as an outlet for their individual creativity. Most importantly, I dont want them to feel the same creative constraints that I have felt with each generic assignment that has led to my own frustrated disenchantment with writing. The only question that I have is how? How can I, as an English teacher, insp ire my students to view writing as a creative process instead of a chore? Based off of her essay, it is evident that Ann Berthoff is more focused on developing students writing by helping them understand the practical application, or in her words, by finding meaning. Berthoff does not believe that students should invent (i.e. tailor) their writing skills to suit the academic discourse, but rather she believes that the key to good writing lies in the writers ability to make meaning, by seeing writing as analogues to all those processes by which we make sense of the worldStudents can learn to write by learning the uses of chaos, which is to say, rediscovering the power of language to generate the sources of meaning (294-295). In other words, quality, genuine writing does not come from a step-bystep process, but rather from the students own efforts use language in order to form new and innovative meanings from ambiguous concepts.

Pushing students to find new ideas (or meanings) is an idea that I greatly value and find extremely important for any English classrooms. Despite my disagreement with Berthoff in believing that there is, to an extent, a certain recipe for writing, I do believe that she is on to something in her idea that it is the teachers job to design sequences of assignments that let our students discover what language can do, what they can do with language (295). In order to fuel students interest in writing, the teacher must create assignments that show them how language can be used in a multitude of ways. By assignment the same generic assignments over and over again, the teacher is in effect pushing the student to do absolutely nothing, as there is very little engaging, high-level thinking involved in writing one cookie-cutter essay after another.