This is my post, Period.

This week. in our session. We talked about. Awkward punctuation. Namely periods. In the example we read for class, the author allows her students to continue punctuating badly, just to get their ideas onto the page. I think this is an important concept, because so much of what we do in writing has to do with editing, and I think sometimes, editing gets overemphasized and makes people become too self-conscious about their work to put down anything meaningful. However, I take exception to allowing someone to blatantly abuse periods, because I feel these are a fundamental part of writing, structuring your work so that it makes sense, both to the reader and writer. I heard a statistic that for every mistake you make, or habit you build, it takes 50 times doing it correctly to retrain yourself to do it the right way. So I don't think allowing someone to blatantly bumble periods is the right way to teach writing. It would be like in basketball, during Kiddie Camp, allowing the youngsters to kick basketballs. Wait, that actually happens. I take that back. Maybe she does have a point. I mean, during kiddie camp, basketball fundamentals are certainly emphasized, and we certainly encourage them not to double dribble or kick basketballs, but sometimes, it just happens. And we don't stop them every time a double trouble or travel happens, because if we did, they would never play basketball again and would learn to hate the game. So I think the author is trying to allow the writer to make mistakes, so that they will foster a love of writing, rather than emphasizing the fundamentals right away, and turning them off from writing.

Switching topics, like my classmates, I also was bothered by the fact that the case study was not on a specific child, but a combination of all the children the author had worked with. Having a combination of first to sixth graders made it confusing, because first-graders are obviously less developed than sixth-graders. So, how do we know which mistakes are realistic for a secondary child, which is what many of us in the class hope to work with? However, I will again use the basketball analogy in that you need to understand the fundamentals before you can teach the more advanced concepts. And I believe if we, the teachers, can understand the basic foundations of writing, we can better teach the more advanced material to secondary students, and help those students who aren't up to speed as well.

The past couple weeks, I have forgotten to add a question at the end of my blog, so here is my question which you can respond to if you like: In your opinion, what is more important? Helping young writers/students foster their love of writing, or teaching them the proper fundamentals of writing?