Partner Reading

I don't want to comment too much on the first half of chapter 8. Mostly because it confirms much of what I have already talked about. But I want to share a few brief anecdotes related to the "Partner Reading" section.

Last year, my 4th period Literature class enjoyed the times I provided for them to read with one or two partners. A little pre-text; I was a floating teacher, and as such I worked in a total of five different classrooms. 4th period drew the school's Home Economics classroom. Quite a contrast from the typical tile floor, prearranged rows of desks in a "standard" classroom. The Home Ec. room had a kitchen, carpeting, tables spread out around the room instead of desks in rows, and twice as much space with which to work. This was not a "standard" setting in which we held a Literature class, but I tried to make it work (one thing I clearly recall is taking advantage of the carpet to schedule large group read-aloud). I emphasize "tried" not because I don't believe it's an authentic setting (in fact, it's more authentic than the usual model), but because students had grown so accustomed to the routine rows and rigid structure of a "normal" room that they had more than a few growing pains (as I did).

But one of the things the Home Economics room encouraged was partner reading because the spaced-out tables were extremely conducive to small group work, as students sat in close proximity to each other. There were usually 3-4 students to a table, and if I gave them time on their own, most of them usually found a way to finish the work. Partner reading was interesting. I had to monitor this quite a bit. Here are some of my observations worded accordingly with the points made in Classrooms That Work:

- Students are not shy about reading in each other's company. It is different when I read to my students compared to letting them read together. As they all settle down to work, they develop their own strategies. I saw several instances of students taking turns, asking questions, saying something (never knew what would come out of some of their mouths!), and particularly choral whispering (p. 190). The latter especially impressed me because it told me they were attempting to honor the work of other tables around them (now don't get the wrong idea; it was difficult to maintain this sometimes, but when it worked, it hummed).

- Students work faster with partners, and thus need more things to do. This is tough sometimes. Students are astute enough to recognize the difference between informative work and "busy-work." I don't want to give them more work purely for the sake of giving them more work, but I know the danger in too many of them finishing early, especially in a room that encourages movement and chatter.

- Students have particular "cliques." Use them and abuse them as needed. I didn't assign any seats for my classes the first day/week of the year. So students gravitated to people and places where they felt comfortable. I let this continue only as long as they worked productively. If they strayed or bothered other table groups, then I didn't hesitate to switch students around until I settled on an arrangement that worked. All the same, I tried to hold back from interfering with the synergy of a group; the innate way these kids knew each other enabled them to find the best combination of strategies to help them accomplish their tasks.

The Book Club Group is interesting. I wonder - how might the group function if more responsibility for conducting activities was given to the students? Perhaps they can identify different genres of books instead of the teacher selecting them in advance. Or they can partner up according to their own particular strengths and weaknesses as the teacher monitors. And I agree - never tell the children outright which books are considered "easy," "average," or "hard;" I'd much rather the students come to their own conclusions based on their reading comprehension skills.

What's Holding us Back?

I think all too often, a mistake that we as ELA teachers make is we assume that the comprehension we work to see happen as students read texts silently, and somewhat passively, "happens" after they read. I think we unknowingly foster this belief when we give them a piece to read, whether in class or for homework, and then give them a sheet of "comprehension questions" to answer after they finish.

Too often, the style in which these questions are posed demands very little in the way of complex thought or careful deliberation. They are usually plot-centric and entirely surface-level, which is why it's not at all uncommon to see kids finishing up their questions even as they read, while they should still be absorbing the material in their brains so that they can quickly move on to another activity they enjoy more.

It is a joke, really. Such an assignment does not assess their comprehension. It makes them think that reading comprehension is a chore to cross off their checklist rather than a tool that grows and matures with continued reading, helped along by interaction with the teacher or other students.

The question is, why do we do it? On some primordial level, we must know this isn't Best Practice, so why do we force this kind of thinking on students?

Maybe it's the pressure of grades. As we talked about in class, often we focus more on evaluating students than assessing them, passing out value (numerical) judgments over constructive criticism. When we are mandated to have a certain number of grades per nine weeks, we panic. There's no way I can possibly teach the way I was brought up in college and seminar and give my students 16 grades per quarter! That's almost like at least two grades a week, be they quizzes or tests! Think about what it will do to them! It reinforces the mindset that you don't come to school for the pursuit of knowledge - you come to be judged by cold, hard numbers. You don't come to have your mind engaged, you come to atrophy brain cells as you sit there, disengaged, or until the worksheets are passed out, which at least gets your motor skills going.

Or maybe we're scared of being different. This has to do with either teachinh with different methods from my colleagues or straying from the way I was taught when I was in school. What happens when my middle-school kids discuss with parents or other teachers how we read texts together in class, and I probed them with the "hooking" questions mentioned in CtW, chapter 6? I tell them funny or serious anecdotes that the stories remind me of (which encourages them to interrupt me to tell me theirs), or pause to request a prediction, or ask them to enter the mind of a character and imagine walking a mile in his/her footsteps, etc.?

And then we get the dreaded email or contact that questions our methods, then "politely" requesting that we go back to the "traditional" form of reading comprehension. What do we do then? I can name-drop Vygotsky, Atwell, Freire, and Kohn until my lips turn blue, but if they come back with, "well, you know, I don't really care about all of that because this is the way it's always been done as long as I can remember, so you need to get with the program already. Stop rocking the boat." How's a teacher supposed to respond to that?

Last year, my tests stood out significantly from those of my colleagues. Especially when it came time for semester exams. Scantrons were considered the default testing format, which meant most, if not all, questions were relegated to multiple choice or true/false. And there could be up to 100 of them because of the pressure to include everything from the semester on one exam. Whether they personally agreed with this style, I can't really say. But we can't deny that it results in much faster grading, definitely a bonus when you have to submit a grade report before the Christmas and summer breaks.

And you know, I understand. We are human, after all, we have families to go home to (and in their case, families to take care of). But I just couldn't do it. After a whole semester of in-depth, short answer questions, I couldn't change formats on them like that. That didn't seem fair or right to me. It may have taken me longer to assign grades, and I probably looked a bit weird grading these packets of multi-sentence answers rather than processing them through a machine. But I was fine with that. I just wanted to be consistent with my teaching.

Clustering the Clutter

"When students first begin a piece of writing, ask them to write their topic in the middle of their papers and then brainstorm a web of possible ideas around the main topic" (p. 35).

As I skimmed through chapter 4 of Heard's book, this raised a question. Does Heard view webbing as a universal tool for organizing the thoughts of a writer before and after composing the draft? I had my students construct webs for their compositions, mostly prior to the rough draft (counter to the non-linear approach to the writing process, I know), and several got stuck. They had not even figured out what it was they wanted to write about! And without a central topic, the web has no anchor! It was a terribly puzzling time for them, sitting there often for an entire period and not knowing what to write. This wasn't limited to a particular genre; short stories, personal narratives, persuasive essays, memoirs, and expository essays all had this conundrum at some point or other. It wasn't that my students didn't have any desire to produce words and ideas on the paper. They just weren't getting through to their creative synapses through the organizational tool of clustering. No doubt they had all sorts of ideas bouncing and skipping around in their brains, but the absence of an anchor, a topic, kept the ideas at bay and left them with a blank sheet of paper.

I'm glad that Heard seems to approach clustering, and indeed, other revision methods as a potential tool, not the singular approach. In other words, she seems to realize that one organizing strategy will not work for all students all the time. I didn't always model this in my classroom because I wanted my kids to try as many of the prewriting/revision strategies as they could to find what worked for them to the extent that I made them try all of them at least once. But they are so numerous that it weakens the freedom of choice that the writing workshop is supposed to give them.

I would suggest as an addendum to Heard's clustering that on given days, some kids may express trouble generating an anchor topic. Or they may have ideas for a variety of anchor topics, but are not sure which would make a compelling paper. Perhaps they could spend time writing down as many ancillary details as they can think of; often, the mark of a good paper isn't the main topic itself; it's how many supporting ideas can come out of it. If they can't create a few details around one topic, that might be a signal for them to abandon it and move on to something else, which I think all writers should have the freedom to do. Make sure it is clear that alternative means of prewriting/drafting/revising exist, and that the teacher's job is to help them to find the one that works best, not to prescribe a strategy that doesn't fit his/her strengths as a writer.

I'm currently planning to do my text set on dialogue, and so "A Roomful of Company: Dialogue" made me sit up and pay attention. Short stories gave me the most fits with getting my students to write purpose-driven dialogue; I'm grateful Heard addresses both sides of the coin. There's a time to let dialogue carry the story and a time to let a simple summation suffice. Often, the problem was "stilted speech" - characters not talking naturally or in a way that revealed more about them, but either because they felt they had to have dialogue in a short story (that brought me up short - was I unintentionally pushing that belief in my instruction?) or they couldn't think of anything for the characters to say, so they wrote whatever came to mind, heedless of any sort of outline or direction (which in itself isn't always a bad thing - except when you're trying to piece together your plot, and dialogue clutters your path with unnecessary obstacles).

Hmm. Being 'real' is also a theme for ch. 5 in CTW with building vocabulary. This is another issue not only with short stories, but most of the other compositions in my class. I confess, I am still searching for the best way to give my students enriching learning tools for vocabulary (thankfully, Cunningham & Allington back me up on this - p. 91); I stuck too closely to the conventional method of dishing out word lists and scheduling weekly/biweekly tests. I want to do more of pinpointing a word or two in the larger context of reading and writing because I believe it comes more naturally for students when they see the big picture.

Writing DisSPELLed

Evry day, lik clokwurk, thu handz go up. Its daylee jurnul-ryting tim in mi Langwige Arz clas, and thuh sam handful uv stoodenzs raiz tere hanz just after I finish intrudoosing thee aktiftee. I don reelee haf to asc them. Chancez are, I olredee now whut thu qwestun is:

(And if you can read and understand what I just wrote, then you already have an idea of where I'm trying to go with this. So bonus points for you.)

"Mr. Ballinger, how do you spell 'calendar?'"
"Mr. Ballinger, is this how you spell 'noisy?'"
"Mr. Ballinger, I think I spelled 'accepted' right, but I'm not sure."

I was fortunate that Dr. Thomas happened to be present on one morning, early in the school year, to witness this occurrence. One of my students (my most dependable one for spelling checks) raised her hand and asked how to spell a word (I don't recall it just now). As I do with all students, I spelled it for her. She said 'thank you' and moved on with her journal-writing. He commented that my action did much more to communicate authentic language practice to her than simply advising her to "look it up," as in the dictionary. Me, I just felt fortunate she happened to ask me a word I knew how to spell; the alternative might have produced a little flushing in the face.

But what's the automatic response we hear to such a request in the workplace? "Look it up." Or failing that, "who cares?"

Who, indeed?

Note that in my class, we were doing journal-writing. I don't ever grade my students for spelling errors in their personal journals. Who worries about spelling when the audience is you? The daily journals are merely an outlet to engage them in continued writing practice; part of that is fostering the freedom to make mistakes.

Yet when I continue to get requests to spell words in journal-writing of all things, it tells me quite a bit about the way my kids see writing. They're afraid to make a mistake. Why do we make mistakes? To learn, of course. But do we want to banish all mistake-making in schools? Lord, I hope not - how else would we learn? But in all of our tireless efforts to "perfect" students' writing, are we putting the correctness of spelling and grammar in a lofty position it has no business hoarding? If kids get to the point where they would rather turn in a blank sheet of paper, still pristine and "perfect," instead of a draft full of missspelled words and incorrect grammar, how much good have we accomplished? We've stopped them in their tracks before they have even had a fair chance to start!

Nevertheless, if spelling must occupy a place in reading and writing workshop, it's only right that we give students as much input as possible. Cunningham and Allington hit it when they suggest doing word walls and developing fluency based on frequent, sustained reading done by the children. I would certainly hesitate to put up a word wall consisting of prescribed "commonly misspelled words" the first day(s) my kids walk into the classroom. Who am I to tell them what they can and cannot spell before they have even read aloud one passage or handed me a single sample of their writing? Pretty presumptuous I'd say. Were I an elementary or middle-school child, I might be a bit insulted that the teacher had already decided what words I must be proficient in and which ones I supposedly needed to focus on. I'd be tempted to not turn in one paper or volunteer my voice in any read-alouds. What would be the point? She already knows what I'm capable of, apparently - it's not like I'd be giving her anything new!

I must mention I love the "Making Words" activity (p. 64-74). We have mentioned in class that an accepted/acceptable concept in critical pedagogy is coercion. Giving students the rare opportunity to play around with words by rearranging the letters is an effective way to get them to discover new strategies; at the samr time as they are having fun with finding the "secret word," we are teaching them about spelling and phonics - something we can smugly (kidding) point out to them afterward.

Stapled Read-Aloud

Cunningham, P. & Allington, R. (2007). Classrooms that work: They can all read and write. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Fletcher, R. & Portalupi, J. (2001). Writing workshop: The essential guide. Portsmouth: Heinemann.


One of the most frequent complaints I received from students last year (but usually only two or three of them) went something like this:

"Mr. Ballinger?"
"Yes?"
"This is Language Arts, right?"
"Last time I checked, anyway."
"Why do you read to us every day?"
"What do you mean?"
"When are we gonna do stuff like nouns and adjectives and...and...verbs and stuff, you know?"
"But we already are! You've been using grammar in the writing you create. Why do we need to use it in isolation if we can use it for the big picture? When I read to you I show you the voice of another writer, in the same community in which you partake, so that you too can someday publish your work."
"Oh...okay, whatever."

(I got similar complaints in Literature about structuring too much time writing!)

I couldn't agree more with Cunningham and Allington when they say teacher read-aloud has been shown to be one of the prime motivators for children's desire to read (p. 13). I made a concerted effort to carve out at least 5-10 minutes each class period to read to my students. With Language Arts, I read The View from Saturday by E. L. Kronigsburg, Who Moved my Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, Howliday Inn by James Howe and passages from Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. With Literature, I read the first two books in Margaret Haddix's shadow children series: Among the Hidden & Among the Imposters (we never did get to complete the last one; I had a substitute that day and he never got around to it). I also read The Haunting by Shirley Jackson.

The authors make a sound point when they suggest that while read-aloud is much more prevalent among younger children (in the primary grades), it might actually be more important for older children (3rd-8th grade). The reason is simple: as we discussed yesterday, the older children get, the more that attitude becomes a factor in their work. At this time, they need all the motivation to perform to as high a level as possible for them. So when they hear the teacher reading books aloud to them, they have a deeper wealth of knowledge from which they can draw for their own reading or writing in class (and at home).

It's even better when we can let children choose the novels they want read during the class (p. 15). The View from Saturday and The Haunting were not my selections. I merely gave students a short list of titles, and they picked out the books on their own. It's important to note that all they had to go on was the title and the cover of the book; none of them knew in advance plot details. I suspect The Haunting made them think they were in for a science fiction thriller or some kind of horror story with ghosts, witches, etc. I don't recall what made them choose The View, honestly.

I fear that I started out the year with the big picture in mind about checking up on students' reading (p. 20), but I didn't really maintain it. It's pretty easy to fall into the trap of focusing too much on the curriculum you feel compelled to complete, but you can easily lose sight of the big picture - helping children become better readers. As with the writing workshop, scheduling time to conference with both the teacher and other classmates (p. 23) is important in not only improving skills with reading, but raising the level of motivation to read.

Fletcher and Portapuli raise similar concerns in ch. 7 of Writing Workshop, thereby strengthening my view that reading and writing are inseparably linked (despite what the middle school curriculum tells us). In Language Arts, I often tried to make use of the daily reading time to either introduce a grammar concept, an element of good writing, or simply to gain their attention (p. 79). I used Howliday Inn to help them take note of dialogue and following the subtle plot details that are appropriate in a mystery book. I used Among the Hidden to show how the author crafts characters in ways that enable the reader to identify with them, as when they wrote letters to the main character, Luke, to tell him they know he is a shadow child and offer him some strategies for coping with his situation. Each time, I made use of some element from our reading for a writing application, thereby letting them know the daily reading time is valuable because it's part of how they're growing as readers and writers.

Visionary Writing

I want my students to see themselves as visionaries when they write.

What does that mean? It means not to worry so much about the technicalities and the processes by which their stories come together. It means not to fret over incessant revisions and the red ink pen corrections yet to come. It means not to worry about the number of drafts they feel they have to do.

It means they just realize they have something to write. They have a story to tell.

How they write it is not important - at least not yet. First, they must realize the truth that what they have to say is perfectly legitimate and credible, no more or less than any other student in the room with them.

But how to be a visionary? How to get beyond the jargon of the writing process and the rigid boundary lines that strangle students' words before they ever reach paper?

I shared a variety of my own writing samples with my students last year, mostly from my journal (as they kept their own journals and used them just about every day as part of their daily warm-up). I wanted to show them how I modeled being a writer, not so they could write just like me, but so they could actually see the strategies we discussed in class working. I used samples dating all the way back to the fifth grade (when I started the journal). All I wrote about in those days was snow chances during winter that closed school, going to the dentist, getting a haircut, favorite TV shows, and so on. Later, my entries got more serious; I'd talk about loneliness and 9/11 and graduating high school, etc.

But I told them that when I sat down with my journal and got set to write, I didn't pick up the pencil with some kind of formula in my head. I just got started writing whatever popped into my head. It might have been what I had for breakfast that day, or the first person I saw in the hallway at school or my favorite takeout restaurant of all time, or whatever. My topics were as ranged as theirs, and my focus wandered just as naturally as theirs did. The point was this: I had something to say, and my journal was the one place I could go to say it, or write it.

How I said it didn't matter so much to me. If I mispelled words, so what? At least they're on the page, not stuck up in my head. If I used improper grammar, so much the better! It's my voice, my journal, my thoughts, my rules. No one else could read it except for me, so there wasn't any pressure to make my writing conform to anyone else's standards. I realize that they see it as different when they write for grades in my class, but it's really not. I stressed to them again and again that they are not writing to get an A, a B or even a C. They're writing for themselves, not for me or anyone else. They're writing to improve. To practice. To express.

That was the hardest thing I faced this year: overcoming the laissez-faire attitude of my students toward the writing process. Looking back, I don't know that I really succeeded in doing it, but I tried. The best I can hope for is that I planted some seeds that will sprout once they move on to high school. It's still a high stakes, standardized testing environment that makes no bones about which view of education it favors. It's not one that is prepared to tolerate a quasi-experimental process of writing. And to be honest, some days, I have no answers for kids when they ask me why it doesn't match how the MAP, ITBS, or PACT will assess them. There, it's all about knowing the steps of the process, what each step entails and the precise order in which they proceed. None of that dovetails with what we do in class.

But some things aren't measured by tests. Character. Hope. Love. Beauty. Some things can't be contained by formulas. A loved one dying of cancer. A trip to Yellowstone National Park. The fictitious creation of a new soft drink.

A mere snippet of what authentic, project-driven writing can capture. At least when we can envision it.

Jigsawing the Writing Workshop

Cunningham, P. & Allington, R. (2007). Classrooms that work: They can all read and write. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Fletcher, R. & Portalupi, J. (2001). Writing workshop: The essential guide. Portsmouth: Heinemann.


Now this is more like it.

I'll admit, I was not exactly in the best mindset when it came to breaking down the readings from yesterday. Perhaps I was a little hasty in assuming the researchers' stance on homework was automatically questionable if it was lumped in with all the positive qualities about effective schools. But you seemed to understand that I was not disagreeing with the potential for homework to be effective when it is used as an organic extension of the learning taking place in the classroom, not purely for the sake of keeping the students occupied.

But chapters 4-5 of Writing Workshop gave me more of what I needed to see: actual examples of how to use these techniques in the classroom. Granted, it still didn't branch out and offer up potential roadblocks:

- What if students need more time to decide what they want to write about (p. 38)?
- What if it's clear students are not struggling for ideas, but merely don't want to write? How can we motivate them to action?
- Can sharing time work as well when there isn't room in your classroom for a true "meeting area" (i.e., it's all surrounded by rows and rows of desks) (p. 41)?
- Should writing still be shared by students if they prefer that other students read it aloud for them (p. 43)?
- What happens to the familiar ritual of writing workshop when extracurricular activities and assemblies interrupt the flow of class on a daily/weekly basis (p. 43)?
- Is the timeline meant only as a suggestion, or is the implication that "effective" writing conferences should have students make timelines? Isn't this imposing upon students one specific prewriting activity instead of letting students choose for themselves what strategy works best for them (p. 55)?
- What happens when students tell you they can't find any problems with their drafts no matter how often you prompt them (p. 57)?

That said, I found these chapters more helpful because I could envision the format of my writing workshop from last year and start thinking of ways to implement these ideas to improve it. I know I need to expand the focus of my mini-lessons; last year I made them too much about the form and technique of their writing. That's good in moderation, but it shouldn't dominate the lessons to the extent that mine did. It's time to make it more about what the students can produce with guided writing prompts.

Obviously, time to write should take up most of the class time; I suppose the main obstacle is how much time. I think I need to define it at clearly as possible and as early as possible in the year, but it wouldn't hurt to be upfront about the changing nature of a workshop. Inevitably, things will come up or won't go according to plan, so they should be prepared for the amount of writing time to change (but I will try my best to let them write for much of the class).

Share time...I had my students share both their daily warm-up journal entries and rough/final drafts last year. Many of them were uncomfortable with the idea; I may end up dropping the mandatory aspect of sharing journals; they need to become more personal for students. If I make it clear that I wrote my own journal for me, that no one critiqued or judged me on what I wrote, that philosophy should be modeled for their own sake as writers.

I empathized greatly with the "I can't do it!" claim that kicked off chapter 13 of CTW. That was my students' most often-used excuse for not doing their work or being tardy or inconsistent with their efforts - in other words, failing to perform at a high level. Teaching for improvement and growth is backwards to most every teaching strategy I've seen and experienced as a student (and sadly, I've even been guilty of doing it myself) - viewing mistakes as flaws rather than teaching points. Students should feel free to make mistakes - moreover, they should feel they have the freedom to learn from them for the practical purpose of growing themselves, not so they can feel inferior to their classmates or view their work as incompetent. If we foster an attitude of mistakes as competitive benchmarks (i.e., more mistakes means you're not as good as so-and-so, less mistakes means you're top of the heap), we remove all the joy from learning. We don't learn to avoid mistakes - we make mistakes TO learn! To strive for perfection is nothing more than an exercise in futility, and it will inevitably lead to frustration on the part of the teacher and disdain from the students.

Working Too Well?

Cunningham, P. & Allington, R. (2007). Classrooms that work: They can all read and write. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Fletcher, R. & Portalupi, J. (2001). Writing workshop: The essential guide. Portsmouth: Heinemann.


"Children did a lot of reading and writing throughout the day and for homework" (CTW, p. 4).

"They planned their time so that children did a lot of reading and writing throughout the day--not just in the 100 minutes set aside for reading and language arts" (CTW, p. 7).

As a reader of Alfie Kohn's work, particularly his article entitled "The Truth About Homework," I would hesitate to put these tidbits in the positive category of the schools observed in the chapter's opening study. Let me be clear, however; I do not hesitate on the grounds that I am an advocate of no homework at all. I merely want to point out an alternative view that urges us to reconsider the notion of viewing homework as an essential teaching tool, particularly if we plan to lump it in with the "classrooms that work."

In his research, Kohn writes that he "failed to turn up any evidence that homework is beneficial for students in elementary school." Indeed he goes on to say that "the only effect that does show up is more negative attitudes on the part of students who get more assignments. The only miniscule benefits he found to homework did not show up until high school, and even then, it only correlated to standardized test scores, hardly sufficient evidence in support of its use for younger children, which appears to be his primary bone of contention. Homework, in his view, becomes a statistic we can trumpet because, in the world of No Child Left Behind, high test scores are the standard. If we can elevate those scores, then we can be proud of ourselves.

Having read the above statements in the study, and taking into account Kohn's stance I find myself asking questions. How much time did students average each night on the reading and writing assignments? What were the methods of assessment? Did teachers accumulate data in an easily quantifiable manner that perhaps made it "seem" like a positive trend was taking place in the classroom? Did students have any say in how much homework was assigned or in what manner it was to be completed (in reading the glowing statements on classroom management, I am led to assume this might not have been the case)? Was there a difference in emphasis on homework as opposed to work completed in the class? If so how did the students perceive it? How did the teachers perceive it?

The first few chapters in Fletcher's book...in all honesty, I felt underwhelmed. Now don't get me wrong; there is plenty of good in these installments. It authenticates the student-driven aspect of the writing workshop, which is the model that I believe generates the best results. But in my opinion, Fletcher could have used less step-by-step instruction on precisely how to incorporate an authentic workshop and more true-to-life examples of how the writing process functions in the classroom. I suppose on the heels of a difficult first year of trying to sort this out, I'm slowly becoming jaded on the glowing prospects of the difference that an authentic writing workshop makes. Again, please don't misinterpret me. I'm not in any way disputing the crux of Fletcher's message. But it's easy for chapters 1-4 to come across as talking-down to a teacher that has the same or similar goals for the class, but is struggling with a significant obstacle that keeps him from seeing it through to his students' liking.