Endings and beginnings

This past week was my final week on campus for my 8 months of teacher education.  I had plans to absorb all the wonderfulness of this year, spend social time with as many friends as I could, and spend long hours in the resource centre writing my unit and lesson plans for the coming five weeks.

And then: sinus infection.  I get chronic sinus infections but have learned how to (sometimes) ward them off if I get them early. My distractions with school for the past two weeks meant I wasn't on top of my game and it is now a full-blown infection.  Getting out of bed is extremely difficult, using my brain is much more taxing than usual and I have a constant fever.  It wasn't the week I was hoping for.

Sometimes the endings we imagine don't meet with our expectations.

I had imagined Aarohi and I working methodically toward the end of her story, having time to caress her word choices, have discussions about sentence fluency and unusual word order that adds to the flavour of a story.  What happened instead is that I had to be reminded that I was working with a Grade 6 student who isn't keen on homework.  For our last meeting, Aarohi was supposed to have a draft of her story, "the bones of it".  Instead, she still had only two or so paragraphs.  She spent that meeting writing while I sat beside her and made suggestions of things to think about and changes she might want to consider.  We were able to touch on sentence fluency and unusual structure, which did make the start of her story more poetic.  I agreed to meet with her once more during my placement day on Thursday (and the unfortunate start of my sinus infection).

By Thursday, Aarohi had much more of her story done but she was veering off of her outline.  We got her back on track and she finished the story that evening at home, as it was due the next day, and sent it to me late that evening.  I would have liked to have time to work with Aarohi in her final editing.  She left out a bit of key information that would have helped the reader and her transitions needed some work.  It wasn't the ending to our time together that I had hoped for.

However.

When I sat down to write my final report on my work with Aarohi, I assessed the story she had written back in the fall.  I assessed it for the Ideas trait and the Organization trait as these were the two traits we focussed on the most in her current story.  She scored fairly low on both traits for that original piece.  When I assessed her new story, I was thrilled to find that she had advanced significantly in both of these traits.  The approach of writing a chronological outline first, after she arrived at an initial idea, really helped keep her story organized and driving her main idea forward.

The experience of being a one-on-one writing mentor taught me several things that I will take with me into my teaching career:

1. Set narrow goals.  Focus on one or two traits for a piece of writing.  Don't assess for everything.
2. Realize that a student in Grade 6 won't necessarily put in the time that you hope.
3. Take frequent breaks.  We used haiku writing as our break and it was really fun.
4. Some traits are really hard to teach because a good writer who is in her forties has been subconsiously applying practices to her writing for a very long time.  It's hard to explain how to do things like choose alternate words and write fluent sentences.
5. Because of #4, model good writing.  Write in front of the student so they can see how a writer works.
6. Use the 6+1 Traits of Writing as the base of a writing program.  Buying this book and following it - for the most part - was the best thing I did going into this experience.

That is a wrap for my one-on-one mentorship from my writing course.  However it isn't the end of this blog or reflecting on my teaching practice, reviewing resources, and finding inspiration in others.  I will continue to use this space to do all these things.

Tomorrow I begin my last practicum.  I will be armed with a unit plan on Dance and lots of antibiotics and kleenex. 

This is just the beginning.