Homeschooling Somewhere in Between

I recently had the pleasure of getting to hear Cindy of http://applestars.homeschooljournal.net/ speak about right brain learners and was especially intrigued by the parts about how right brain learners approach writing. Aubrey, my poster child for right brain learner, has never been a writer. Though she did read extremely early, I remember clearly her first grade teacher calling a conference because of her concerns that Aubrey’s writing was just not where it should be. At the time I was still miles away from homeschooling and where I am now in my thoughts about child development, but even then I remember being surprised that a 7 year old could be “behind” in writing and my casual response of, well, maybe she isn’t going to be good at writing totally flummoxed her otherwise excellent first grade teacher. Because, I suppose, I had already formed that opinion. It was ok to me that Aubrey wouldn’t be a writer, and I figured that was my part–to not push and accept her as is and focus on what she could do. I didn’t realize at the time that I was shortchanging her in my insistence that, really, it was ok, not everyone enjoys or is able to express themselves in writing.

The first year we homeschooled I did doggedly try to get her to complete a writing program, but finally decided it was not worth the potential damage to our relationship so I dropped it. When she was a freshman I decided once again that maybe it was time to formalize some writing and I convinced her to take an online class from www.writeathome.com. She made it through it and I took a decidedly hands off approach but she didn’t find it an enjoyable experience. I really didn’t pay much attention to what else she might have been doing as far as writing. I knew she often created manga characters and would write character descriptions and short stories about them. And I knew she did some online role playing that involved writing–but I never really thought of it as noteworthy or serious writing. Really, the pictures were what she spent the time on–words were just an afterthought.

This semester Aubrey (with a bit of nudging) signed up for Composition 1 at the community college. We discussed that, since she really didn’t care for writing (probably my words not hers) and wasn’t great at it, getting this out of the way at the community college level would probably be a good idea. I was totally surprised by her independence at just getting papers done. Even more surprised when she told me on more than one occasion how much she was enjoying the class. I remembered the struggles we had when I attempted to get her to write. When she showed me the “A” on her first paper and announced that she had been selected to read her paper to the class, I admit that I immediately thought to myself that wow, community college student standards must be low. When she brought home her second paper, and read parts of it to me I realized that something had happened. She had become an eloquent, insightful writer despite my insistence that it was ok if she didn’t. The assignment? To describe her path to literacy and writing.

Here is her description of her public school writing assignments: “Oddly enough, in all that time I spent reading books, I always saw writing as the bane of my existence. Writing was just a set of handwriting drills, no creative process at all, unless you counted having to pull creative flowery language out your ear to complete an assignment. One rather memorable example was where we had to take a picture up on the board and describe it in a half page paragraph. The catch: we weren’t allowed to repeat words. The first half of the class was spent alternately staring at a blank sheet of paper, and trying to figure out if the no repeat rule applied to short words too. The whole thing seemed overdone and, well, boring. Who could like writing when it was spent staring at a picture of a meadow and trying to think up a paragraph to say what could be summed up in a sentence?”

Her first pleasant writing experiences involved chatting, role playing and fan fiction on the internet. She wrote that through this she discovered she LIKED writing She writes of fan fiction, “The fan-fiction itself wasn’t awful and it showed my first step into writing for real. Through spell-and-grammar check alone, I learned how to spell a lot better and how to appropriately use commas and apostrophes. The process of typing the nearly sixty pages drastically increased my typing speed, making the whole process of writing an incredibly easier task. Since then I’ve only gotten better, branching out and writing my own stories, creating a cast of original characters, and often wanting to burn the old stories as my writing style evolves.”

I found it telling that she says that grammar and spell check actually improved her grammar–because I would imagine most people would say that it is contributing to the detriment of writing and spelling ability because there is no reason to learn it if it is there to fix it. But, at least for a right brain learner, that immediate visual feedback and then selecting the correct replacement word or adding the necessary punctuation to get the computer to stop flashing those colored squiggly lines, connected the information in her brain. She just took the ACT and scored over 30 in the grammar section despite having no formal grammar since leaving elementary school. And then there is the whole handwriting issue–though a gifted artist her handwriting is almost illegible and was certainly a deterrent to her interest in writing. Being able to use the computer and becoming proficient in typing took the difficulty of handwriting out of the equation.

Surely the hours spent role playing and creating stories to go along with her characters paved the way to her becoming a proficient writer, but I think more than that it was the timing. I think more than anything it was the freedom to not spend hours learning to hate writing while being forced to try to express herself in that manner before she was developmentally able. Maybe I should send this paper to her first grade teacher?

This entry was posted on February 27, 2010 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.