Preschool Crafts ⇒ High School Writing
Read the following essay:
It will be photocopied for you, too. Follow these steps:
- Take notes, click on links, ask questions, etc.
- Talk to your peers about their notes, questions, etc.
- Share the essay or its ideas with other folks, and talk to them a bit about what they believe.
- Do the writing assigned below.
Empathy and Blame: Process Reflection
Melissa Dahl’s essay emphasizes process over product, which fits your ongoing essay work. You started with two videos on empathy and blame, respectively, and then were asked to find an approach to your essay that is unique, inventive, and interesting:
Most of you will not have gotten much further in the essay itself. That’s more than okay; it’s actually what we intended here. You need to embrace what Dahl talks about in her article, except that you would replace “preschool crafts” with “high school essay writing.” You are interested in the process of writing, not just the product.
Your assignment: Write a response that tells the story of your writing process, from the day you watched those videos up to today, including
- your use of time in class and at home;
- your collaboration with your peers;
- your collaboration with your teacher;
- your use of other resources, especially the interstitial classroom; and
- your overall sense of how the writing process has unfolded.
To figure out what you’ve learned through your writing, we must have a sense of the time and energy that went into creating your writing. In other words, you are writing an essay about your essay, or at least about the process of writing your essay. That’s where you will learn the most. Remember the quotation at the top of this website:
We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.
~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
The most important thing you will learn here is something about how you write, and that reflective work begins before you’ve come close to finishing the essay itself.