Tom Romano’s and Donald Murray’s chapters on writing both made me think back to my earliest academic writing experiences, in elementary school. When I was in second grade, my small, rural public school began a system that they called, creatively enough, “Writer’s Notebooks.” Basically, everyone had to buy a notebook, and they had to write in it. That was pretty much the whole thing. I don’t think there were many requirements to the project–as I recall, we simply had to write, and from time to time the teacher would collect the notebooks to see how we were doing. If we had written something we wanted to keep private, we could fold the page over (I remember thinking “yeah, right,” and watching what I wrote on folded pages too, but still, the option was there). In short, the only goal was to get us writing. When we got the notebook back, there’d be maybe a few spelling corrections, but mostly just reactions to the small events of our second grade lives, and questions to push us furtheron our topics.

I guess they liked the results, because the program continued through the rest of my time at the school. The school began provided the notebooks, which would we decorate at the beginning of the year. We were supposed to write for 20 minutes in class, anything at at all, progressing to 30 minutes as we got older. We were supposed to do the same at home every night. I found I loved doing this. I started off in second grade writing about my day to day life, my ideas for the future, etc, but from third grade on discovered that I loved writing stories and poems. I don’t think I would have the interest I have in writing as an adult if not for this early, forced daily work. It would not have occurred to me, as an eight or nine year old, to make time to write, so my teachers did it for me.

This seems to me to be exactly what Romano and Murray recommend in their essays. From Romano, to write constantly and to write everything, in order to become comfortable working in diverse genres. And Murray, right in his opening, forcues on simply making the time to write, unplanned and comfortably. This seems so obvious–how are we to know what interests us if we cannot explore, and how are we to become comfortable with different tones if we are always trapped in a single, academic form? Further, how are we to think of writing as a means of communication, of expression, if we only ever encounter it as a rote task, a way to respond to basic questions?

And yet, when I think beyond my elementary school years, to middle and high school, and then to the middle and high school classrooms I observe now, and even to some of my own college classes, it is so rare that older students are simply given time to write. Why is this? Students do not naturally lose creativity or curiosity and they get older unless they are taught to. But after elementary school, the only times that I remember being given the space to simply write were a couple elective courses late in high school. During my observations now, a few years later, I have never seen students given time to write, or assigned daily journaling. This confounds me, because it seems like an equally important, if not more important, time to be writing. If, as children, we are exploring, then as adolescents we are discovering. We are getting a hold on our own voices, on who we want to be and what we want to do as we reach adulthood. Therefore, this is an essential time to be developing a strong writing voice–but where is the space to do that? Perhaps I’m mistaken, and it is just my limited experiences that make me think students no longer have the kind of required free-writes I had as a child. But if not–why? Why does this open reading and writing space disappear when it’s needed most? Is it a lack of time due to test preparation, or basic skill reinforcement? Could twenty minutes be found to work on something that helps even nervous students get comfortable with the basic process of writing, of not worrying about errors? I know this would’ve helped me in middle and high school.