A Sense of Wonder

The other day, I was showing my developmental writing students the 1000 journals project website. You can find the project website here: http://www.1000journals.com/. An interesting thing happened while we were looking at the journals. My developmental students were interested. Not only were they interested; they were actively planning the kind of artist's journals they were going to make. Now for those of you reading this journal who aren't in teaching, you need to know that it's hard to get any English class entheusiastic about doing a writing project on their own, much less a group of developmental writers who are typically very burnt out on school. And in the nearly six years I have been teaching developmental writing, I have never had students excited about undertaking a project without even an extra credit incentive. Yesterday was the kind of day teachers all over the world dream about: lightning struck in my class.

So I did what most teachers do in that situation: I went home, cracked a beer, and started trying to figure out how I could "bottle" the experience for future classes. The experience led me to ask a lot of questions about teaching and learning, most pointedly why school seems to provoke a sense of profound apathy in so many people.  My hunch is that the key to learning is something entirely untestable and nearly edited out of our schools: joy. We've managed to expurgate joy right out of school and often out of the process of teaching entirely. So my students have gotten me inspired to do my own writer's journal. Hopefully, by modelling this sense of joy in the process of writing, I will be able to show my students that there is another way, that school can be something more than just a "prison for kids" (verbatum from one of my former students). Incidentally, the image you are seeing is from my writer's journal.