Writing 'a Whole Page'

By Cindy Reitzi,
Madison substitute teacher

December 1999

Most teachers have a class that they’d like to forget or redo and teach ‘right’ the second time. Still, when reflecting on our own ‘learning experiences,’ sometimes the biggest challenges turn into our best successes.

I knew that selling the idea of writing every day to my psychology students one summer was going to be skiing uphill on glare ice. I got the distinct impression that many of them hated writing:

“One of the requirements in this course will be to write a page a day in a journal. I’ll give you a question or you can choose a topic of your own.”

“A page!”

“A whole page?!!”

“I can’t write a whole page!”

“Yes, you can…”

What is it about writing that inspires such fear? How do students get past this fear so they can write? My own experiences and those of students across the academic spectrum give me clues:

• Whether you love writing or hate writing, it’s hard. Writing requires more focus and persistence than shorter academic tasks and there is no ‘right answer.’ From what I’ve observed, too many students give up way too quickly when they encounter problems in academic projects that require intense focus. Writing is also a solitary activity and puts sole pressure, responsibility, or credit on the individual writer. For some students, that’s intimidating.
• Assessment. Some students are afraid to reveal themselves in writing to an authority figure who exerts grading power over them. They may become afraid to write. This also happens in the workplace and with students in academia whose writing represents high stakes in their future.
• The complexity of the writing process. The different stages of the writing process require an agile mindset and very different skills at different stages. This means the writer’s mind needs to shift gears frequently.

Using journals is not a good way to teach structure, form, or organization, but that was not my purpose. Journals are a good parallel for Psychology class. They are a ‘non-threatening’ form of writing. They can be used as learning logs and are a good psychological tool to help students reflect, solve problems, and test run that most elusive writing quality: voice.

For students fearful of writing, getting to the bottom of the page, day after day, was a psychological victory over the page and their fears of writing. I told students that I graded strictly on length: if they wrote a page, they got full points. Although most students wanted me to read and respond to their entries, they could put an X at the top of the page if they didn’t want me to read it. For students who were phobic of assessment, this was a relief. It helped them just relax and write.

That done, the next challenge was writing “a whole page.” I showed students freewrite techniques to use if they got stuck and encouraged them to “just write.” After a short time, most students were writing a page a day on the topic I chose or one of their own.

They were not an easy group. I had 30 students, which was an enormous class in summer school, since many of them needed a lot of individualized help. Still others were active discipline problems and I was putting out fires all summer. For me, that clouded anything good that was happening. Ironically, what my students resisted the most, turned out to be the most valuable to them.

Within six weeks, most students wrote approximately 30 pages or more. For some, this was the most they had ever written. On their final exam, I asked them to read their journals and write what they learned from the experience. It was all I had hoped for and more:

• One student wanted to continue writing a journal because she thought writing helped her get perspective on her problems before overreacting to them.
• A philosophical student observed that he’d never before thought about the type of journal topics posed in class and that he enjoyed writing and thinking about psychological questions.
• A student who was battling depression found the theories we studied helpful and wanted to show her journals to her therapist. She said the experience helped her sort out key relationships in her life.
• One student, who was terrified when teachers read her writing, relaxed enough to write a page every day. More poignant still, she let me read it.

Posted December 1, 1999