For the first twenty-five years of my thirty-two-year teaching career, I really didn’t like teaching writing. I wasn’t a writer myself, and all I knew how to teach was the five-paragraph essay and the research paper. Even though I steered clear of writing myself, I made sure that my students were prepared for college with these two types of writing, not enjoying my part of their learning very much.
But times change, and after taking part in a writing workshop one summer where I discovered other types of writing, I began to enjoy leading my students into new territories. One of the new things for both my students and me was journal writing. Every morning, I’d go into my classroom and write a quotation and a journal topic on the board. They were to spend the first few minutes each day responding to/identifying with the quotation and writing a journal on either my topic or one of their own. I did this for a few years, building up a storehouse of journal topics that I could use each year. I even had a book of topics. (I need to tell you that this was back in the “dark ages” before the Internet. I couldn’t just look up a website that had a gazillion topics listed.)
One morning, as I was standing in the hall waiting for my first-period students and watching to see that no fights erupted, I realized that I had gotten busy before going to my classroom and hadn’t put a topic on the board. I frantically searched my cart (my classroom on wheels . . . it had everything that I would ever need for teaching on it. Well, maybe not everything!) for my little journal book. Couldn’t find it! What to do? What to do? My students had come to the point of expecting a journal topic, and they would demand one (I had them trained!).
After a few minutes, I thought of something, but I didn’t mention it just yet. I checked roll and called a couple of kids to my desk to talk about make-up work. Then I turned to the class. Just as I thought, someone said, “Where’s our journal topic, Miz Young?” (We’re Southerners.)
“Well,” I said, “we’re going to do something new. What can you think of that has twenty-six parts?” Oh, my goodness, they thought of all sorts of things but not of what I was thinking of. Finally, one of them chirped up, “The alphabet!”
Yes! They would do an alphabet journal, thinking up their own topics, one letter a day for the next twenty-six days. They couldn’t believe that I wanted them to do the choosing of topics themselves. That sounded hard. A journal for EVERY letter? What about X and Z? I knew they’d think of words even for those letters. And they did!
I feel sure that some of them waited until the night before the Alphabet Journals were due, but that didn’t matter to me. I just wanted them turned in on time.
The first year, the journals looked terrible for the most part because I hadn’t said anything about HOW to write them; therefore, most of them were in their terrible handwriting. Also I didn’t give a length. Some were VERY short. So . . . the next year, I added a couple of instructions to help me. Each letter had to have a journal at least one page long . . . one typed page long. This was in the early days of computers, so many of the students were still using typewriters.
The Alphabet Journal turned out to be one of my favorite assignments and a favorite of my students, too. I liked it so much that I, too, did Alphabet Journals. I even made copies of mine and gave them to my students. They needed to see my “creativity,” too, just as I had seen theirs. The Alphabet Journal in my classes was introduced in the late ‘80s, so you see, I had the idea for this blogging challenge way before John Holton began the Blogging from A-Z April Challenge. Of course the “challenge” is much better organized, but I’ve always been proud of my “challenge” for my students because I, a very uncreative teacher, thought of it myself!
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