A mom on an unschooler’s bulletin board I visit was lamenting the fact that her teenaged kids don’t write, and asking how to teach them this important skill that they needed to know. Another sage mom wondered who says they “need to know”? I replied:
I have two boys, both pretty hesitant writers. They are now 11 & nearly 14 and still don’t much like to sit down and write – UNLESS it’s pertinent to them. My eldest has fallen in love with the ukulele – he decided to start a blog to write about music and do book/music reviews and such. His idea, his baby. Some of his posts are very short, but he is writing on his own. On another day, he was sending some music information to a friend via snail mail. One of the papers needed explanation, so he sat and wrote for an hour, creating step by step instructions for how to use this information. If I asked him to write an essay, he’d balk. But this is stuff that’s important to him, so he does it without any qualms.
I think we would all agree that writing is a very important skill for kids to learn. But is it important that they be able to write a fictional story? Is it important that they know how to write a comparative essay? Or is it most important that they learn to write in order to convey information? Thoughts?
September 28, 2006 @ 4:10 pm
These are good questions. I think we have it drilled into us so much that, for example, writing is something we all have to be good at. But we’re not, not all of us are gong to be writing well enough to be published authors, for instance.
But it seem instruction-wise the books, the teachers all have this expectation that every student must be good at it.
I mean, we can’t all be good at everything. And I don’t think a goal of most of us being reasonable competent in most everything is a good goal either. If they can write well enough to get their point across *when they need to* then that’s enough. Then we’ll have tiem to develop this skills at which we are really good at, the ones we are blessed with.