Using My English Brain

The past two days I have been preparing to teach a class on writing a research paper for a home school Coop. Writing Pedagogy makes me excited! It is so fun to use this part of my brain that has been sorely neglected. I really do enjoy explaining how to use MLA format, and stretching student writers so that they are able to write an authentic research paper. I love explaining the writing process and practically applying it. I love teaching kids how to revise their writing and add details. I love encouraging them to change and combine their sentence structure to sound as smart as they really are on paper. Teaching writing helps me be creative in a way that is different from taking pictures, from teaching and practicing music, and from anything else I do. I love coming up with crazy introductory questions for my students to write about so that I can 1. see how they write and 2. know more about them. For example, "What would you do if a lemon the size of a car landed in your backyard next Tuesday?" I love making up a sample work cited page about giraffes off the top of my head to show students how to cite sources they might use in their paper. (I had a lot of fun creating fake author names and coming up with great giraffe titles.) I love teaching research papers because it involves learning on multiple levels: learning to write better, learning to write formally, learning to use a specific format for writing and learning lots of interesting things about a chosen topic. I love all these things, and I love teaching CREATIVE writing even more. Teaching writing just gets my blood moving.