By the time 4 p.m. rolled around last Friday, my hair hurt.
That's because I'd spent four straight days, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., reading and writing and otherwise thinking on a level that would make a first-year Harvard law student whimper, stamp his feet, and plead for mercy.
And I have four more weeks to go.
I'm back for round two of the Plymouth Writing Project, having participated initially during the summer of 2006. This time, I'm one of four returning fellows who'll receive advanced leadership training. In addition to my regular teaching load at Hampstead Middle School next year, I'll be a writing consultant at a middle school in Manchester.
The basic idea behind the National Writing Project, of which Plymouth State University is a satellite, is to train teachers to go back to their school districts and teach their colleagues to be better teachers of writing.
Imagine meeting with a group of seven other teachers twice a week, three hours for each session. We've all read two or three lengthy and intense academic articles about one theory or another regarding writing pedagogy.
Now that I'm a returning fellow, I can use "pedagogy" in a sentence.
We have to write a one-page reaction to that set of articles and then read it aloud to the group. Each individual group member has one minute — yes, we're timed — to plan an oral response to the written reaction, and then another minute to make that oral presentation. And then the process is repeated for each group member.
Remember when you could sit in the back row of a college lecture hall and snooze or read "Rolling Stone" without worrying about being called on? Yeah, those were the good old days.
Imagine having to produce an original piece of writing every week and then sharing it with a small group of colleagues. They critique it, and then you must write a final draft. That's in addition, of course, to all of the smaller writing exercises we do every day, as well as an ongoing research project that's due at the end of July.
Not writing is not an option.
Imagine, as well as doing all that reading and writing, preparing a demonstration of a practice that you think demonstrates excellent writing instruction. And after your 45-minute presentation, you sit silently and listen as your colleagues dissect and analyze your every move, but in a purely nonjudgmental way.
It's more than a humbling experience.
The Plymouth Writing Project is by far the best staff development experience of my teaching career. With colleges and universities spending millions — and businesses billions — of dollars re-teaching and re-training students and employees to get their basic writing skills up to speed, the time is now to help K-12 teachers become the best writing teachers they can be.
But it's Sunday morning, and I have three articles to read, and I need to finish the draft of a poem I'll share with my writing group on Monday afternoon. My hair hurts, again. But as John Mellencamp says, "it hurts so good."
nnn
John Edmondson is a teacher in Hampstead. His column appears Wednesdays in the Derry News.
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