Tag: experiential learning

Molly Backes on How to Be a Writer

Molly Backes, an author of young adult fiction, considers the question from a mother about her teenager, “She wants to be a writer. What should we be doing?”

Her first answer was, “You really do have to write a lot. I mean, that’s mostly it. You write a lot.”

But then she thought about it, and that’s where it gets really interesting:

First of all, let her be bored. …

Let her be lonely. Let her believe that no one in the world truly understands her. …

Let her have secrets. …

…

Let her fail. Let her write pages and pages of painful poetry and terrible prose. …

Let her make mistakes.

…

Let her find her own voice, even if she has to try on the voices of a hundred others first to do so. …

Keep her safe but not too safe, comfortable but not too comfortable, happy but not too happy.

Above all else, love and support her. …

— Bakes (2011): How to Be a Writer

At the end she posts a picture of her collection of forty-two writer’s notebooks.

It’s a wonderfully written and well considered post that I’d recommend to anyone trying to teach writing and language, particularly if you take the apprentice writer approach. And, I’ve always been a great believer in the power of boredom.

Backes’ advice more-or-less summarizes my interpretation of the Montessori approach: create a safe environment and give students the opportunity to explore and learn, even if it means a certain amount of struggle and failure.

Jungle play area at the Skudeneshavn Primary School in Karmøy on the west coast of Norway is another great example of creating an environment that offers students the opportunity to explore.

It’s also interesting to note how differently writers and other experts think, yet how much their practices overlap. Mathematician Kevin Houston also recommends writing a lot when he explains how to think like a mathematician, but his objective is to use full, rigorous sentences to clarify hard logic, and less to explore the beauty of the language or discover something profound about shared humanity.

Resurrecting the greenhouse

Two years ago, the middle school’s flagship project was to put up a fully functional greenhouse (using this design). It took all year but we did it. On the way, we got to practice geometry, mapping and construction, while learning and growing plants and studying soil profiles. It was so successful that, with our spring plant sale we broke even on the entire project.

Last year, however, the greenhouse was somewhat neglected. My plans to add an automatic window opener, which would have been a wonderful tie-in to our electronics and Newtonian physics studies, did not work out; we just did not have the time. We’d taken the plastic covering off, so only the bare, forlorn PVC frame was left standing around a plot of waist-high weeds.

Though I could not have predicted it, this year we have a strong core group of students who are highly enthusiastic about resurrecting the greenhouse and making it work. My suggestion was that we try to grow produce this fall that we could cook in December when we do our Dinner and a Show. Well, two weeks in, they’ve already put together a menu plan, weeding is well on its way and I’m being harassed to hurry up and arrange a trip to Home Depot. The excitement is so infectious that another student has volunteered to bring in his electric weed-whacker during the immersion. It’s amazing!

I’m having the hardest time not butting in. There is a beauty in seeing a well oiled machine executing a project or solving a difficult problem. But there is another even more wonderful aesthetic visible in a the birthing struggles of a nascent team. The forward motion of infectious enthusiasm is pulling puzzle pieces into its wake, and the pieces just seem to click into place when the time is right. I have to keep reminding myself that my job is to prepare the environment and let the kids do the rest.