Writing About Writing

        There is a lecture I give to my GED students as I prepare them for the essays they must write as a part of the exam. It begins, "There are three ways to write about someone else's writing." I go on to explain the concepts of paraphrasing, summarizing, and quoting. Today I've been asked to write about my own writing experience in the last 9 weeks.
        A summary, I explain to my classes, is an explanation of just the author's main ideas in your own words. It condenses a piece of text and gets straight to the point. I would sum up my writing in the last few weeks as a strong start with poor follow-through (how typical of me and my average student!) and more negative than I wanted it to be. When they asked me if I wanted to do the 9x9x25 challenge, I honestly thought it would be simple, not really a challenge at all. After all, I love to write, I already blog and I'm a storyteller by nature. It hasn't been the experience I expected, however. I have fallen short of my 9 posts because I got stuck good and deep in the seventh week. Somewhere 7 or 8 paragraphs into a blog post/rant, I came to the realization that my writing has been overwhelmingly whiny, a laundry list of complaints about the system- from testing, to former teachers, to other professors, to my students- and I didn't know how to dig myself out of that hole. Because that really isn't how I feel. I love teaching. It's not infrequent for me to leave class singing. My students energize me and infuse me and I invariably leave them in a better mood than I walked in with. So why the preachy passages each week?
        A quote, I go on to tell my students, is the author's ideas in the author's own words. However, I always warn, quotes should be used sparingly and only when the author's words are so beautiful, powerful, or vivid that you could not say it any better yourself. The latest blog began by explaining my long history of getting emotional about education like this, "When it comes to learning, I've always had what could best be described as an overdeveloped sense of self-righteous indignation." It went on to describe in detail incidents where I have lost my cool at various teachers over the years as a result of letting that indignation win out over my common sense and finally settled into my latest diatribe against a certain large publishing group's online learning program that my students were struggling to use. 
         I define a paraphrase as all the author's ideas in your own words, clarifying that since this method gives you roughly the same amount of text as the original, it's best suited to writing about short pieces of writing or for supporting details you'd like to use to back up your points. According to that probably never-to-be published post of mine, the mandatory pretests meant to assess students current levels were poorly designed; the content was organized and presented in such a way that is would only overwhelm and bore my students; and the body of material covered was unlike that which is tested on the actual GED. Because of all this, I went on to say, this program should not be mandated for use in our adult education program (which it is.)

       Can you see why I got stuck? I just had nowhere to go from there. For two weeks, long after the post was due, I kept coming back to that lengthy diatribe and rereading and editing what I had already written but couldn't seem to finish it on a positive note. Personally, I despise a whiner who complains and complains but has no better solution. Ask my students; I scold them for it. There I was, moaning about a problem, with no solution at all. Finally, I realized I needed to do something more productive about my problem than a blog rant.
        So, don't expect anymore posts from me for a while. If you need me, I'll be in my office, busily typing away. I'm working on a new project- YC GED classes in Canvas with my own assessments and my own content- an online class that actually aligns with the GED. And you can quote me on that!