Affective Dimensions of Writing

 I look at myself as an individual who does pretty good in most classes. I attribute this to high expectatons...except in math. In math I just focus on passing the class. But in the others subject areas while I might not be the highest scoring student I still aim for an A and get upset with anything less. English and writing are not exceptions. I wouldn't really classify myself as a writer, its not something that I choose to sit down and do if I have free time, but now that I think about it I wonder if I am more of a writer than I first would have thought. Given a choice between drawing or writing I would choose writing as a way to express myself. Even when I scrapbook I incorporate a fair amount of writing in the captions, descriptions, and memories that I include. I do have a journal but it has been months since I have updated it and even in the past when I have been more faithful in my entries the entries always tend to be big chunks of writing where I catch up on everything that has happened since the last time I wrote. As a child, recreational writing consisted of a few journal entries here and there, a pen pal that I had for a few months, and of course the frequent secret letters and notes that I passed on to my friends in the hallways or in class. Now days my recreational writing is a bit more extensive but definitely not formal. I use texting on a regular basis to stay in contact with family and friends and email is used weekly. I have facebook but I don't update my status very often. I use it more as a way to stay in contact with family and friends than I do to express myself.

 The majority of the writing assignments that I remember from school all kind of blend together as research papers, reflections, or essay type discussions but there is one writing assignment from high school that stands out to me. It was a relection type assignment in my history class in 11th grade. We were studying the Holocaust and my teacher assigned us to write a paper pretending we were someone involved in the Holocaust. We could choose to be whoever we wanted and we had to describe our thoughts and feelings about concentration camps or ghettos or something like that. There probably was more factual information required but I don't remember. I thought long and hard about this assignment and about what we had been discussing in class. I think the overall thought process of the assignment was that we would write a reflection from a Jew's or other victim's point of view but I decided to try something different. Instead, I wrote my reflection from the point of view of a Nazi soldier. I do not believe that all of the soldiers in the Nazi regime were bad people or that they all enjoyed what they had to do. I believe there were some lower enlisted soldiers who had been forced into the military and who carried out atrocious orders because they believed they had no choice. It was either follow orders or be inprisoned/killed themselves. This was the point of view I expressed. A soldier who woke up every morning choking on the smoke and grime of the concentration camps and who hated doing what they did everyday. I don't remember what I wrote exactly but it was pretty much of that nature. When we submitted the papers to our teacher, he breifly went through them and began to read some of them outloud, without disclosing the author. He read mine to the class and it was interesting to see the reactions of students to a viewpoint that they hadn't really considered. It helped to put a different light on the topic that we were discussing.

To me, this can be a powerful tool that we as teachers can use in our classrooms. We can use writing assignments to get our students to think more deeply about a topic and to maybe even think outside the box and look at different perspectives or ideas. What ever our individual content or lessons might be, assigning thought provoking writing assignments can serve as a tool to get our students to internalize and to personally connect with what they are learning. In my own discipline I think this can be used by asking students to reflect on topics that directly influence them such as a health issue that their family has personally experienced or in resolving personal conflicts that are prevelant in a teenager's life. The key to these type of reflections would be to allow the students to take the assignment in their own desired direction.