Hawthorne

The end...

Our writing adventures at Hawthorne have now come to an end. In only 4 short sessions together, I think it is difficult to say that my student writer made much progress. Although, I do think that he is a much more conscious writer, better aware of resources available to assist him with his writing and more willing to treat writing as a process that includes several drafts. I saw him, during our last few sessions, able to recognize and revise aspects we had discussed in the previous sessions. I was happy to see this improve understanding and ability to self-correct.  

I really enjoyed and value the experience to work with student writers. Most of our program in the Bachelor of Education is very much theory based, and while that is helpful and necessary, this experience allowed us to apply the theory of writing strategies in a real classroom situation. I believe my student writer learned a lot from me, and I certainly learned a lot from him.

Continued writing adventures at Hawthorne...

I was thinking that working with struggling writers may have been a better opportunity to implement writing help. I have, however, reconsidered. Our gifted students don't need the basic grammar corrections nor do they need help with the outline process. It brings the mentoring to a much deeper level where we are working with the students through more complex, more challenging writing difficulties. My student has developed a very logical process for putting together a piece of writing. It is well structured and nearly error free. He writes well and is very confident in his abilities. This poses the challenge of needing to push him further, to further improve. As writer's there is always room for improvement, and encouraging him to make changes and revise, restructure, reconsider has been our objective. 

Hawthorne

Today was our first visit to Hawthorne school for student mentoring. It was a very interesting experience.

The teacher seems very enthusiastic and passionate towards teaching. Through his summary of the course, he demonstrated how effectively he is applying the curriculum material and connecting that to to real life themes.

He has the students engaged in the curriculum and the marking system, which I thought to be very novel and very positive.

The students seemed to really respect him and be interested in what he had to say.

I was very impressed upon meeting my student. He had prepared 3 texts. We focused on 1 of them during our mentoring session.

Mr. Harder had given them the directions, write about a paradigm. Although very short and vague instructions, the student wrote a masterpiece. He researched and wrote about the paradigm of twins and how it relates to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

There was very little to edit in terms of content. We focused our attention on grammar corrections and the diction used.

I look forward to our next meeting!