Touchstone Moment #1

“Black and White Moments”

I was in fourth grade even the thought of writing made me break into a cold sweat, the rules of grammar taunting me through my TCAP scores. It showed through the scores on my state tests that I was not a good writer if anything I was far from it. Up until this point I was placed in the lowest reading groups, the writing groups that needed that extra “umph” from the teacher in order to get by and be another teachers problem. Even my mother as my teacher couldn’t make a difference in my writing because I had no want to get better. Everyone told me that I was a below proficient writer and because I had no understanding of the relevance of that I had no desire to want to change it. It all changed when I took a Writer’s Workshop from my fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Dodds. We met only once a week and she always had food for us, I swear as an incentive to make us come. In that hour or so that we met she challenged my whole outlook on writing, it no longer was a chore or a way to devalue me, it became an outlet to work out all the anxieties my little mind had. My favorite activity, though, was these black and white photos she had. Pictures that resembled those in The Widow’s Broom. We had ten minutes to write about what happened before or after or even during the picture, and I ate it up. There were no guidelines on how many words we had to write, or what even it had to be about, all that mattered is that we captured the brief moment of the photo. It made me realize that writing doesn’t have to be solely about getting proficient on a test. It let me look at writing through a new lens, one where I wasn’t being judged on the black and white, the gramatics, of it. Rather I was allowed to open up my own thinking and place that on paper. I was able to share my thoughts in a whole new media, and it turned out I wasn’t half bad at writing. I think without that workshop and Mrs. Dodds, I would have never learned to love writing. I would have always been stuck in the box that the technical things placed me. By doing so it opened up the love of reading, of enjoying other people’s works, creative ideas. It truly planted the seed that grew into me being a hopeful English teacher.