Introduction
My literacy narrative reflects how one of my past teachers has influenced my teaching and tutoring values. Mr. Jacoby gave me a reason to write and focused his lesson on the writer and not the project. The ability to rewrite someone else’s work in their own words is not a hard task in the least, this is done every day when a student quotes or paraphrases in an essay. Mr. Jacoby’s project was not made to draw out informative or original papers; the focus was to bring out informed and creative writers. The love that I found of writing in that class made me want to write and made me want to pass on the passion of writing that I found to my fellow students. I personally feel that this is an effective method of teaching, especially in high school and lower level college settings. The students come out feeling refreshed about writing and the process causes them to improve without feeling drowned in the complication of improvement. The class had areas of grammar and vocabulary within it, but the heart of the class was to have writers attain a higher level of invention and style. The project itself also incorporates the ideal of interdisciplinary writing within it. Our group rewrote The Crucible which is a play and therefore had to be written in play form. There were other groups that rewrote short fiction and one group that rewrote a nonfiction journal article. This project pushed students into discovering other Medias of writing that they hadn’t touched on before without even realizing that they were learning a new skill. The classroom was very student based and concerned itself with bringing students back to writing on a personal level. I believe that every person who attended that class left with new skills and a new appreciation for writing which is what I believe all teachers should be focused on when teaching.
