By Ned Ide, Conval High School, Peterborough, NH
An interesting stigma has always been attached to my inclusion of freewrites in the classroom. Simply, freewriting is me giving my students permission to think and summarily to write whatever is on their mind. In this case, we are emphasizing right-brained expression.
A major bi-product of nine years of formal education is creative and intellectual constipation. Our students are not asked to think freely and are more often than not asked to write "correctly" the first time around. They invite in the over- analytical, systemic, editorial left brain too early. Good and fresh ideas are left to decay. Writing lacks "voice," passion, and immmediacy. Indeed, in a recent Boston Globe article, a professor of writing at Harvard characterized his students as "high priced, high performance sports cars with no linkage between their engines and their drive shafts." He said they were capable of thinking, but didn't have a "voice." All they cared about was pleasing him and writing "correctly."
Freewrites open the mind and in a flood of five minutes, the average junior will have written a page of material. Their ideas. Their identity. Their dreams. Their anger. Their loss. Their grief. It's better than a session on Freud's couch.
Why, then, have freewrites been stigmatized?
Some say they are not a quality use of time. The first five minutes of my classes are the best, I would counter. Students are engaged, are thinking, and are writing.
Some say that playing music during freewrites is incorrect. Students appreciate the inclusion of music as an intellectual stimulus. Students often have something to write about when music is played while they write, and as my colleague Earl Aldrich points out, playing music helps students to focus in on the task at hand because it is essentially a distraction. Finally, music is not dangerous or threatening. Music stirs the soul. It is one of the humanities.
Finally, some say freewrites give the students the opportunity to use profanities. If a student is thinking in a profane way, he or she will use profanity. If a teacher is really invested in the concept of free-writing, he cannot ask students to edit their thoughts, otherwise call it critical writing. It's very simple. We cannot ask our students to edit who they are. As much as we try, we canno