This is the first draft of my grad school application essay. I'm applying for my Masters in Education. I have a few specific questions:
1) Do I focus too much on the journaling exercise?
2) Where should I elaborate?
3) Are there any parts that sound too casual?
Thanks for any help you might be able to give me
7
**************************************
After graduating from Hampshire College in 2005, I have had two jobs working with adolescents: as a day camp counselor at Camp Norwich in Huntington, Massachusetts, and as a teacher at Nature’s Classroom at the Becket, Massachusetts site.
Working as a counselor greatly affected my decision to become a teacher. I’d always known, to some degree, that I would love teaching, but I had been nervous about being an authority figure. Camp counseling gave me the confidence I needed to step forward, knowing that I have the potential and drive to influence the lives of young people.
At Camp Norwich, I mentored a different group of adolescent girls each week. The position required creative and energetic performance of duties including planning the daily schedule, mediating large and small conflicts, communicating with guardians, and organizing the weekly overnight. Throughout the day, I led activities including nature walks, art projects, swimming, canoeing, low ropes course, and writing. As a Writing and Literature major, I was especially excited about leading campers in writing exercises. Some campers even brought their creative writing to camp for me to read.
Nature’s Classroom is a program that hosts groups of students from a different middle school each week. I spent most of the day with my “field group,” the 10-14 students I was assigned to work with for the week. During our hikes and activities, I had the opportunity to observe the social dynamics of adolescents. I feel a strong bond with this age group, and every day I looked for ways to foster trust and communication within the group.
As a Nature’s Classroom teacher, I also taught two or three classes per day. Most teachers use lesson plans written by the administration and former teachers, but I chose to write most of my classes myself. For example, I taught a class on dreams, beginning by introducing various dream theories from throughout history, and then asking the students to write their own dream theory. After everyone shared their theories, I opened up the discussion to sharing dreams each student had had. I was amazed at how eager the students were to interpret their dreams with their fellow classmates. It was then that I fully realized the power of relating subject material to the student’s own experiences.
My fascination with middle school students stems from my vivid and painful memories of those three years, sixth- through eighth grade. My footing on the social ladder was shaky, and every idle moment was spent worrying that I wasn’t wearing the right clothes, that I wasn’t in the “cool crowd,” or that everyone was talking about me behind my back. I assume that this is an experience shared by many, if not most, middle school students, and I have a strong desire to ease the agony of adolescence by helping students to express themselves, especially through writing.
During my junior year of high school (years before applying to Hampshire College, where there are no grades or tests) I asked my American Literature and Classical Literature teachers not to show me my grades on my papers or tests. I felt, as most Hampshire students do, that reading and processing my teachers’ written comments were enough to tell me whether they’d interpreted my work as excellent, good, mediocre or poor. I saw (and still see) no reason to attach percentages and alphabet symbols to any educational endeavor.
In my ideal classroom, there would be no grades or tests. Student writing, projects and activities would not be judged using numbers or letters, but evaluated individually. I do not believe that students would use the no-grades system as an excuse to “slack off,” because an outstanding written evaluation is as desirable as an A, just as a poor evaluation is as much to be feared as an F.
I realize that my views on grading are not shared by the majority of educators, but in my future years as a middle school English teacher I hope to put my theory into practice on a small level, namely through daily, grade-free journal writing.
The exercise of writing in a journal is possible for, and valuable to, anyone who has been taught to form letters on a piece of paper with a writing implement. If my future school allows me a small amount of freedom in designing my curriculum, I intend to dedicate as much of the students’ time as possible to free-writing.
If at all possible within the constraints of the school’s standardized usage of class time, I would set aside a small amount of time each day (or each week if it must be so) for silent journaling. The written works created during this time would be shared periodically with an assigned group. If I were allowed to execute the journal-writing exercise daily, which is a far-fetched idea in regards to traditional schools, I would set up groups of three to four students, who would meet once a week at least, for the sharing of writing. Every weekend the student would take home the journal of someone else in his or her group, read the partner’s entries, and write a one page response in the partner’s journal.
I would check the journals to make sure a page was written per day, but I would ignore spelling, grammar, punctuation and neatness. I believe in the correct usage of the English language to an almost arrogant degree, but for the purpose of free-writing it is important to let one’s guard down and try not to analyze every line scratched on the paper.
“But what should I write
about?” students would inevitably ask. I am familiar with a plethora of writing prompts and exercises, and would readily share them if prompted: fill in half the page with questions and try to answer them; keep your hand moving for the entire ten minutes and do not let the pen leave the paper; turn a conversation you recently had into a narrative; describe what you can see, hear, taste, smell and feel as you write.
Writing something that has no requirements and is transmitted directly from the student’s own mind to the paper frees the student of boundaries and makes him or her look past the “basics.” By “looking past” I do not mean “ignoring” or “forgetting,” because what the student has learned about spelling, grammar, punctuation and essay-writing will remain in his or her mind, and will inevitably shine through in the writing produced through journal exercises; not
having to think about those “basics,” however, destroys the self-consciousness that comes with writing formally, allowing the students to let their guards down and
write.
The goal of my journaling endeavor is for each student to have a notebook (or, hopefully, more than one notebook) filled with writing at the end of the school year. As a chronic journal-writer, I find the chronological entries, however mundane the subject matter may be, to be quite powerful in the solidity they award to the timeline of my experiences. To put this chronology in perspective, one idea is to assign a different writing topic to each day of the week: for example, on Monday, write about the weekend. Tuesday, write about the past. Wednesday, write about the present. Thursday, write about the future. Friday, write whatever you want.
“Write whatever you want,” however, should be the default practice, with prompts and themes offered in case of writer’s block. Inevitably, students would be self-conscious knowing that this writing would be read by their peers. Hopefully the freedom to write incorrectly and/or incoherently would release the students from fear of “doing it wrong.” Many people have never heard a teacher say, “It doesn’t have to make sense,” or, “If you’re sick of making sense, try to make as little sense as possible.” This freedom allows for spontaneous constructions of meaning and creative value.
My habit of writing in my journal every night began during the emotionally turbulent era of middle school. It began as an outlet for the psychological stress I experienced; I would write about the unsettling instability of my friendships, the stress of being a middle child in a family that expected academic perfection, and my disturbing fears of changing into an adult in what seemed, at the time, like an inhospitable society. As I grew older, the “habit” of journaling became a necessity to my sense of well-being. I hope to pass this comfort on to young people who will, hopefully, retain the urge to write daily as they ascend into adulthood.
