revisions and conventions

Routman speaks about an internal conversation that a good writer needs to have in order to be able to revise a paper. I think that this is a really important lesson to teach your students and I actually recently had some firsthand experience teaching this. Last week I taught a lesson to my 7th graders that had to do with having this internal conversation. I read a story out loud to my students and throughout the whole story I was having an out loud conversation to myself so that the kids could see what was happening. I was trying to show them the process of having this conversation so that they could all have an idea of what that revision consciousness looked like.
Another lesson that Routman talks about is making sure the students understand why conventions are important. This hit home for me because I have recently had an experience with a kid who came to this realization through a conversation with me. I was reading this student’s paper the other day and it was filled with incorrect conventions. When I brought his revised paper to him he was very reluctant to fix his mistakes. He said that it didn’t matter and that those ‘rules’ are stupid anyway. I asked him to sit down with me and listen to me read his story out loud the way that I understood it. I read his paper to him without stopping and even if I knew he intended for me to pause, I wouldn’t if there was no punctuation. Throughout the whole process this student was laughing out loud but at the same time he was starting to understand the importance of conventions. This was a really good experience for me as a teacher because I felt like I helped a kid in a very creative way. If I would have sat down and lectured him he probably wouldn’t have gotten a single thing out of it. However, I showed him the importance of conventions in a way that he not only got but that he enjoyed as well. It’s moments like these that remind me that teaching can be fun!