A New Writing Class

I had a very interesting conversation with one of our young people yesterday. He shared with me that he was writing this 6 page paper for a project he was working on and wanted me to look at it. I read it and although his thoughts were great, grammatically it was way off. The traditionalist in me wanted to immediately start "teaching" him how to fix the paper. Instead, we read it together and I began to highlite areas that I thought needed "tweaking." From there we both end up having this deep discussion on how he along with his friends don't really understand how grammar works. They guess when to put a period, as opposed to knowing the exact formula to how that all works. I then shared with him how the majority of the PG County schools do not teach this and most students I've met from this area, have no idea how to write properly. It's so bad that PG Community College is often called the 13th grade because of the amount of students who enter there without the skills needed to enter college. In fact they cannot even enter regular community college classes without taking the remedial courses. So he and I are talking about this and he was floored. Mind you, I never cracked open an English book or started to lecture or handed out worksheets for him to do. We were just talking. He shared his experiences with schools and how they had not taught him to write, etc. He shared what he noticed among his friends and their writing. And we are just talking. A 42 year old educator with a 15 year old young person...just talking. Soon HE asks me (and not the other way around) if I could show him how to write. I told him I could pull some things together. I told him that he only has 2.5 years to get his writing to a point where he won't have to go to the 13th grade and he says to me AND I QUOTE! "Ms. Anika, isn't this school about students working at their own pace? I want to learn this and I don't think any of us who take this class with you should be able to graduate until we understand how to write." Of course I would not plan to do something like that, but isn't that just the coolest thing? A 15 year old student telling ME to teach him how to write. We are still growing and learning about Sudbury, but this is a classic example, I believe of how classes are formed. Instead of us setting out with a long list of required courses, we engage in these discussions with students in order to support them as they figure out their interests, etc. This is why when you visit us, it may seem like kids are just hanging out, but they are not. They are thinking and figuring out who they are and where they want to go and the staff is available to help them sort through all that. It takes a lot of patience and faith, but it works...it really works.