I have learned a lot about myself throughout the process of taking Teaching of Composition. The development of my writing has been a steady, but fast-paced train since high school. With each writing or education class I take in college, my voice and style as a writer has come through a little at a time. The different activities, class discussions, and projects outside of class required for this course have helped me to realize how many different genres and cross-disciplinary writing tools I can use to teach my students.
          I have learned that being a teacher of writing will have its challenges; however, with all of the ideas from my classmates’ mini-lessons, multimodal projects, and genre pieces, I know I’ll be able to make it a fun experience for my students. Another challenge I know I will face will be the assessment, evaluation, and grading of these works. I am taking another class right now called Teaching Assessment in which we have been learning how to give feedback, just as we have in this course, as well as how to make a test. This particular class has scared me a little bit because I’m not too good at giving constructive feedback without being a little too harsh. The couple of exercises where we’ve had to give random students’ essays feedback as well as our own peers’ work feedback have made me realize how difficult it is to be positive, but also constructive so as to be helpful.
          My greatest strength as a writer has always been personal writing. The “one hundred things list” really helped to bring this skill out. The only part of personal writing that I sometimes have a hard time with is thinking of topics to write on. I want to use this method of brainstorming for my future students. An example of how my personal writing strength came out for this class was with my second genre piece. I wrote a journal entry from my grandma’s perspective, and it gives her take on the ever-chaotic experience of hosting Thanksgiving at her house tied to the responsibility of having to take care of her ninety-eight-year-old father. Pieces like these really help me to be creative but also add a personal touch and sense of voice to my work. When it comes to being creative, like one has to do for fictional writing, I am not so gifted. None of the pieces I’ve completed for this course have been too abstract, but that’s because I haven’t chosen them to be.
          As a future teacher of writing, I know I will be able to call on the experiences and skills I gained from this class to make my classroom an engaging, creative, and safe place for students to develop their own voices in writing. One activity that didn’t quite work for the particular work I used it on but that I thought would be a helpful tool in teaching revision was the day we did the revising circles. I brought a poem to be revised, so two out of the three circles fit around big chunks of my poem and didn’t really help me to hone in on a specific spot in my piece. However, I feel that if I teach this method of revision to my students when we are working on a personal narrative or persuasive essay, it will be helpful to them. This class has helped me understand all the hard work, innovative creativeness, and time it’s going to take to teach, assess, and give feedback on my students’ writing. This does not mean I will not love it. I love to write, so hopefully I can rub off a little on my students, and by the end of the year in my class, they will love to write too.