Do What You Love

Every day after recess my friend Keith and I would race down the hall to get back to the classroom. Pretty weird for fourth grade kids to be eager to get back to schoolwork, right? Not for me and Keith. It wasn’t math or science we were racing towards. We loved Writer’s Workshop.

There was a big metal filing cabinet that stood by the wall next to the classroom door that held all our writing folders. Every kid in the class had one. Mine was orange (not my favorite color), and had my name and “#4” written on the front because when the class stood in alphabetical order, I was fourth in line. Me and Keith would dive for that drawer and find our folders, then tear back to our desks and open them.

Mrs. Willadsen’s Writer’s Workshop let us experience every stage of the writing process: the first draft, revisions and changes, illustration, publication, and recieving feedback. I even made up my own publishing company, complete with its own logo.

Our writing folders held all these things: the first drafts, the teacher’s comments, and our finished products. One part that was really fun (aside from the actual writing) was the publishing process. Each student took their pick of a piece of construction paper, used various art products to affix the title of their story to the “cover,” and then turned it in to the teacher. She would see that it was laminated so that it would be sturdier. Then the author would start working on the “pages.” Sometimes the story would be handwritten, but other times we would be allowed to use the computer. That was almost more work, because after typing and printing out the story, the author would have to cut the words out and paste them onto the pages. There were always a few empty pages at the end of any story that was published so that classmates could write constructive comments.

My least favorite part of the publication process was always the illustrations. I loved to write, but drawing was less fun. Compared to many of my classmates, I was not good at drawing at all. Fridays we had art class instead of Writer’s Workshop. Keith and I didn’t race down the hall after recess on Fridays. We walked slowly, complaining that there would be no Writer’s Workshop that day.

Keith liked to write true stories about himself, like “The Time I Broke my Spleen,” but I favored fiction. The most successful story I wrote in fourth grade was called The Secret of the Pencils. The cover is purple (my favorite color at the time), every letter of the title is a different color of colored pencils (my favorite medium), and the illustrations are of the pencils that were in my desk at the time. Not terribly entertaining pictures, but the illustrations were not how I planned to entertain my classmates.

After stories were published, we took turns reading them aloud to the class. The Secret of the Pencils was about ordinary pencils living in the desks in our classroom. In the story, I had noticed that the pencils in my desk were not always where I had left them, so I had decided to leave a tape recorder in my desk overnight. My classmates giggled as I read the conversation between the pencils that came to life, giving them different accents as they talked about their “writers” (the kids) and their aversion to “the grinder” (the pencil sharpener).

The best part about Writer’s Workshop was surprisingly not the enjoyment I had writing the stories. It wasn’t the comments I recieved (one of which is “I like the Jimakin pencil best”), or the work I put into publishing it. The best part of Writer’s Workshop was the culmination of my work: being able to see the enjoyment that something I had written brought to others. The laughter and the smiles on the faces of my peers made all the hard work worthwhile, and the fact that I had enjoyed the work made it even better.