Excellence in Writing - a History

SOURCE: http://www.excellenceinwriting.com/page/history-institute-excellence-writing
(Excerpted from a 2006 conversation between Andrew Pudewa and Rebecca Kochenderfer, Editor of homeschool.com)

Rebecca: Andrew, tell us about how you got into teaching writing?




Andrew: Well, it was kind of accidental almost. I was working for a small school in Montana. It’s one of those schools where anybody who can do something gets appointed, and without any background in elementary education or English, I got myself into teaching English and history to a 7th and 8th grade class. There was a teacher at that school who had taken this course in Canada, called the Blended Sound-Sight Program of Learning. She was encouraging all of us to go and take this course. So I did. I went to Canada, met Dr. James B. Webster, professor of African History, who had created over the years a syllabus of structure and style in composition. It was an 11-day teacher-training course, and I learned it from Dr. Webster, came back, and taught in that school in Montana another year, and then got amazing results.

The first year I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, and the second year, I felt so smart, I knew exactly what I was doing.

The next summer I went back, took that course again from Dr. Webster, the same 11-day course in Canada. I’d learned so much, I thought there was more to learn, came back and then we moved to a different city in Montana and started home schooling our children. And so I started some after –school classes for basically my kids and their friends in the town there in Bozeman, and kept teaching this writing, went back the next summer, and Webster said, “Well, if you’re going to keep coming back, we’ll put you to work. You can help teach the thing.” So I gradually learned this system from him, and was just teaching it to children, took off a couple of years, started a whole business in customer service training seminars, which I tell you, that was a horrible thing. Nobody ever wanted to hear what you had to say. It was very depressing, and then went back to teaching music, which is my primary profession, violin and Kindermusik, and this school in Montana said, “Hey, would you come over and do a little workshop on that writing program you learned when you were working for us?” And I said, “Yeah, sure. I’d love to come on over.” And I did this seminar. A couple of home school parents in the group said, “Wow! This is the greatest thing since sliced bread! I’ve never seen anything like it. You should teach this to home school families.” And so I thought, “Wow! That’s a great way to maybe do a seminar once or twice a month and make enough money to afford to be a violin teacher, too.

So I started, with Dr. Webster’s blessing, taking his program, and designing it to be taught over a period of two days instead of 11 to home school parents. And then we did some student classes, and someone came up with the idea of putting it on video and like I said, I thought that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. It won’t work. You know, it’s a class! You have to be there. You have to look in people’s eyes and see if they’re responding. But we sold a few videos, redid the videos, got them better, redid them a third time in 2000, so they’re relatively professional. Still they’ll have that live interactive feeling.

Rebecca: Tell us the story about Dr. Webster. You said he was an African studies college professor.

Andrew: Yes.

Rebecca: And all these people were signing up for his classes.

Andrew: Yes. It’s rather humorous. He was teaching African history at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is kind of a, you know, ivy league type of school up there. And he had worked in Africa 16 years teaching in the British system. So when he came back to Canada, he felt that the Canadian students’ writing skills were kind of substandard. He found it difficult to teach history to students who couldn’t write well enough to do history. So he started giving little mini lectures, 10 minutes at first, the first 10 minutes of every history period on how to organize your paragraphs, organize your essays, rules to follow, stylistic checklists, and he built up a very sophisticated checklist, had over a hundred things that you would do for a paper in Webster’s class. So it was a very, very detailed rubric. Of course, the students liked that because they knew, “Okay, now we know exactly what to do for this professor.” And word got around Dalhousie that if you wanted to learn to write, you wouldn’t mess with the English Department; you’d go take an African history class.

Rebecca: And that’s the method that you then learned and that you used for your own students.

Andrew: Yes. And of course, Dr. Webster geared this down. His aunt is Mrs. Anna Ingham. She has been a primary, you know, first, second grade teacher for several decades. She designed this phonics-based reading and writing program, The Blended Sound Sight Program of Learning that Dr. Webster was helping her teach during the summer courses. This was the origin of the 11-day course that I took. And, over the years, Dr. Webster gradually started to take his university level writing ideas of structure and style, and gear them down for use in an elementary, middle school level as well.

Rebecca: Well, I’m sure glad you discovered them.

Andrew: I am, too, and it is exciting to see how you can have children with very high aptitude in writing and very undeveloped aptitude in writing, and the system works for both ends of that spectrum.