Best Practices: Writing for Fun (and Learning)

By Anthony Cody

As a middle school science teacher, I have struggled with all the content my students are expected to master in one short year. The text books have hundreds of pages of facts, diagrams, and theories for my students to digest. Here we are in May, testing is done, and we are breathing a sigh of relief, looking forward to a few months of rest. The students need a change of pace, but we do not want them going on vacation just yet! Now is the time for some creative writing.

When students write research papers, their first instinct is often to collect as many facts as they can into a big pile and string them together into a report. If I am lucky, they have avoided literally cutting and pasting, but really, how far away from copying is it to regurgitate whatever you have read, changing a few words here and there? What I really want is for students to make ideas their own. I want them to understand their subject as a result of their research—and be able to explain it in a way that makes it fresh.

My favorite tactic for this purpose is to ask them to do some original creative writing. One year I had them write science fiction stories describing travel to another planet in our solar system. I started with some modeling, reading passages from Arthur Clarke's classic story, "A Fall of Moondust." This story was written prior to the Apollo moon landings, and described a lunar surface very different from what we actually found there. But that was part of the fun. Students could see how Clarke had taken the limited knowledge we had of the moon and woven an adventure around those facts, filling in with imagination wherever...