Tony PennaySED 525 EnglishProfessor Rowlands4/16/08Run with the Stampede: A Review of Teaching Adolescent Writers by Kelly GallagherKelly Gallagher. Teaching Adolescent Writers. Portland: Stenhouse Publishers (2006). $20.00 (paperback) ISBN-10: 1571104224 You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement,hopefulness, or even despair: the sense that you can never completely puton the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act withyour fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and takedown names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you orbecause you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Letme say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.- Stephen King, On WritingStephen King, master of horror and suspense, warns that no writer should come to the blank page lightly. Taking a pen to a piece of paper with the intent of creation is a solemn andmeaningful event, an event that should not be dismissed, disregarded, or rushed through. Yet, as an English teacher, I’ve always found that writing is taken lightly. For both students and teachers writing is seen as a bane. When I assign an essay in class, just the mention of the word “essay” is enough to elicit a delightful cacophony of groans and complaints from all corners of the classroom. Depending on my mood, I can ignore these groans, react to them in a chastising and didactic tone, or give them an spontaneous inspiring lecture, providing and nuggets of wisdom on the importance of writing. But guess what happens as soon as those essays are turned in to me? I now groan and complain about having to correct a hundred essays and about how long it takes me to make comments and suggestions. I complain to my fellow English teaching colleagues about how the math teachers have an easy time of assessment, and how the plight of the English teacher when it comes to teaching and assessing writing is surely the single most oppressive duty inall of education. After reading Kelly Gallagher’s Teaching Adolescent Writing, I feel that these sorts of reactions are akin to coming lightly to the blank page. Gallagher’s book is an immensely practical and readable book that gives a tremendous amount of insight into writing instruction. As a teacher, Gallagher writes in a prose that is easy to access and understand, and he brings in several real-life examples of his techniques and practices as they have been used in a his classroom. He begins by defining the problem, comparing. He compares literacy to a stampede. As teachers, we have a choices. We can ignore the stampede. We can hope our students figure out how to safely drop to the ground and try to avoid being trampled (an unsuccessful strategy). Or, as Gallagher advocates, we can, and should, Gallagher advocates, teach students how to run with the stampede and become literate readers and writers. Gallagher cites data from a study done by the South Basin Writing Project that suggestsed, “50 percent of the students did not demonstrate that they understood the basic writing form” (Gallagher, 2006). Gallagher goes on to lists, in David Letterman style, the Top Ten Writing Wrongs in Secondary Schools.1. Students are not doing enough writing.2. Writing is sometimes assigned rather than taught.3. Below-grade-level writers are asked to write less than others instead of more.4. English language learners are often shortchanged as well.5. Grammar instruction is ineffective or ignored.6. Students are not given enough timed writing instruction or practice.7. Some teachers have little or no knowledge of district and state writing standards.8. Writing topics are often mandated with little thought about the prior knowledge and interests of the students. 9. Teachers are doing too much of the work. Students are not doing enough work.10. Teachers need help assessing student writing. (Gallagher, 2006)The rest of the book focuses on of the rest of the book is rectifying these writing wrongs.He divides the book into six chapters, and eachIn six chapters he presents a specific set ofstrategies for addressing these wrongs. He cites the research of Langer and Applebee that says “students were not getting necessary broad-based writing experiences” and that “American children do not write frequently enough” (Gallagher, 2006). To begin, Gallagher gives several practical suggestions for increasing the writing done in class, including, “daily in-class writing activities, weekly writing in writer’s notebooks, and regularly scheduled on-demand writing” (Gallagher, 2006). Throughout the chapter he gives specific activities to employ in the classroom. , and wWhether a teacher is a seasoned veteran or a nascent addition to the teaching profession, these strategies can easily be adapted for immediateand used in the classroom immediatelyuse. Gallagher goes on to suggest that Oonce students have the time to write, Gallagher suggests, they must also have proper modeling. Rather than simply assigning writing, he suggests recommends that because teachers are often “the best writers in the room” (p?), and they should model their writing processes for the students. Gallagher suggests that teachers need to move beyond the “Grecian Urn Approach, ”by which he means… (Gallagher, 2006). It He believes it does little good for students to see a teacher present a polished draft of their own work. Instead, They derive much more from the experience when the they need to experience a teacher showings the struggles inherent to the writing process. One suggestion in this chapter serves as a particularly welcome permission. For those English teachers hidden behind an imposing mound of papers to grade, Gallagher suggests a 4:1 grading philosophy;. s Students should write about four times as much as the teacher grades. Thisgives them students permission to have terrible drafts and off days, and also provides a bit of relief for the weary teachers. For the terrible drafts, Gallagher has some excellent suggestions forrevision, including the “Pimp my Write” technique, which involves taking a bad draft of writingand turning it into a polished and beautiful piece of prose (p#). Once again, Gallagher explains these activities clearly and gives student examples to show what can be expected in the classroom. Gallagher’s other suggestions include using real-world models to guide student writing, strategies for revising including