Voices from the 2012 Invitational Summer Institute: Myla Jones

By Myla Jones, NVWP TC, Freedom High School

ISI 2012 TC Myla Jones

Ed. Note: This year, as we continue to celebrate our most recent Invitational Summer Institute and begin to look forward to the next, we want to pick up and continue a tradition of the Journal of the Virginia Writing Project. So, throughout October, we will be publishing Voices from the Invitational Summer Institute—position papers from the newest NVWP Teacher Consultants. Position papers are a consistent feature of the ISI. The fellows write one before the Institute begins, and then they write back to themselves as the Institute ends. It is our hope that the position papers we highlight for you will represent the spirit of the 2012 class as a whole. The editorial note for this feature in Volume 27 number 4 reads, “It has become a yearly tradition for The Journal to publish position papers written by Teacher Consultants fresh out of their Summer Institutes. The voices in these papers represent the future of the Virginia Writing Project, but for many veteran TCs they may also resonate with familiar echoes from the past.” May these voices of inspired educators inspire you.

Writers read and readers write. That is the long and short of teaching writing effectively and assisting writers as they increase their skills. Writers need to be exposed to fair, mediocre and excellent writing in order to experience the concepts, nuances and elements comprising a text. Writers need to be invested in the experience if they hope to improve; practice sans personal investment becomes the equivalent of aimless driving—no GPS, no plan, just burning $3.79 per gallon petroleum.

If I gained nothing else from this experience of being an NVWP fellow—and I have gained much—it is now clear to me that I am an expert at what I do.

Having taught writing (without realizing that was occurring), and having taught reading (ditto), my thoughts and philosophy on both have gone from educational philosophy (“theirs”) to developed pedagogy (mine) to an ever-evolving belief that at the heart of all this, my students—whoever they may be at the time—are the ones who will drive my position on writing. This view has been altered somewhat having been audience to effective writing lessons shared over the course of the NVWP’s Invitational Summer Institute. While the students will determine the angle by which I might approach the writing lesson(s), the drive will come from me. If I gained nothing else from this experience of being an NVWP fellow—and I have gained much—it is now clear to me that I am an expert at what I do and that while I am still, thankfully, eager to learn and thus teachable, 19 years of instruction is no small feat.

Reading and writing are still personal, for me, thus teaching those aspects of the English curriculum will continue to remain so, and as I personalize the process of education, making a conscious effort to know each student as an individual who brings character, validity, background and knowledge to the classroom, the students will continue to become more invested in the September-to-June  experience, and then for all of us, another school year of true learning will begin.

A Certain Kind of Writer

by Myla Jones, 2009

What kind of writer am I?
A writer writes
Continually
Thoughts come into my head and like text messages
Hurried and harried
They disappear from the screen which is the synapse of my brain
c u later
OMG
There it goes again
Society has played a trick on me and my fellow citizens
Advances in technology are to make life more efficient, right?
…but no one told us about life less meaningful

What kind of writer am I?
A writer writes continually
So today I look at life differently
Cell phone
Television
Internet
Blackberry
iPod
all tools which vaporize my creativity
preventing ideas from making sense to me
as mechanization overpowers free…
thinking

What kind of writer am I?
Awriterwhowritescontinually…