Unwinding with Unjournaling

From the moment I read the introduction, I realized that unjournaling will be a huge asset for my classroom. Everything we’ve been learning this semester from Elbow, and yes, I’ll even throw Williams in there, has opened my eyes to a different world of teaching English. Now, I have fond memories of my English classroom experiences, but I have to admit that not many of them include writing beyond that of formal papers and answering questions related to literature we had read. I never had a journal in school. There was never time for “freewriting.” The concept of doing these activities in my own classroom hadn’t really entered my mind.

But the discussions and activities I have completed in this class and others have introduced me to the wonderful opportunity of allowing students to “just write.” If these activities can help them relax in their writing as much as testing them out has helped me relax when I’m doing my own writing then I think that this approach will really have an impact on some students. As the first sentence in the introduction of unjournaling states, “Writing can be an intimidating process for many people.” To correspond with this, I like how the cover art depicts all different kinds of “characters.” To me, it is representative of the fact that any person out there may have a writer inside of them that they simply have not discovered yet.

I tried out some of the activities in this book for myself and found them to be challenging, but the challenge wasn’t so much of a frustration as a fun challenge. I knew that there was no pressure or “failure” involved if I couldn’t really complete the activity as desired, but if I did and produced something unexpected, it really brought a smile to my face.

I am very excited to use this book in my classroom, and I like the idea of using it in that “no pressure” scenario. I think these activities would make a great prompt for journal entries in cases where students were struggling with having nothing to write. I think they would make great Monday brainteasers, a little kick off to the new week where students could ease themselves back into the academic world. I can also see many of them working as great supplements to teaching lessons about style, usage, etc. Of course, I don’t plan to rely entirely on this book for unique activities. I’d like to think I still have some creativity in my own system. But I do think it will be a wonderful tool.

Does anyone else intend on using this in a classroom? How so? And what do you think of the “sample answers” in the back and the introduction’s reason for their inclusion? Do you agree with it?