"No Blood, Guns, or Gays"

In response to "No Blood, Guns, or Gays", I surveyed some of the teachers that I work with about their free-choice writing times as well as their personal narrative work. In the article, "teachers revealed that writing was constantly controlled in their classrooms" (Schneider, 2001,pg. 423). Teachers decided what kind of writing, "the amount of writing, and the length of writing time", as well as limiting choices by assigning topics and "directly prohibiting certain topics"(pg. 423). This is on par with what I found in the first and second grades of my school. First grade classes have a greater opportunity for free-choice writing than second graders. They spend more time with their writing which occurs more often. Most of their writing time is spent working on assigned writing topics within genres;however, in these topics students can choose to create any story they want. Second grade classes have free-choice writing less than once a month for about thirty minutes. Two teachers out of six discussed the merits of allowing pop culture like Pokemon and movies to be discussed in writing. These teachers thought it would help the teacher and student bond when the student has the responsibility to teach his/her teacher about something new. Almost one teacher from each grade said that the children do write about violence at some point, but had the idea that it was better to write it down in school, where there was someone to talk about the violence.

Here are the most popular writing topics of the children:
playdates, family outings, animals, first experiences, shared school experiences

I agree with the author that sometimes a choice in writing will lead children to "explore their thoughts about certain undesirable issues" (pg. 423). However, I think space to explore in the classroom through writing is a safe venue for that. That way students can have some kind of guidance if they need it.

In the library, I try to give students the a choice of what they want to read. Of course, as a book buyer, I have power to include through buying or refusing to buy books and other products.There are also books labeled as YA or Young Adult that are not available to forth grade and younger. This is because of content that usually does not match their maturity such as sex, drugs, and deep violence. I allow students to look at puberty books whenever they feel like it.

Schneider, J.J. (2001). No blood, guns, or gays allowed! The silencing of the elementary writer. Language Arts, 78(5), 415-425.