Learning to ride a bike is a challenging task that takes a tremendous amount of perseverance to master. When learning to ride a bike, children often fall off the bike multiple times before mastering the skill, often resulting in embarrassment and physical injury. If parents continue to allow their child to fall off the bike without any assistance, eventually the child will quit out of a need for self preservation. Therefore, parents often utilize training wheels to help assist the child until he or she has provides evidence that they have mastered the skill. Once the parent is confident the child has mastered the skill, they remove the training wheels, and the child, for the first time, gets to experience the sweet thrill of success and the independence associated with being a master rider.
Like learning to ride a bike, writing can be hard! Because of the nature of writing, there is often more failure associated with learning to write than success. Essentially, you will "fall" multiple times before you succeed. As a result, students often get frustrated, and early in the process of learning they label themselves "bad writers". Once they've entered the "bad writer" zone, it is difficult for students to open themselves up to learning out of fear of failure and self preservation. Like the child afraid of being hurt from falling off their bike, the student quits trying to develop their writing skills. As a teacher, I believe in providing support to help the student leave the "bad writer" zone. Essentially, The Woodard Method will serve as training wheels through the writing process allowing you to have the support you need in order to develop the skills necessary to become a successful writer. As you provide evidence that you have mastered this valuable skill, your training wheels will be removed and you will experience the sweet thrill of writing success and the independence associated with being a master writer capable of success at the collegiate level.