ABSTRACT
When the year began, writing was squeezed into fifteen-minute time slots. The entire school day was like that: a collage of little bits. Ten minutes for spelling, fifteen minutes for a quiz. Ten minutes for a penmanship ditto. Twenty minutes for page 36 in the social studies text. Graves likened the schedule to driving in city traffic: the children shifted from first to second gear, but never got into high gear for there were no broad stretches of time. […]
Writing well, as we were to learn, requires a different pace than we are used to in our schools. The initial fifteen-minute writing slot was stretched into twenty minutes, then thirty, forty. By the middle of October, Mrs Howard’s children spent three or four hours a week in writing workshop and then, to get even more time, they sometimes elected to write during recess.
