Friday's Boston Globe featured a story about how young revelers arrested after the Red Sox American League Championship Series victory over the Cleveland Indians are writing about their incarceration as part of their sentence."Of the 17 arrested that night and charged with disorderly conduct, seven people, most of them college students, were ordered by Roxbury District Court Judge Edward Redd to write a five-page essay about their arrests," the article states.
Redd's sentence is an example of the type of reflection we, as teachers, try to impart on our students. According to the story, "one student wrote that passing a night in jail made her feel 'reduced to a fraction of myself.' Another lamented that 'running down to Fenway Park in a craze is only asking for one thing and that is trouble.' "
As I've mentioned before, our school is currently in the process of implementing Writing Across the Curriculum. It seems only natural that it would extend to our school's "planning room," the place where students who can't behave in class are sent, usually for the remainder of the period.
I wonder what would happen if, as a component of students' punishment, they were required to write a reflective essay and share it with the teacher whose class they disrupted.
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