My Bias
It is only fair to you, Dear Reader, that you know that I have known Erica George for a long, long time. I first met her in 1999 when she was an eighth grader walking into my English language arts class for the first time. Even then, she was a writer. The year I had Erica our curriculum had changed, and students no longer had a period for reading and a period for language arts (which was a writing class). Instead we were trying to cram everything into one 42-minute class. And I felt like I wasn’t doing her or any of my other writers justice because we lost the time to work in our notebooks. We lost time to explore. And we lost writing choice. Gone was the time when we could take a deep breath and emerge ourselves in words. However, as I followed Erica’s journey from student to ELA teacher to writer author, I learned that my students will most likely succeed in spite of me and not because of me.