A NEW LANGUAGE (there's a time and a place for everything and apparently this is neithr)

Teachers always ask (and think about) how they can get their students to express themselves as, of course, the first step to writing. So, how do students express themselves? One would assume, and per my surveys would probably be correct, that teenagers freely express themselves via text and instant message. These mediums are impersonal and “safe”. PLUS it’s theirs. It’s their rules and their language. No teenager was formally taught how to text, they picked it up in the process, much like slang or dialect in any other language. One (like a teacher) would think that if he/she asked students to express themselves in their own text/slang language the student would have no problem doing so. Not true!! In my experience, if a student is asked to do this he/she has a difficult time comprehending the concept. Why would the teacher ask them to do that? It’s not appropriate for school (so they’ve been told). On the flipside, if they’re asked to write in a grammatically correct format (or academic) they don’t (or can’t) and instead revert back to text/instant message language since that is what they’re most comfortable with. The answer?? Well, let them in on the secret. Explain that nothing else matters except for their feelings, which of course is the first step in this scaffold writing process no matter what the end product. Next time don’t ask for a specific “language” but instead whatever THEY feel comfortable with and it’ll probably be this new fangled language. I guess labeling it and bringing it to light in a classroom made it, for that moment, not theirs and not comfortable.