Welcome

Hi to All,
I am Patrice Mills, a 7th grade Language Arts teacher at East Columbus Magnet Academy in Columbus, GA. Teaching writing is a passion; it's an opportunity to change what I don't like about this world through unshaped lumps of clay - students whose lives I touch. I approach writing in the classroom and from a personal vantage from a historical point of view. Like the African griot, I am a historian and storyteller - the keeper of words. I challenge students, especially African American students, to move from the oral tradition to written discourse as a means of preserving the "his" stories and "her" stories. I remind students of the proverb, "When an elder dies, a library is burned down." As students explore this reality through reflections of lost stories because of death, their perspectives about writing as a medium changes. Hence, an adolescent writer is hooked!