Minds Matter

Portland - Writing & Critical Thinking Program

The Writing & Critical Thinking Program teaches students how to reason, weigh information, argue and write. Mentees are required to read a weekly article from the New York Times. They must prepare to discuss and debate the content of these articles. Students meet weekly with Writing & Critical Thinking instructors to discuss their written work. They receive group instruction supplemented by individualized assistance from their mentors in preparing writing assignments. One of their major assignments is to prepare biographical "Personal Statements" for application to summer college programs.

Sid Eaton, Co-Director of Programming:

"For half an hour the students either wrote freely in their journals or wrote creative responses to poems which were provided for them. All shared their writing in small groups; some then shared their writing with the entire group. For the next hour and a quarter the students wrote and shared their writing with their teachers, also doing exercises involving run-on sentences, sentences fragments, comma splices, punctuation, and homonyms. The writing during this portion of the morning concentrated, first, on paragraph writing and then on the writing of a Personal Statement.

Almost all writing occurred in class. Between Saturday sessions, the students read papers involving choosing and outlining a topic, writing introductions and conclusions, making transitions, and omitting needless words.

Finally, in the final fifteen minutes of each session, one of the teachers read and commented upon a published sample of a good Personal Statement. The work each student did forms a base for the goal of the sophomore program, acceptance into the summer program of each student's choice."

For more information on our Writing and Critical Thinking Program, contact Sid Eaton, Co-Director of Programming, portland@mindsmatter.org