CI5461: Week 6

Being the kind of English teacher who enjoys grammar (well, enough to read Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, anyway), I found the readings for this week somewhat confusing. Some of the suggestions that Dean and Petit give for teaching grammar bore even me! I do not know any students who would be interested in analyzing the usage of the semicolon-- even if it is in an interesting context such as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s letter. Nor do I know many students who find an exercise such as modeling sentences intriguing, even if it is "just for fun." Somehow, teaching grammar needs to have immediacy for students; they need to see how it makes a difference. Neither of these articles made me feel the importance of grammar as it relates to high school students.

That having been said, I don't have a clue as to how to make this happen! I'm sure it has something to do with working it into the revision process. As students review one another's work, they can ask questions regarding sentence clarity-- which ultimately come down to punctuation, grammar, and syntax. But even with this kind of structure in place, students still need to have some kind of common vocabulary to talk about this, which requires some direct instruction on the teacher's part. This is where I'm stuck. How do I make that interesting? Any ideas, cohort?

There are some ideas at this website, but I think many of them are gimmicky and too cheesy to really engage and motivate high school students... but it's worth a shot.

You MIGHT be an English teacher if...

Today, my friend Kim asked me to "help" her with a poem she was writing for a dance class (they're doing a dance to their own spoken word-- don't ask...) and it totally and completely made my day. I asked if she wanted to "workshop" it, or if she just wanted my comments. When she said she just wanted my comments "for now, and then we'll see if we need to workshop it later," I instantly thought about how my comments could possibly be detrimental if she wasn't planning on doing more than one more draft. So I asked her to do a writing excercise for me.

Seriously? I just asked my friend of five years to do a writing excercise??? Who am I, anyway?

Apparently, I'm an English teacher. And there are no two ways about it.

Now I have spent the last hour and a half obsessively checking my e-mail, hoping she has done the next step as I've outlined so that I can give her more constructive feedback and give her an opportunity to revise some more. It's this crazy rush that I get from helping someone who sincerely wants to improve their writing that affirms my desire to go down this career path. Thank goodness for small favors that remind me I'm on the right track in life.

Thanks, Kim, for making my day! :)

CI5461: Week 5

When I was a high school student, I really loved being able to keep all of my assignments. Big essay? Of course I want it back with my instructors' comments! Storyboard project? Oh my gosh... please please please tell me how I did! Give me a grade! Spelling test? Put a sticker on that sucker and let me take it home to show Mom and Dad!

Despite the fact that this little snippet might make me look like a terrible perfectionist, it also shows what I think a lot of students feel they need: validation from others. Reading about portfolios this week made me think about their strengths as far as students' own assessment of themselves. With portfolios, they can see the progress they have made over time and can really focus on the things that they need work on as individuals. Wolf talks about how portfolios are reflective and how they show student growth over time and move students' work forward. Looking back on what they have done well gives students motivation to move their work to another level and it gives them a sense of what they could do better as well. I think they give students the flexibility they need to say, "Okay, I've done well on this. I can move on and focus on something else now."

I also like the idea from the Wolf article that "A portfolio is collaborative." Although individual students are able to think about their own work critically when they can see how it has changed over time, peers and teachers can do the same for these growing writers. It's easy for others to help you pick out patterns in your writing that could be feeding into a step forward or that could be holding the writer back from doing their best work. Also, feedback from others that is sprinkled throughout the portfolio is likely to reinforce students' views of their own work. Both different ideas and feedback that falls in line with students' own thinking about their work is valuable to a beginning writer.

Because I really like the idea of students having ownership of and accountability for their own work, my website resource for this week gives tips on how to write a self-assessment. It would probably need to be formatted a little differently and edited for high school students, but I still think it's helpful overall.

CI5461: Week 4

As teachers, we all walk many different balance beams. There is a sort of practiced, artful, gymnastic quality in almost everything we do. The readings this week highlighted a couple of important issues that require the kind of balance and thought put into any good routine.

First, that of how much to praise and how much to correct. I understand the reasoning behind praising students' writing to lower the affective filter and to simply get them writing. That makes sense to me. However, I also think that it's important to show students that all writing can be improved upon-- that even a "final draft" is still a draft. So where do we draw the line? I think it's important to make sure that all of our praise is genuine. Certainly, there should be a large amount of praise given to students who put in the effort to write, but they need to know that it takes more effort than just a first shot.

Which leads me to the second balancing act of revising. Where do you start in order to give students enough structure to put them on the right track, but without quashing their ability to go out on a ledge and take a risk? I really like the idea of peer conferencing for this reason. As a teacher, I don't want my students to feel the need to take my word as gospel. They should know that I'm still learning too. On the other hand, I don't want my modeling of constructive criticism to seem fabricated or gimmicky. For this reason, I really want my students to have an active understanding of safe space and of respecting one another. This way, my students will have a good foundation for working in groups and for helping each other to do their best work so that modeling on my part will be minimal and to the point.

There are a couple of lesson plans on this website that deal with revision... along with many more for reading and writing. Most of them need a little revision of their own, but it's worth browsing for some general ideas.

CI5461: Week 3 continued

My resource for this week is a website with many different writing prompts. Some are valuable and some are not. Some would work well for practicing five-paragraph essay form. Others would not. I think giving students a different writing prompt every day would help them make good choices regarding what kind of writing they do for different purposes and why.

CI5461: Week 3

"My students understand the concept of dressing to fit the occasion. They wouldn't consider wearing pajamas or a yellow rain slicker to prom. Neither would they wear a formal dress or a tuxedo to play soccer."
-- Deborah M. Dean (from "Muddying Boundaries: Mixing Genres with Five Paragraphs)

I think Deborah Dean really strikes at the heart of how I feel about teaching the five-paragraph essay. It's important. It's necessary for my students to know how to organize a solid expository essay. But it's not the only way they can convey information. It's all about context.

In my opinion, the most important thing about teaching students different forms of writing is teaching them how to identify which form is appropriate (or not appropriate) in many different contexts. For example, it's important for them to know how to write a five-paragraph essay because it is expected of them for standardized testing. On the other hand, I would hope my students would be able to figure out that a five-paragraph essay may not be the best choice when trying to convey their personal feelings to their friends via e-mail. I want to be able to teach many different ways of writing and to teach that students have a choice of how to convey information. Their choice will affect how well their information is conveyed.

For this reason, I stand on both sides of the five-paragraph essay debate that we will be having in class on Wednesday. I can see the importance of writing traditionally. And I can see the importance of making writing fun and interesting for students using a variety of genres. What students need to learn from me, then, is not simply what to write, but when to write what.