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Potential

Monday 27 September 2010

My English 1 Honors class is about to start the Odyssey. For their weekly short essay assignment, I asked about heroes and heroism. Commenting on the usual association of “hero” with super powers, one student wrote the following:

In fact in the real world having superpowers would make you a villain sooner than it would a hero because though the idea of superheroes saving the world on a regular basis is nice and all, name one superpower and there are probably more than ten different ways to exploit it for personal gain and in a world where “look out for number one” is a personal motto for most of the world it is no long shot that with real superpowers there would be more villains than heroes in the world.

Getting these kinds of results is a real boost: such potential in this kid’s writing. The problems are purely cosmetic: nothing a few mini-lessons on sentence variation, punctuation, and voice can’t buff out.

14-year-old Poetry

Thursday 10 December 2009

People write about what they know. One of the prime motivations of confessional poetry was that we theoretically know more about ourselves than about anything else.

When you ask a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds to write poetry, there is one guarantee: the boys will write about video games. In one portfolio of ten poems, one young man wrote two poems about games (including a haiku about “Call of Duty 5”), two poems about sports (one about playing, the other about watching), and one about hunting.

I mentioned this to a colleague this afternoon. She thought for a moment, then made a suggestion: “Next year you could tell them that each poem had to be about a different topic.”

“Then they’d simply say, ‘Well, they’re two different games, so that’s technically two different topics.'”

Teaching Writing

Tuesday 15 September 2009

Teaching writing means reading things like this

  • The crowd looks like a box of crayons with their colorful shirts on to support their favorite school.
  • The most magnificent and wonderful part of day is the night that takes us within. It gives you your dreams and time to think about the day that trailed behind you.
  • I ask my mom. “I’m too busy at the moment. How about later?” Knowing that later will be near 7 PM, I slither back to my room.

How can you not smile when gems like this are scattered through student writing? Evaluating each assignment becomes a treasure hunt.

Daily

Thursday 10 September 2009

Pens on Flickr

I began keeping a journal my freshman year in college. I wrote almost every single day. When I arrived in Poland in 1996, I kept the journal daily for two straight years.

One night — though “early morning” might be a better description — I realized, as I lay me down to sleep, that I hadn’t written anything that day. I picked up my pen, scribbled the date, and quickly wrote, “I’m writing this to keep my streak going.” I’m not sure if that really counted, but it did give me a sense of closure as I drifted off to sleep.

I don’t write in my journal as much these days: much of what I would write, I write in here. I try to write dream of writing daily, but sometimes, I just have difficulty motivating myself.

Like this evening.

Journals

Thursday 3 September 2009

How does one keep a journal? It’s something I’ve done for so long that I no longer even think about it. And yet when you’re starting out, doing it on command–and for a grade, no less–then it might seem a little intimidating.

“Three hundred words, three times a week,” I said. “About anything.”

“Anything?” the students ask incredulously.

“Yes, anything.”

“Anything” is an awfully big topic. So big it could be overwhelming. I understand their concerns.

One thing I mentioned was writing about school work and projects. I need to tell them, “You should think of a journal as a place where you simply think aloud.” Perhaps that will help. “It’s a place where you can think through the Lord of the Flies project or tease out all the reasons you don’t really like So-and-so, or where you can simply play with language.

“Here language, fetch.”

Students tend to question the value of it, especially when I tell them that I won’t be reading each journal in its entirety. “Then why write it?”

“Writing is just like any other activity: the more you do it, the better you get.”
Some buy it, some don’t.

Finding Our Space

Monday 24 August 2009

“I don’t know what to write about” is a common complaint among eighth graders, often regardless of whether or not a topic has been provided. To alleviate that, we began an extended lesson: “How do I find topics for my writing?”

It seems abundantly clear to me: just look around and there are things to write about everywhere: the jostling silliness and/or frustration of a class change; the way five minutes can just drag by even in the best classes; the dress code to which students are required to adhere; the difficulty of coming up with a topic for writing–topics are simply everywhere.

To give students a starting place, we worked on creating Expert Inventories today. “Imagine a teacher told you to write a paper on the topic of ‘blank.’ What topic would make you make you think, “Oh, that’s easy. I can do that I no time!” All the kids dutifully began creating the same lists. The boys wrote “basketball, football, Madden 09.” Many of the girls included shopping, texting, boys.

There were some surprises. One girl enjoys making bricks with her dad. “We like to experiment with how things used to be done,” she explains. Another is good at making mortar. “Mortar?” I asked, wondering if I heard her correctly.

Next step: branching out some of the general terms to more specific ideas. “What do you mean when you say you’re an expert at basketball?” I asked. “Playing it? Watching it? Commentating on it?”

“Shopping–shopping for what? Shoes? Music? Clothes?”

The kids expanded their list, some of them writing endlessly. “Can we use the back of the page?” one girl asked. A good sign.

What I’m trying to do is fairly simple, not to mention fairly obvious: before kids can get serious about improving their writing, they have to enjoy it, or at least tolerate it. Having them to “analyze the author’s craft” (as one of the required “artifacts” is to do) in a short story will not bring “Ooohs!” and “Ahhs!” of excitement. For it to be enjoyable, it has to be meaningful; for it to be meaningful for many eighth graders, it needs to have a personal connection. And so I’m taking the whole idea of required this and required that and tossing it in the recycling bin for a moment. We’ll return to these ideas soon enough.

By Hand

Friday 15 July 2005

Kinga bought a new notebook for taking notes at her job. New vocabulary, new measures, new everything.

It’s a sturdy notebook, with a rough plastic cover and a cloth-covered binding. Very nice.

It makes me wish I could write something by hand, in a hard-bound notebook, with one of my fountain pens. But I keep a journal by computer, remain in contact with friends via email, and blogging by hand? Well, I guess I could write it on a page, take a picture of it, the post the image.

Such are the costs of an electronic age.

When I first moved to Poland, I didn’t have a computer, so I kept my journal by hand, in flimsy notebooks with pictures of unknown teenage girls on them in semi-provocative poses. They were the only ones I could find.

When I got my laptop in Poland, I started transcribing all the entries, but got through only a few months.

I recently found them, going through boxes packed away years ago. For a brief moment I considered getting started again on the transcribing, in some misguided attempt to make them “permanent.”

Still, my journal documents on the computer are password protected, keeping out any casual snooper. These obviously enough are not.

Do I care if anyone reads them? Not really. They read about like this entry…