poetry, prose, & purpose

Finding my old graduate school blog online, one year to the day that I last blogged, I am amused and relieved to read my own words again.  That is, it is a relief to find the idealism of my former, pre-service teacher self and recognize it still alive in my current, active-teacher self.  I am currently teaching 12th grade composition in Minnesota, and have conflicting views about methodology in practice.  I despise teaching the required research paper (perhaps, in part, because I am currently doing my own research to finish my M.Ed. degree, and it’s a bit like research-overload), but I love teaching creative writing.  I am very excited about our upcoming unit, taken from a fellow English teacher at last year’s MCTE conference; beginning next week, I’ll be teaching “Shoe box Memories,” a senior time capsule project in which my 12th graders write in a variety of genres, all relating to their high school years and their future goals, and place the final product in a decorated shoe box, to serve as a “lock box” of their memories.  I hope to do some of this writing with my students to teach by modeling and also to create an atmosphere in my classroom more conducive to sharing and breaking down boundaries.  I love that, one year into teaching, I’m reassured in my choice to become an educator; it is one of the most challenging and rewarding things I have ever done in my life – what a joy!

Though I won’t confess to being a digital junkie, as Candance does, I will say that this Jenkins article, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, got me pretty excited. I’m particularly in agreement with the idea of addressing the three core problems with ignoring the emerging participatory cultures of our adolescent students; that is, “the participation gap,” “the transparency problem,” and “the ethics challenge.” What stands out as an essential issue for me to focus on in the classroom is the transparency problem, or, assuming “that children are actively reflecting on their media experiences and can thus articulate what they learn from their participation” (17). This is a serious issue that has kept me from blogging (outside of educational settings) and from creating a “myspace account” for a long time. For whatever reason (call me paranoid), I’ve been hesitant to put all my information out there – whether it’s marginal information such as my favorite movies and bands or more personal information such as my location, habits, friends, and relationship details, etc. I don’t know why – all my friends and siblings are doing it, but I just don’t like it. It makes me feel like I’m isolating myself and revealing myself at the same time – like any rando can learn about my deepest thoughts without ever having to meet me in person – and I’m not comfortable with that. Conversely, our students are. Therefore, we must be careful to teach them to reflect on what the media means to them, how they’re using it to get information, and how they’re using it (or it’s using them) to re-present themselves as personal and public beings.

A second idea that’s really important to me is that of helping to guide/discuss ethics. I ask the same questions Jenkins does: “What constraints, if any, apply to in online realms? Do young people feel that same level of investment in their gaming guilds or their fan communities? Or does the ability to mask one’s identity or move from one community to another mean there are less immediate consequences for antisocial behavior?” (17). Furthermore, I agree that “One important goal of media education should be to encourage young people to become more reflective about the ethical choices they make as participants and communicators and the impact they have on others” (17). I’m excited to discuss these issues in more depth during class next week.

Until then, a helpful Resource Link is Professor Rick Beach’s website, which accompanies his new book, “Teaching Media Literacy:” www.teachingmedialiteracy.com

In the first twenty pages of Ch. 6, Williams explains why grammar is important, why teaching grammar does not work, the difference between grammar and usage, and offers some tips on popular grammatical and usage problems students encounter in writing.  In this light, as an aspiring English teacher, the notion of my role as a gatekeeper of the English language and its uses, in relation to grammar, is quite daunting.  Aside from a brief focus on grammar during a linguistics course I took last summer, I haven’t taken a grammar course since my time as a public middle school student in Wisconsin over ten years ago.  That said, I do believe my grasp of the English language (in both written and spoken form) has increased over the years do to my increased reading experience.  Given my experience, and Williams’ research on grammar instruction, I look forward to talking to my students about grammar and its practical applications.  For example, Williams explains that grammar instruction as part of an overall analysis of how good writers achieve the particular effects they do “works best when teachers read with their students and periodically make a comment that focuses students’ attention on a particular word or phrase” (191).  I have no intention of boring my students with busywork and mindless drills that leave no lasting effect on their writing, but I do agree with Williams that “students need to expand their repertoire of language skills and conventions, not reduce them, which surely would be the outcome of any serious effort at abolishing academic conventions” (182).  Therefore, I will attempt to call attention to grammar in practice; that is, through the reading, writing, and speaking we do in class, I will encourage discussion among my students and set them to studying grammar as if they were anthropologists of our literate culture.  Hopefully, my students will learn to value the complexities of language and find ways to make it work for them, rather than against them.

Resource Link:  For free tips on referencing, grammar, editing, spelling, design, and marketing, check out this site:
http://www.webgrammar.com/

Following Einstein’s wisdom, and Spandel’s endorsement, I hope to create a writing classroom environment in which assessment is not just about numbers and standardized tests, but rather about courage and joy and exploration.  As a hopeful/hopeless creative writer myself (obviously battling the schizophrenia and self-doubt that most writers contend with), it seems that at times, I can’t NOT go off-topic.  If I were held accountable for answering every contrived prompt teachers have provided for me in my years of schooling I’m not sure I would have made it this far.  Luckily, I encountered teachers whose attitudes were such that they allowed me the freedom to write on a topic I felt more comfortable with, if I had the courage to come up with a better idea.  To me, following directions is not the most important thing in life, and certainly not in writing.  In my future classroom, I would like to echo Spandel, as she wrote, “In writing, though, creativity matters.  Spontaneity is a virtue.  Originality and perspective define voice.  Risk is essential to success.  And writers who never think for themselves cannot get anywhere” (33).  I agree.
Resource Link:  http://www.creativewritingprompts.com/

This cool site provides creative writing prompts and creative writing ideas to create stories, poems and other creative pieces from your imagination. The writing prompts can even help you come up with creative content for blogs and blog stories.

In his essay, “Learning to Praise,” Donald Daiker points out that writing is an act of confidence. I understand that confidence is based largely on self-efficacy; however, I’m worried that praising a student’s writing (when there is little to praise) simply to increase one’s confidence borders on patronizing, and bears traces of the failed self-esteem movement. As an undergraduate Writing Fellow at UW-Madison I received the same sort of instruction from my program leaders. “Praise your peers,” they told us, “only critique high order concerns like organization and flow, rather than low-order concerns like grammar and word choice.” My instructors echoed Daiker’s belief that “genuine praise can lift the hearts, as well as the pens, of the writers who sit in our classrooms” (113) and recognized writing as a craft that requires patience, practice, and confidence. Again, I understand this, but I struggle with the notion of “genuine praise.” What if there is little to no evidence of praise-worthy text in our students’ papers? Wouldn’t it be better to offer our students constructive criticism, rather than empty praise? How will they learn from their mistakes if they don’t know they’re making them?

Then again, there is a wounded writer’s voice in my head scolding my cynical and jaded heart this very moment; I, too, was scarred as high school student, after receiving an F on a paper that included one run-on sentence (a fatal flaw, according to my teacher). Not only do I remember (and retell) that one horrific moment more than any other writing moment in my high school career, but I still feel the burn. Why, then, would I argue against praise when it comes to student writing? I guess the conclusion I’m so carelessly stumbling towards is an idea of balance. Of course, “to become teachers of English in a ‘positive, joyous, creative, and responsible sense’” (Daiker, 105) we should praise our students’ attempts at writing, but I beg English teachers to proceed with caution, and to retain some level of restraint when doling out lavish praise. After all, it’s evident from this blog posting alone that I could have used a few more grammatical lessons in my day (even if the method of learning them was less than joyous).

 Resource Link:

Here is a link to Daiker’s notes on responding to student writing and writing across the curriculum: http://www.psu.edu/dept/cew/faculty/student.htm

After reading the six articles lamenting and praising the five paragraph essay and other such formulaic fixes to student writing, I feel quite tired, really.  All this arguing about what is the best way to teach student writing and whose idea is better and why – I have an urge to raise a white flag and beg surrender.  As a teacher-in-training, my instinct is to agree, in part, with a little bit of each of the researchers’ findings.

With Novick, I like how she claims that “taught with creativity and variety, [the five paragraph essay] gives our students a useful tool with which to face business meetings, testimonies before public officials, and letters to the editor (English Journal, 12); I’m also inclined to side with Wiley in his English Journal article (67), and his argument that the Schaffer formulaic approach, when taught as a strategy, “becomes one of several, instead of the only one a teacher might offer students.”  Although I think Nunnally is himself a little bland and contrived, I do understand the need to break through the mold of the FTP (though I wouldn’t quite say it “stunts the growth of human minds,” as Wesley claims (EJ, 57).  And finally, I’m most torn between my alignment with Baron and his clear disgust with the way the SAT’s writing component is “promising to marginalize writing still further…leaving even more schools behind than does the government’s controversial NCLB policy” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3), and my satisfaction with Dean’s proposal of mixing genres with the five paragraph essay.

As mentioned earlier, I think all of these researchers make valid points, but I also think there is an awful lot of fuss about what the RIGHT way to teach writing should be.  I wholeheartedly believe that there is not one right way to help students become critical thinkers, readers, and writers; rather, many of these methods will work for our various students, and we must take that into account when approaching our future classrooms.  If I had to chose, however, what strategy I would begin with…I would begin with a discussion of options and methods with my class, and then have them try a little bit of each, using Romano’s multi-genre approach, and see where we go from there!

Resource link: http://www.calstatela.edu/centers/write_cn/fivepara.htm

The Cal State University Writing Center helps you think about going beyond the five paragraph essay… should you dare!

Although the text, Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers takes 13 chapters to extrapolate on some of the more obvious benefits of using the multigenre approach in one’s English classroom, author Tom Romano did manage to create a convert in me.  I love the ideas and seemingly endless possibilities the multigenre approach provides for creativity and exploration in the classroom, and can’t wait to integrate into my own classes.  Romano supports his design best when he explains that “the multigenre paper offers students the opportunity to take part in the production of texts that are driven by narrative thinking, to try out the lenses of poets, fiction writers, playwrights, and artists right in the middle of expository school, long after formal education has turned them towards genres of paradigmatic thought and away from genres that use narrative to think and reveal experience.  One day our students will take jobs in education, auto repair, business, industry, government, manufacturing, sales, law, medicine.  No matter what professions they enter, facts and analysis are not enough.  If our decisions are to be both sound and humane, we need to understand emotion and circumstance, as well as logic and outcome.  Writing in many genres helps minds learn to do that” (57).  I, too, am an advocate for this type of educational setting, and want to encourage my students to come to their own understandings and interpretations of fiction and poetry, rather than regurgitating in writing what they think the school (or I, as their teacher) want to hear from them.

My only concern, in trying to wrap my brain around how to incorporate this technique, is how to plan it into the standard curriculum, and how to plan a unit around such an approach.  Romano offers testimonies from various teachers explaining how they’ve used it in their classrooms, but, as we are all different types of teachers, I believe this is going to be one of those trial and error approaches for me, as I begin teaching.   Nonetheless, it is one I’m excited to experiment with!

Resource Link:
The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has found it useful to add comments and tools regarding the “Multigenre Approach” (as created by Tom Romano) to their website.  Click here:  http://www.ncte.org/profdev/online/ideas/freq/114026.htm to find out more suggestions for professional development in this area.

Hmmm, very interesting. As a future teacher, I love the idea of using the “process approach to composition,” and the notion of “teacher as coach;” however, as a former student, I believe I was taught with variations of this approach and vaguely remember hating it (especially the revising part). I also, evidently, did not internalize it, for most of my college-level papers were written strictly in the draft-briefly revise-final product fashion. I wonder why this is so; that is, I wonder why the process approach to composition, as outlined in the Third Edition of Preparing to Teach Writing by James D. Williams, sounds great on paper to prospective teachers but, as even research cited in Williams proves, fails to happen regularly in the classroom. I wonder who or what causes more resistance – the students, or the potential planning workload put on teachers. Whatever the case, I do think Williams has a good point regarding student engagement, and I will strive for meaningful learning in my classroom by assigning my students writing that “actually does something in the world” (121). I love the idea of setting up pen-pals with other high school students across the country, and I also will try to incorporate some sort of simulation, by “asking students to take on roles and to act in character” (125) in their writing. I want my composition class to be fun – I want it to be the class that students hope to register for and graduate feeling like they are better writers and thinkers for having participated in my classroom. I know, I know, lofty goals for a pre-service teacher, but I’m nothing if I’m not idealistic.

Finally, here is a resource link to a website that may be helpful for future writing teachers: http://4teachers.org/intech/lessons/index.jsp?subject=4&theme=13&topic=58

The link is derived from www.4teachers.org, and focuses on the “Teacher Tackle box” for composition skills. My favorite link is Writers’ Window, which even has an additional link to a writers’ workshop where you and/or your students can find ways to improve your writing. Enjoy!

Welcome to my blog!  “Poetry, prose, & purpose” exists as a supplement to a course I’m taking at the University of Minnesota.   The postings on this site, related to teaching composition in the secondary school, will reflect on topics covered in this course and other issues concerning my journey to becoming a teacher.