Confessions of a Former Blog-Fearer

At the beginning of our program, I would’ve definitely identified as being hesitant and skeptical about integrating “Technology” into my English classroom. I doubted how realistic it would be, given issues of access, time, and money, and I questioned my own ability to use whatever said “Technology” there was to incorporate. Plus, I had never been in a classroom that actually used any sort of "Technology," save word processing, surfing the internet, or watching a movie, so I couldn’t really even imagine what a class like that might look like.

Oh, how times have changed.

Well, to be honest, I still have moments of doubt. But when I read Beach’s article this week, there was no ignoring the fact that I was all into it and tried to figure out how I might have my students at North use blogs during my student teaching. I never saw it coming: I’m excited about blogs.

The American Literature class described in the article devoted one class day a week to writing in and responding to blogs during class, and that seems like a really good schedule to use. That way, students who really don’t have access to the internet at other times have a solid hour each week, but it doesn’t bog down the rest of the class. Plus, it seemed like students were talking about their blogs and comments as they were working, and that seems great. If blogs are completely an out-of-school task, it seems we run the risk of having them be a completely separate and detached part of the class (WebCT, anyone?). That’s one part of this Teaching Writing class that is modeled particularly well, I think—we write blogs outside of class each week, but we devote some class time to discussing them by highlighting the “blog of the week” and some cool links. As with any type of "Technology," (sorry if that's getting annoying) it seems to work best if it’s built into the class rather than an extra part, just one more thing to do.

I think I’ll still need a lot of help to envision successful units and lessons that successfully incorporate “Technology,” (last time, I swear) but it doesn’t seem so scary anymore. I’m convinced that there definitely are benefits to be gained—especially student engagement, if it’s done correctly—by using digital writing, but maybe even more than that, I think we have a responsibility to include it in our classrooms because it’s such a part of life now. It’s just as an important skill as any other kind of writing, and maybe even more important in some aspects.

In keeping with the blog theme of this blog post, my resource link for this week is called The English Teacher Blog. It almost didn’t make the cut for my resource link, because really, who among us needs one more thing to read. But, I just spent a couple minutes browsing around on it, and it just seemed really relevant—so I went with it. The posts are clearly organized into categories, each post is fairly short, and many entries include practical suggestions for lesson plans and other activities. Plus, I found this gem: the Educational Jargon Generator. Jargon is funny to me because it's made of the kind of words that take themselves too seriously—and they’re the kind of words that people who take themselves too seriously love to hear.

Writing and Assessment

I was pleasantly surprised by Dornan’s chapter on assessment, evaluating, grading, and responding to writing, starting with the clear distinctions the authors make among each of those terms. Trying to figure out how to “grade” writing has been something I’ve been pondering for awhile, and I have never felt to confident about the ideas I have. This chapter helped me out a lot by offering specific and realistic suggestions. It seems like, as is the case with most everything education-related, every teacher will have to figure out his or her own way to handle assessment and grading, but Dornan didn’t use that as a cop-out answer. After reading their suggestions about portfolios and rubrics and different styles and methods of grading, I don’t feel like assessing writing will be a breeze, but I at least feel like I have ideas about where to start—which is a lot better than where I used to be.

One quote that really jumped out at me was a comment made by Alfie Kohn, who said, “Broadly speaking, it is easier to measure efficiency than effectiveness, easier to rate how well we’re doing something than to ask whether what we’re doing makes sense” (p. 206). How true this is in regards to high-stakes, standardized testing, but it also occurs to me that it applies to many other aspects of teaching--and of life-- as well. It's easy for me to get so caught up in mastering or perfecting whatever it is I’m doing that I don’t stop to think about whether I care about what I’m doing, or if it really makes sense. So often, people take the easy way out—some days, it almost seems like it’s human nature. Standardized testing relies on multiple-choice for convenience’s sake, not because it makes sense to do it that way. Makes me stop and think…. What am I doing just because it’s convenient? I don't want to be like a standardized test.

But back to the reading—another interesting point that jumped out at me in this chapter was the assertion that students should be doing two to three times as much writing as what the teacher actually reads and grades. That was eye-opening. It seems like an excellent rule of thumb, and once again it makes me reflect on my own experience in writing classes, because I don’t think I’ve ever written nearly twice as much as what the instructor actually graded. The one thing that worries me about asking the students to write so much, though, is that I don’t want students to adopt the mentality of “I’m not gonna write this because no one’s even going to read it.” It seems like that attitude could be avoided with the right introduction and sense of community in the class, but it’s still scary. Once a student starts thinking that way, I’d imagine it’d be pretty hard to convince him otherwise.

My resource link for the week (http://www.uni-due.de/SVE/VARS_Varieties.htm) is a site that briefly describes several varieties of English. I think it’s important to know about all the different varieties that exist—for teachers, but also for all students. This site doesn’t go into great detail, and it doesn’t include many varieties-- but it’s an accessible introduction to the ones it does mention, and it serves to give readers an understanding that hey, there’s more than just standard English, and they’re just as important.

Words, Grammar, and Vocabulary Quizzes

First off—here’s my resource link for the week: http://www.myfavoriteword.com/. This is a great place to share your favorite word and to look through what other people have submitted. What I really like about this site is that all entries are reviewed before they’re added to the list, so it’s not like a hundred people can write in with the same favorite word, and then all the formatting is the same so it’s more user-friendly. Also, submitters write a little bit about what they like and what it means, which is more interesting than just reading cool-sounding words. It would be great to share with this students—if nothing else, it reflects the teacher’s passion and enthusiasm for language (and shows that a bunch of other people have the same passion), which can’t hurt.

Secondly, wow—the Dornan chapter “Grammar, Correctness, and Style,” is about to overflow. As I was reading, I felt like every sentence was important and potentially useful, which is, admittedly, something I don’t often feel when reading. I think the authors have captured the importance of grammar in a really convincing way. I’ve always been a supporter of teaching about grammar, mostly because I enjoyed it when I was going through school myself, but I also do believe that knowing conventions actually can improve writing. A couple of big points stuck out to me in this particular reading:

Point #1: We’ve heard it a hundred times, but teachers need to constantly expose students to well-written literature and varied writing styles. According to this chapter, oral language is more complicated than written language only until 7^th grade, at which point the written language actually becomes more complex. I’ve never really thought about that explicitly, but it’s true—how often do I speak in complex sentences? Take a look at the second sentence of this entry, for example: “As I was reading, I felt like every sentence was important and potentially useful, which is, admittedly, something I don’t often feel when reading.” I feel like that’s my voice, but I don’t think I’d speak that thought aloud in the same way—it’d probably be something more like “When I was reading, it just felt like every sentence was important and useful and that’s not something I feel a lot when I read.” I used to think that a good tip for writing was to just write how you would speak. Maybe that’s a starting point, but now I’m convinced that writing isn’t just oral language written down. The point is, written language needs to be experienced and practiced and modeled if we expect student writing to improve. The other huge component, I think, is that teachers are explicit about what makes the well-written examples well-written. How does the use of commas help us read the sentence more fluidly? If students can identify what makes for strong writing, they’ll be able to practice translating those techniques into their own writing.

Point #2: “Good” English is appropriate English: for both the writer and the reader (p. 85). One of my biggest pet peeves in grammar lessons is when teachers say, “well, think about it—what sounds right?” It’s frustrating, because that works in some cases, but it’s completely useless to anyone who doesn’t speak Standard English all the time. When I teach grammar, I want to be clear to students that I’m teaching Standard English conventions, and there’s a time and a place to use them, depending on the audience and the content of your writing. Also, I think both this text and the Culham chapters did a nice job of reminding us that just because a technique works well for one kind of writing, that doesn’t mean it’s always beneficial. Yes, we like to push students to find unique, colorful adjectives, but that won’t always be the best way to dress up a sentence. We all know that, but the trick is to remember that we know that when we teach adjectives. I don’t think we have to worry about confusing students with “sometimes this is a good way to go, sometimes it isn’t”—that kind of ambiguity applies to so many other things in life that I think if we’re upfront about it, there will only be benefits.

I also really liked the “what should we teach and why” section of this chapter. I took advanced grammar in high school and liked it, but it really was pretty useless to learn and identify appositives, participial phrases, object of the gerund, etc. And diagramming sentences has always been beyond me… what do all those lines mean?? I guess it doesn’t hurt to learn things like that, but realistically, why bother spending time in the classroom on something that half the students will never retain, and the other half will never conquer in the first place? I really liked the lists they came up with about what’s important to teach—granted, I have no real experience in the classroom, but it seems like they got the essential pieces pretty much right on.

One final unrelated piece: In the “word choice” chapter, Culham went out of her way to tell us not to teach words or vocabulary by assigning a list or having students use a set of words in a paragraph. While my first instinct was to nod along and agree that those tasks never really did much for me as a student, I quickly remembered that during my student teaching I’ll be responsible for introducing a set of vocabulary words each Monday and testing them on Friday. So, um… what should I do??

Would this blog entry be better if it were written in a 5-paragraph essay?

Organization is clearly an important part of good writing, but it seems like a difficult idea to teach. I think the most important aspect that the Culham chapter pointed out was that there isn’t just one kind of organization—a piece might be organized by space, time, content, perspective, etc. Looking back on my own writing assignments over the years, I feel like teachers often get stuck on the idea of organizing by time: First, this happened; next, this happened-- and so on. That’s a useful way of thinking about some pieces, but a good story doesn’t necessarily follow that kind of linear construction. I think the more teachers can use examples pulled from literature and articles and previous student work, the more we can emphasize that “organized” writing looks different in different contexts. My favorite point from the Dornan text was that everyone organizes differently. We know an organized desk when we see one, for example, but it seems like no two people organize their desk exactly the same. Students might find that analogy useful, because it reminds us that there isn’t a formula for organization—it’s just a matter of finding what works for the writer and the writing.

It was interesting to read about the different “types” of papers that teachers typically assign their students to write. The more I think about it, the more it seems so silly for teachers to focus solely on the end product and disregard the writing process. In my opinion, that’s the biggest downfall of the 5-paragraph essay-- there's no attention to process. The student doesn’t have to learn anything or do any real thinking, because there’s already a set form they know they must produce. Actually, when I wrote papers in the 5-paragraph form, I barely even thought of it as a writing assignment—it was just an assignment. The only revision I ever did was to move Point One to Point Three, or maybe change the wording of my thesis statement. I know that writing these didn’t help me at all as a writer, except for perhaps strengthening my ability to write a 5-paragraph essay about a topic I didn’t have to care about. That said, I do think that we as English teachers can’t completely throw the form out of the window. I like what Wesley suggested in her article about focusing instead on three parts: an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Then, it’s not “okay, what three points can I mention,” but “okay, what do I want to say.” We have to make sure that students do understand the uses of a clear introduction, coherent body, and concise conclusion-- we just shouldn't mislead them into thinking that that's the only kind of writing that works.

On a different note, my favorite reading of the week was actually the article about multigenre responses to literature. I absoluately loved the idea of having students respond to literature by writing in different genres, and I’d really like to incorporate something like that into my student teaching. But I’m struggling a little about how to handle it practically—how would you fit in time for revision and make sure that everyone is making progress when everyone is writing something different? Suggestions welcome. Oh, and my resource link for the week relates to multigenre writing too: http://www.sheboyganfalls.k12.wi.us/cyberenglish9/multi_genre/genre_types.htm. One of the points made in the Gillespie article was that the teacher wishes she had given her students a more thorough understanding of what each type of genre was before they dove into writing them. This site provides a pretty good list of different genres, and the descriptions are written specifically with students in mind.