Prologue
Chapter 2
Chapter 4
Epilogue
Gracie decided. “But what is next?” she wonders.
The world will tell her.
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.
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.
