12.08.10
A Few Days
Ok, so I said I’d get back here in a few days and discuss what I’ve been doing to teach writing this year. It’s been more than a few days, I know. I should be grading a mountain of papers, but I’m in a bad mood and I know it’s not a good idea to grade when I’m in a bad mood. So I’ve just been taking them for a walk the last few days.
As I mentioned before, I’ve been working pretty hard for a few years to teach writing better. I know that what I have done in the past isn’t enough to really teach good writing skills, so I’ve done as much as possible to address that. A couple years ago I was a fellow at the National Writing Project at Rugters. While the NWP is eye-opening for many people, it was only part of a gradual shift for me from a teacher of literature who sometimes talked about writing to a teacher who deliberately thinks about how to teach writing. I’m still not where I want to be, but I think I’ve made some progress.
One of the things that I have to emphasize (to whoever might be reading this and also to my own students) is that I’m not trying to “unteach” what students have learned prior to my class. Nor do I think that what they’ve learned is wrong. Students need structure, they need form, they need those things. The 5 Paragraph Essay teaches them these things. But at some point those useful structures can become stifling and they can actually hurt the students they are intended to help. They become so infatuated with the form that they actually cease saying anything interesting. Their own teenage voice is lost in thesaurus-itis. It’s a problem. Their essays sometimes are mechanical to a fault. I want students to, as Tina Blue so clearly puts it, “say something interesting and useful about the literature and to do so in prose that can be read and that actually makes some sense!”
Yes, the good writers can do this. But in my sophomore honors English class the bad writers substitute the “form” or “structure” for good writing. My task is to help them learn how to write well, not help them learn a form. It’s clear they’ve learned it already!
So… how have I addressed writing this year? First, I couldn’t spring anything crazy on my students. I needed them to feel comfortable as writers and get them willing and ready to take risks. I also wanted them to actually see other students’ writing. I think that too often students do not read essays, which is just weird. I can’t imagine teaching students to paint, yet not showing them many sample paintings. I can’t think of how to teach someone to sing without them hearing other people sing. Yet we sometimes do this with writing. Students read literature–novels, nonfiction, poetry, drama–but how often do they read essays? I don’t mean the heavy-duty professional essays in a textbook. I mean other students’ words. How often do we provide them with the opportunity to read a variety of essays and discuss what is effective and what is ineffective? I don’t know about other teachers, but I know I don’t do enough of it.
So I set my students up with blogs. I use a free service called 21publish. What I like about 21publish is that I can have all the blogs set up in a “portal” which I can control. When a student posts to his or her blog, they can choose if it is viewable to all the portal members or just me. It’s pretty neat stuff.
On the blog, I have students write a bunch of “one-pagers,” a term I stole from a former professor of mine at Colorado State Unversity, Cindy O’Donnell-Allen. I’m beginning to recognize that a number of shorter, more focused essays are much more useful than one or two larger essays. I grade one-pagers based on Organization, Support, Mechanics and something else specific to the assignment, such as their analysis of diction, the clarity of their argument, etc.
The first essay I had them do was pretty benign; I just wanted them to get comfortable writing for the blog and for each other. The assignment was:
Explain how something works. You should not have to research your topic—write about something you know. It can be a physical item (like a machine) or a process (like an event).
I got all sorts of great responses–how to listen, how a track meet works, how to compete in mixed martial arts–but the best part of the assignment was that they didn’t resort to their stock 5-Paragraph Essay format. The confines of the paper (one-pager) and the topic didn’t lend themselves to that. Instead, what I got was true voices of sophomores. They were lively. They were fun. Some were more successful than others, of course, but overall they were a success. Most writers stopped thinking about what they were taught to do as writers and just wrote.
I often relate the writing process to other acts that require practice, such as playing a musical instrument or playing a sport. Yes, you need instruction. Yes, you need practice. Yes, you need to think about the rules. But there is a point at which a talented musician or athlete just plays. It’s at this point that we say they’re doing what “comes naturally” to them, but it’s just the opposite–they’re doing what they’ve practiced doing many, many times.
That’s where I want my writers to be. But I almost have to trick them to get it to feel that “natural” to them. And yes, some are more “natural” than others, but that will always be the case, so how can I help them do better, too?
I have continued the blogs through the year so far, although I have to admit they’re only on their fourth post so far. Each one-pager has had a different focus. The second assignment was to analyze diction in a poem. The third was a film review. The fourth was to write an argument about television. Each of these tasks ties in to other work we’re doing in class. Each of them has a different “something else” that I look at while grading.
After students post their one-pager, there is a follow-up assignment where they read at least one other student’s writing and leave a comment on their post. Now they are reading each other’s work, which is what I had in mind all the time. Now they are considering what makes each piece effective or ineffective.
Of course I’m doing other things with writing, too, including much more formalized instruction. I’ll write about that in a few days.
