As we near the end of the semester, a similar feeling has come over me. I have been busier this semester than any other semester here, so I am thrilled to have a break, but also a little sad to leave behind a semester of professors, subjects, and classmates. This feeling started early this semester when my "Orientation to Secondary Ed" class stopped meeting. I never got particularly close with a group of friends in that class, but I liked hearing about what was coming up in the program. It was comforting to know that I went to lecture twice a week to hear people tell me how to make it through the TEP and I learned a lot. When we stopped meeting, I missed seeing Nancy Langguth and the rest of the speakers she brought in. A couple weeks after that class ended, my six-week ESL/Human Relations partnership ended. This let me sleep in an extra hour each Tuesday, but I've missed hanging out with the guys I talked with for six weeks. Next up was the end of my practicum experience at West High. It's been great to have my afternoons free, but I miss being around the classroom, reading the students' work, and talking with my coop. In another week and a half I'll have a completely open schedule (minus work). I'll sleep past 7:45 whenever I want. I'll make delicious meals at home instead of eating junk on the go. I'll visit friends who live in other cities and states. I'll read for fun, for as short or as long as I like, instead of desperately trying to reach page 134 in enough time to also read 72 pages for a different class. But in truth, I'll also be a bit bored without any classes. I'll miss class discussions about poetry, race in the classroom, and yes, teaching writing. I'll miss the junior high student I've been mentoring this semester in my practicum class. I'll miss the professors that I've seen every week since the thermometer read 80, then 55, and now 20.
This is the same feeling I'll have as a teacher for the rest of my life. Each class will bring its own challenges, but also its own personality. It will feel a bit empty letting go at the end of the year, but I'll look back fondly on the past and be excited for the next year to start-
after my summer break that is.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Quick Thoughts on West Partnership
I was disappointed in the West Partnership, not because we were all scrambling at times, or because I disliked any of the topics we were given, but because I never felt like my pen-pal and I built any sort of relationship. Matt wrote very little in response to what I wrote him and most of what he wrote about himself was dry and came off as lazy. Each week, I looked forward to seeing if he wrote anything interesting, and I asked him questions in my responses that I hoped would encourage him to write as much as he could to me. Each week, though, I was disappointed. He just didn't seem to care to write anything. Why not? That was a question I've asked myself a lot over the partnership. Here are a few of my ideas:
-He does not feel any pressure to write because there is no grade attached. Matt wrote in his "Peak/Valley" assignment that he felt like he messed up with his diagram and paragraphs but it "didn't really matter because it wasn't graded." For me, it was exciting to write to a pen-pal and I was curious in what the pen-pal would write back; that was a release from my busy schedule of academic reading and writing. A high school student may not take the same pleasure in reading and writing. Matt came off as "too cool for school." He may only put effort into an assignment if he knows his teacher will be grading it. It's a shame to a future English teacher like myself, but it may be the reality.
-He's a shy guy by nature. It's possible that Matt is just shy. He may be an introvert who doesn't care to open up to a pen-pal he's never met. I tried to open up to him in hopes that he would respond similarly and we would build a relationship, but he may not be comfortable with that.
-The volume of my writing intimidated him. I tried to write as much as possible, and it's possible that scared Matt off. He may have worried about what someone (who he knew was in English) might have said about his writing. Perhaps he thought writing was easy for me because I wrote so much and he became frustrated because it was difficult for him. In reality, writing is never easy for anyone. I know this now, but Matt might not. I don't think this is the reason Matt didn't write back, but it is possible.
What do you guys think? Can you think of other reasons why Matt would write so little?
-He does not feel any pressure to write because there is no grade attached. Matt wrote in his "Peak/Valley" assignment that he felt like he messed up with his diagram and paragraphs but it "didn't really matter because it wasn't graded." For me, it was exciting to write to a pen-pal and I was curious in what the pen-pal would write back; that was a release from my busy schedule of academic reading and writing. A high school student may not take the same pleasure in reading and writing. Matt came off as "too cool for school." He may only put effort into an assignment if he knows his teacher will be grading it. It's a shame to a future English teacher like myself, but it may be the reality.
-He's a shy guy by nature. It's possible that Matt is just shy. He may be an introvert who doesn't care to open up to a pen-pal he's never met. I tried to open up to him in hopes that he would respond similarly and we would build a relationship, but he may not be comfortable with that.
-The volume of my writing intimidated him. I tried to write as much as possible, and it's possible that scared Matt off. He may have worried about what someone (who he knew was in English) might have said about his writing. Perhaps he thought writing was easy for me because I wrote so much and he became frustrated because it was difficult for him. In reality, writing is never easy for anyone. I know this now, but Matt might not. I don't think this is the reason Matt didn't write back, but it is possible.
What do you guys think? Can you think of other reasons why Matt would write so little?
My One-Pager on the Yancey Article
I know I didn't have enough copies of my one-pager for everyone last week, so here it is just in case you want it, even just to have a quick summary of the article. I have loved hearing everyone else's one pagers all semester and I think it's a great way to get discussion started while making the students feel like they are free to comment on the readings. It's something I'll ask my students to do, even if it's just a half pager or paragrapher.
When the one-pager sign-up sheet went around at the beginning of the semester, I scanned the topics for something unique- something that would challenge my thinking about an English classroom. I passed over “Revising and Responding,” “Assessing Assessment,” and “Grammar and Editing” with a sigh, wondering if we were going to talk about anything fun this semester. Looking back, each of those topics has been more interesting to explore than I had expected (I have actually liked reading up on them, really), but the only topic that really caught my attention that first night we signed up was “Alternative Genres.” In an ever-changing technological world, what should we do about literacy that extends beyond canonical literature and essay writing? These are important things we ought to teach, yes, but if we refuse to acknowledge and explore the new literacy that has come with the technology boom, aren’t we missing out on a huge chunk of resources we could be using to connect with students and teach them to be successful in the real world?
Yancey calls this change a tectonic shift, and compares the culture-wide increase in writing from technology we are seeing today to the increase in public reading seen in nineteenth-century Britain. She highlights the new technologies that had surfaced by 2004: chat rooms, Presidential blogs, email, and instant messaging. Today we should tack social networking sites and video conferencing to the end of that list. Yancey is sure to point out that students discover these literacy mediums outside the classroom, without a teacher assessing them, and they are often more comfortable with the technology and enjoy using it more than their teachers. Reading and writing have spread well beyond the English classroom. Print literacy is now closely tied to screen literacy, and Yancey sites Daley who says, “screen is the language of the vernacular..if we do not include it in the school curriculum, we will become as irrelevant as faculty professing in Latin.” People today combine words, pictures, and sounds to express their thoughts, and this model can be brought in the classroom.
The challenge now is figuring out how to do this. Nobody will deny that technology has changed the way people communicate, but it is far more difficult to craft a new curriculum that puts this theory into practice. To start, we need to change the relationship between students and teacher. Yancey writes, “If we believe that writing is social, shouldn’t the system of circulation…extend beyond and around the single path from student to teacher?” Certainly, it should. Secondly, we need to challenge students to write in the medium that best fits their topic. Not everything students write about fits into an analytical essay or a personal narrative. Instead, different communication pieces call for different medium, with only some topics being transferable between mediums. Perhaps a poem is better performed live than read by the instructor off a page, or a story better told in a video posted to YouTube than a personal narrative. Almost every student carries an iPod, so alluding to a song lyric may be better than the famous opening lines of Tale of Two Cities.
Today, students research with Wikipedia, not the World Book Encyclopedias I was taught to use as an elementary student in the late nineties. Where will we be in fifteen more years? Will we laugh at Wikipedia as a new technology replaces it? If Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist when Yancey’s article was written in 2004 (and blogs were still called “Web logs”), what kinds of literacy will we have in 2016? Technology is too prevalent to just disappear, so we must learn how to integrate it into our classroom. We have to periodically assign 140-character poems that would fit into a tweet or text message. Facebook templates may replace narratives about our lives, at least during drafting stages, because students are comfortable writing in these mediums. I do not want to de-value essay writing or close reading of texts, but they cannot stand alone in curriculum when literacy extends so far beyond these two mediums.
Time to start posting again...
Has it really been four weeks since I've posted? I can't believe it. I kept telling myself I would post later in the week after my schedule lightened up a bit, but obviously I haven't. This week I'm turning it around. I'm excited to be back in the cyber discussions and read what everyone has been posting about. I'm not one for working too far ahead, but I thought the portfolio was due last week in class, and thus, am already done with it. For the first time in a long time, I can write the blogs calmly, knowing everything else for this week's class is already done.
So, for the first of four blog topics... my portfolio.
When home for Thanksgiving, I dug through my parent's dusty attic until I found a plastic storage box with "John Henry" written in permanent marker on the lid. After digging through yellowed newspapers and matte photos I found what I was looking for: a stack of writing journals from elementary school. I read about my third grade birthday gifts, a class Halloween party (including the "Witch's Brew"), golfing with my grandpa, and my second place finish at the pinewood derby. The writing is detailed- and my handwriting was better then than it is now- but my language is far from graceful. Still, this was a great place for me to practice the act of putting a pencil to the page. I was also hoping to find a story I wrote for a young writer's conference or one I wrote about my grandma growing up on a farm, but neither was in the box.
The rest of my portfolio is stuff I've written in college, for writing classes and outside class. I only included one page from an analytical essay because I wanted to focus on my creative writing. In reality, almost all my writing is analytical papers of characterization or metaphor, but most of the essays are the same to me. My first writing class in college was a workshop I took to fulfill my fine arts gen ed. From there I took a few other classes, so I have samples from all that. I also included my afternoon attempt at a children's book and a page from my "idea book." My writing is nothing spectacular, but I have enjoyed writing most of what I've written and I can be proud of it for what it is. That's where I am right now as a writer- someone with lots of lost ideas and jotted down stories- but that's OK by me.
So, for the first of four blog topics... my portfolio.
When home for Thanksgiving, I dug through my parent's dusty attic until I found a plastic storage box with "John Henry" written in permanent marker on the lid. After digging through yellowed newspapers and matte photos I found what I was looking for: a stack of writing journals from elementary school. I read about my third grade birthday gifts, a class Halloween party (including the "Witch's Brew"), golfing with my grandpa, and my second place finish at the pinewood derby. The writing is detailed- and my handwriting was better then than it is now- but my language is far from graceful. Still, this was a great place for me to practice the act of putting a pencil to the page. I was also hoping to find a story I wrote for a young writer's conference or one I wrote about my grandma growing up on a farm, but neither was in the box.
The rest of my portfolio is stuff I've written in college, for writing classes and outside class. I only included one page from an analytical essay because I wanted to focus on my creative writing. In reality, almost all my writing is analytical papers of characterization or metaphor, but most of the essays are the same to me. My first writing class in college was a workshop I took to fulfill my fine arts gen ed. From there I took a few other classes, so I have samples from all that. I also included my afternoon attempt at a children's book and a page from my "idea book." My writing is nothing spectacular, but I have enjoyed writing most of what I've written and I can be proud of it for what it is. That's where I am right now as a writer- someone with lots of lost ideas and jotted down stories- but that's OK by me.
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