CROCODILE WRITING
Practice what you preach. The adage can be applied to every aspect of life, from faith to kindness to our environment - and teaching is no exception.
Which is why I haven't blogged for a few weeks. Poor planning on my part resulted in summative writing assignments in ALL FIVE of my classes. But I was writing every day, modeling every skill I asked of my students. I took advantage of the memoir writing time in Creative Writing by sharing one of my memoirs with my students and revising it with them. Watching the cursor delete words in real time, what I call trimming the fat, could be the most powerful form of modeling. "Yes. Removing sentences is part of a revision!" Some of my student writers think that once they type a sentence on a page it's there forever, like dog paws in wet concrete.
My sophs wrote the dreaded five-paragraph essay: the dinosaur writing assignment that still roams the earth. How many five paragraph essays have you written in your life? Too many to count, right? It's easy to teach because that's the only structure the students have ever been taught, but it's as exciting as folding laundry. To try to spice it up, I used their own writing as the model. I created scores of Google slides with sentences from their rough drafts and asked for ideas to "spice it up." Some of their ideas were robotic, for they've seldom, if ever, been taught to be themselves in formal writing. Using kids' personalities in the room, I asked for different voices to revise the sentences. "Let's have a drama queen rewrite this rhetorical question." Surprisingly, the girls (and even a boy or two) were proud to carry the label of drama queen. We had great power laughs as the volunteers revised. "Let's hear that same question re-written by a smart-alec." Again, there was no shortage of volunteers.
My honors class wrote a compare/contrast essay between Siddhartha and Chris McCandless from Into the Wild. The hardest part of any literary analysis is avoiding summary. Many writers were not happy with me when I required them to cut entire chunks of summary from their paragraphs. Again, the cursor raced across the screen, devouring 27-word sentences like a predatory crocodile.
The honors writers are different from other writers; they think more is better. Longer is smarter. We even did an exercise connected to SAT skills that illustrated conciseness. The majority of the time, the concisest choice is the answer. Silence. Eventually, we addressed the voice component. One student struggled with the text-to-self connection I asked for in the conclusion. She had a terrible case of writer's block. So I asked her, "Who can you relate with more? Siddhartha or Chris McCandless?" She looked at me like I was a complete nut job and replied, "Um, neither. I can't relate with a Buddhist monk or a whack job who wants to live in Alaska by himself."
"There's your conclusion."
There's no element of surprise of what I'm doing this weekend. And no surprise why I slept late and needed an urn of coffee to get moving today. Teaching writing is tiring and demanding but it's also engaging. Each of these assignments required different roles: was I modeling writer's craft? Revision? MLA Format? Hopefully it all paid off.
Which is why I haven't blogged for a few weeks. Poor planning on my part resulted in summative writing assignments in ALL FIVE of my classes. But I was writing every day, modeling every skill I asked of my students. I took advantage of the memoir writing time in Creative Writing by sharing one of my memoirs with my students and revising it with them. Watching the cursor delete words in real time, what I call trimming the fat, could be the most powerful form of modeling. "Yes. Removing sentences is part of a revision!" Some of my student writers think that once they type a sentence on a page it's there forever, like dog paws in wet concrete.
My sophs wrote the dreaded five-paragraph essay: the dinosaur writing assignment that still roams the earth. How many five paragraph essays have you written in your life? Too many to count, right? It's easy to teach because that's the only structure the students have ever been taught, but it's as exciting as folding laundry. To try to spice it up, I used their own writing as the model. I created scores of Google slides with sentences from their rough drafts and asked for ideas to "spice it up." Some of their ideas were robotic, for they've seldom, if ever, been taught to be themselves in formal writing. Using kids' personalities in the room, I asked for different voices to revise the sentences. "Let's have a drama queen rewrite this rhetorical question." Surprisingly, the girls (and even a boy or two) were proud to carry the label of drama queen. We had great power laughs as the volunteers revised. "Let's hear that same question re-written by a smart-alec." Again, there was no shortage of volunteers.
My honors class wrote a compare/contrast essay between Siddhartha and Chris McCandless from Into the Wild. The hardest part of any literary analysis is avoiding summary. Many writers were not happy with me when I required them to cut entire chunks of summary from their paragraphs. Again, the cursor raced across the screen, devouring 27-word sentences like a predatory crocodile.
The honors writers are different from other writers; they think more is better. Longer is smarter. We even did an exercise connected to SAT skills that illustrated conciseness. The majority of the time, the concisest choice is the answer. Silence. Eventually, we addressed the voice component. One student struggled with the text-to-self connection I asked for in the conclusion. She had a terrible case of writer's block. So I asked her, "Who can you relate with more? Siddhartha or Chris McCandless?" She looked at me like I was a complete nut job and replied, "Um, neither. I can't relate with a Buddhist monk or a whack job who wants to live in Alaska by himself."
"There's your conclusion."
There's no element of surprise of what I'm doing this weekend. And no surprise why I slept late and needed an urn of coffee to get moving today. Teaching writing is tiring and demanding but it's also engaging. Each of these assignments required different roles: was I modeling writer's craft? Revision? MLA Format? Hopefully it all paid off.
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