Aesthetic vs. Efferent Reading: Yay Reader Response!

Honestly, what I liked best about the readings for this week is that they emphasized the process of having fun and enjoying reading and learning. Lately as I have been designing my lesson plans for student teaching, I have started to think about the relevance of making learning fun. Again, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been hearing Jack in my head, telling me that English teachers spend too much time trying to make school fun instead of trying to make it useful. When he said that I was in complete agreement, but I think that there is a key point here. Fun for the sake of fun is not doing students any good. However, if we are able to make school fun and educational, then students are going to be more engaged. They are going to remember what is happening because we will be experiencing something memorable. You can tell students all day long that it is important to learn. You can even convince them of why they should learn something and they may work to learn it. However, if you do not make the lesson memorable and meaningful, the students are missing out on something greater.

Using Jack again, I’ve also found myself disagreeing with the whole anti-reader response thing. Yes, I do not see it as a vital critical veil for literature. However, I do think that it represents more of an aesthetic approach to literature, which I believe is often lost for many students. Part of reading is enjoying it and experiencing it. Literature can teach us about other perspectives. It can enlighten our minds into new territories. It can also be an escape from this world. The greatest moment of reading is that moment when you are completely lost in a text. It is that moment when you lose all sense of time and you enter into a state of flow. It is when you truly enter that other world. I want students to be able to experience this, and I’m simply not sure how. Do students need to first understand how to read a text critically before they can learn to enter it? Or is it a completely different skill and appreciation? I feel like when we force students to spend their first reading writing question marks and looking for different representations or language, they are separating themselves from the text. They are onlookers instead of participants.

If students enjoyed reading and were able to experience it, I then think that they could go back and look at it critically. I just wonder how to invoke this kind of reading in my students. I think that Schwartz offers a look into how teachers can approach this idea. His ideas of connecting poems with videos is great for making a memorable experience for students at the same time that it forces them to think critically about the meanings and connotations that are being developed in the poetry. It forces them to look at a poem through different lenses, as they experience it through a different media. I also like that Schwartz has the students pick a poem themselves, read it, and make it their own. This example really introduces using technology as a way to advance learning. It shows how students have to be playing with multimedia techniques if they are going to possibly understand the images and ideas that are being thrown at them every day. Literature cannot just be read through books, because books are not the only messages that are being used to socialize us each and every day. Students have to be working with these kinds of technologies and understandings if they are going to be able to critically respond to the world around them. It is not really a question of if these new literacies should be addressed but rather how can they be addressed most effectively.

My link for the week is about how to get students to enjoy reading. It talks more about how to avoid excuses of students saying that they do not want to read. It falls under the assumption that if we can just get kids to read then they will enjoy it.

Link: http://education.families.com/blog/how-teachers-can-help-students-enjoy-reading

Finding the Cure-All for Education

Many of the topics in the readings for this week have been things that we have discussed before. However, I found myself asking new questions as I was reading them this time. Perhaps that I am now observing an actual classroom and am about to finally be the teacher of a class, I am beginning to think a bit more practically. Whatever the reason is, I’m wondering how these new technologies and ways to approach literacy will actually be implemented in the classroom.

In the Jenkins article, he had a real focus on civic engagement. I’ve read quite a lot of work from Jenkins and his focus seems to be on increasing civic involvement and creating a more educated and active public. While it is certainly true that many citizens are disengaged in politics and the public sphere, I’m wondering what my role is in changing this as a teacher. I think that while getting students involved is important, the most important thing to teach them is how to get involved and why it even matters. I think that students have to realize that their say even matters. This is where Jenkins had me thinking about building a sense of autonomy within students and teaching them that what they do in this world even matters. It is quite easy to feel isolated and small in this society. It is easy to be passive, watching television and spending each day being constrained by the conventions of society. This is where it is important to get students to not just start questioning the systems around them, but to also learn about what they can do if they want to create change or create their own meanings.

So, what can students do? How do you teach students that they have a say? The answer: technology.

This is where I am a bit hesitant. I’m not convinced that blogs will save the world. I can see the idealistic view of them where students feel as though they are being read by the world. But are they? I mean what really is the difference from posting on a blog than having students share their journals? I suppose with a blog they can bring in outside media easier as they find it on the internet. And yes, I do think that students will feel as though the homework they are doing is more connected to what they do at home. But, in reality, nobody else is probably going to read their blog. My class is probably not going to get an email from someone in Kansas about the wiki book that they are creating. So how do I make blogs more than just an easier way for students to respond to each other when they are at home? Or is that enough? It is enough to have students publish some of their work online so their friends and classmates can be more involved in their reading? It is simply an easier way to share ideas, peer review, and perhaps get a sense that it is possible for someone else to read your work?

One technology that I did enjoy being discussed was book trailers. Now, the only benefit that I see of this technology is that it is more fun and artistically-oriented for students than other types of book projects. I think that they are a great way for students to use their own background knowledge and their outside lives about what they see in movie trailer. They have to start thinking about why they choose to go to movies and how a trailer orients them as a reader. They have to become more aware of a process that they are affected by on a daily basis, which is essentially the goal in getting students to be good citizens and questioning members of society, right? While on a much smaller scale, I think that my main goal for students is to get them aware of how they are constructed and affected by society and the media around them.

These projects give students a chance to efficiently pull out the themes and main points of a book so that they can present a clear and accurate book trailer. Doing one of this efficiently can be difficult, as students have to be able to summarize a book without giving too much away in a small amount of space. They also have to entice the reader and form it in a more persuasive model. I have seen students do this and they really seem to enjoy it. Is that a good enough reason to use technology?

Finally, I also liked what Jenkins said about performance. I think that he took it to a greater level than what I have seen many teachers do. Often, I see teachers have their students take on different identities, but they do not let the students really engage and live in this identity. What is key here is that I think students have to deal with changing circumstances. When they take on a persona of another, they have to have a dynamic environment where they have to make decisions as a character and really take on that person’s perspective and life. It does not become real until you enter the real world.

Overall, these readings made me question the line between the idealistic and the practical. Lately, I have found myself wondering how I am truly going to put these theories and ideas into practice. Is there something here that is truly going to work in the classroom? Is there something here that is worth trying? Sometimes you read about how Socratic seminars will solve all the problems in the world, but you wonder how much they are actually going to get done. Sometimes I find myself going back to the basics, and I wonder if I am too afraid to try something new or am I just missing some crucial element of that something new?

Link of the week:
In honor of the idea of technology, I have posted a YouTube clip for my link of the week. This video is coming from students themselves about why they feel that blogs are a great tool for the classroom. It comes from the ultimate source, the students that we are trying to engage!

The Pains of Peer Review

Several of the readings for this semester have talked about peer revision. I mentioned in my last blog entry about how I enjoyed Harpers’ tool kit for creative writing revision, so that students would have something particular to search for when they were reviewing both their own work and the work of their peers. I think that this would make it much easier for students because it would give them something concrete to look at while they are reading. It gives them something to grasp onto when they might not know where to go.

I think that I liked Harper’s tool kit, because I am looking for something to make peer revision an effective process. I think that if done correctly, peer revision is a great way for students to increase both their reading and writing skills. As was mentioned in the Van De Weghe chapter, the skill to write is much different than the skill to respond to other’s writings. This is true for many reasons. First off, I think that the skill to review others works requires an ability to be able to dissect a piece quickly and accurately. It requires advanced skills of organization and theme. These are skills that are needed for good writing, but I think that students frequently are able to “write” something without truly having these skills. Many times students are not able to go back to their own work and pull apart how each point adds to their overall thesis or goal. They are not able to track the development of their thinking. By learning and practicing how to peer review, students are thrown into this situation, and it will ultimately improve their writing.

The skill of response also requires that students know the essential elements of a piece of work. I mean in all honesty, we as teachers are a bit hesitant when it comes to responding to students’ work. That’s why we’re doing so many readings about it. It is difficult to be able to pinpoint where other writers are struggling and how to approach that dilemma. Students have to know what to focus on. They have to be able to let go of the need of correcting every comma and just looking for punctuation errors if there are larger issues that should be addressed. Sometimes it may be effective for a writer to just hear that the reader was confused and then the two students can go from there to figure out why. These will allow both students to come to a better understanding how to read a paper and to track its development.

Yet, the skill of response is not one that most students share, and I think that this is why I have always detested peer revision in my past experiences as a student.  Whenever I participated in these, other students would always just tell me that my work was good. They would either fail to invest their energy into it or they would not know how to read it effectively. I found these activities to be a waste of time. Many of my teachers have given out grading rubrics to follow as we read other people’s work, but I still don’t think that these worked very well. While, they were better than nothing, students would often just check the boxes and pass the paper back.

That’s why I think that modeling is important. I think that it would be effective to do a few readings as a class or to have students work in groups.  I also think that having a revision process full of symbols and tool kits may be a more effective and memorable way for students to learn to read work. It would give them a process that they could fall back on whenever they are writing or reading a work.  It literally would be a tool kit that would scaffold students into learning to read and analyze.

 I agree that students can’t just be thrown into a workshop. They need to be shown how to read and they also have to be given an incentive to do so. In my own classroom, I’m still not sure if I have found the best approach to use. I think that for essay writing, it may be helpful to have students follow the grading guidelines and then to provide evidence for where they did or did not see those guidelines met in the writing. I also want to make sure that my students are conversing. I would want the students to read one together before they moved on to the next. I think that it is important for the writer to be part of the reviewing process, so that they can understand where the reviewer is coming from and also so that they begin to delve into their own thinking and how they can improve their writing. Active conversation is important.

Link of the Week:
I chose to the writing center at Colorado State University. I think that it is a very practical page that talks about the logistics of peer review. One of my favorite things about it was how it talked about building in incentives for peer review. Unfortunately, students are rarely motivated by intrinsic movitation, and they are unlikely to put in their all for peer revision if it is not part of their grade. This reminded me of what we read about the Atwell chapter and how to assess students' work. For the most part,  I find myself saying that at the end of the day, students will not do something if they do not have a reason to do it. I think I lean towards the side where everything should somehow be tied to a grade.  This does not mean that students can't build toward a grade and that these grades cannot be negotiated.

http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/teaching/peer/com2b2.cfm

Week Three Reflection: Revision and Editing: Where Does Grammar Fit in the English Classroom?

When I saw that the majority of our readings for this week were about teaching grammar, I’ll admit that I was a bit excited.  Teaching grammar has always been one of those pet peeves of mine. I cannot stress enough how important I think that it is to write in agreement with the standard English conventions and rules. As we are teaching students to enter into the culture of power and succeed in this society, they have to be able to write according to the agreed upon rules of grammar and rhetoric. While these rules are arbitrary and not nearly as important as the creation of meaning and content, one simple punctuation error can cause a great idea to be dismissed. Our students will not be taken seriously in this culture of power if they cannot conform to these standards. Yet, few students really do understand or implement these rules in their writing.

The more time that I spend in the schools, the more dismayed I am about the mistakes that students are making in their writing. Many seniors in high school are still not able to use punctuation rules correctly or to tell the difference between its and it’s. In the Edina school district and many other districts, grammar has been set on the back burner. Few teachers ever actually set aside time to teach grammar explicitly to their students, as it is not demanded in the curriculum. Teachers do not want to bog down students or make writing feel like a chore. The focus is on gaining fluency and getting the words down on paper. And while this is important, I am a strong advocate of getting students to know how to construct sentences properly.  It is essential if they are going to climb up the social ladder.

I liked how the Dornan reading discussed the subjectivity and arbitrariness of Grammar 3 conventions. The chapter we read gave a brief history about how correct grammar has changed over the years. Years ago double negatives were seen as correct, but as the years progressed, certain groups of people wanted to distinguish themselves and thus they made a change. These conventions are not set in stone and they are certainly not innate. I think that as we teach students grammar rules, we have to teach them where they came from. We have to teach them why it is important to learn them and what it means to follow them. I think that students should understand that they do not have to change their own dialect to fit with the standard form of English in their everyday life. In the classroom and in society, different vernaculars and dialects should be allowed. However, when it comes time to write an essay, students have to buckle down and do it the way that the power culture states is correct. This is simply a way of life and until students get access into this culture, they have to follow the rules. Once they are there, they can take the steps to change it.

After doing the readings for the week, I am still uncertain about how I want to approach grammar. I do think that it is important for students to use their grammar skills in their writing. However, I am not completely convinced that a grammar worksheet is not just as or more effective than having students analyze a paragraph from one of the texts that they are reading. I think that it is important to isolate grammar rules so that students really get a chance to play with them so they can master the skill. Repetition is really the key here. I do agree with the chapters in the sense that I think I would have my students use what they learned and perhaps free write using the grammar technique of the day. I’m simply not sure. I am still searching for a better way to teach students grammar in context that is efficient, productive, and useful. I want students to be engaged and  I want to make what I teach practical instead of busy work. Yet, sometimes I still see the value in this “busy work.”

One final note that I would like to make is on the Harper reading about revision instruction for creative writing. Normally, I am not that gung-ho on revision tools, but I loved this article. I think that this article presented a great and realistic way to approach revision of creative writing. Creative writing is really the worse to rewrite, because often students are so attached to their work that they can’t seem to separate themselves from it.   I have never been an advocate of peer revision, because I have always felt that students either don’t care or are scared to actually give constructive feedback to their fellow students. Yet, I think that Harper’s ideas in this reading make the revision process much more explicit. Having these explicit tools to look for makes it a much more efficient and useful process. I loved the final tool of making a scene where he had the students highlighting the writer’s use of action, dialogue, snapshots, and internal reflection. This breaks down the revision process into something that students can really understand. It takes the feelings out of it and gives students something concrete to work with.

Link of the Week
For this week, I chose a website from Full Sail University that basically summarizes the main points of our reading into eight bullet points. I like it because it is explicit about how teachers should go about correcting students works. It gives steps for how to approach salient grammar issues and the revision process. Many of the ideas are very easy to implement and seem like they might be very effective in the classroom!

Eight Tips for Teaching Grammar Without a Worksheet

Response 2: The 5 Paragraph Essay and the Art of Writing

I suppose I should start this week’s reflection on my feelings toward the 5 paragraph essay, as many of the readings were discussing this format. In reflecting on my past experiences with the format, I am amazed that other people had not even heard about this type of essay. My entire junior high and high school experience were dedicated to writing this way. We were given precise formats. The first paragraph started with an attention getter (a quote or personal memory), then 2-3 explanatory sentences that connect the AGD to the thesis. Following the thesis was the plan of coherence or the POC where the three parts of the essay were mentioned. There was then a paragraph for each section of the essay and a final conclusion paragraph that was basically just the introductory paragraph in reverse. It always ended with a revisit of the same quote or personal memory. I learned this format so well, that writing an essay always felt like literally just filling in a template. When I took my writing test in 10^th grade, it took me no more than 10 minutes, as I did not even have to think when I was writing. I knew exactly what I was doing.

Now, my first instinct was to say that this was an absolutely ridiculous, ineffective, and anti-creative/critical thinking approach to essay writing. I remember the first literature class I took in English. I was completely taken aback on my first paper grade when I had followed these guidelines. It took me a long time how to figure out how to move beyond this format. Yet, eventually, I did learn. It only took me a few sessions with my TA to learn how to write an essay for that class. Which gets me to thinking, did my essay writing in class impede or help my ability to write and collect my ideas into coherent thoughts and argumentations? While I always thought that it hindered my ability, I am beginning to realize that I did learn invaluable skills through the organization of the 5 paragraph essay. I learned how to structure arguments and how to add clarity and precision in my words. I learned the basic components of an essay in an easy-to-follow format. For that reason, I think the precise structure of the 5 paragraph essay is needed, at least when writers are first starting. It gives writers something to fall back on that is not too daunting for them as they are learning new ideas. Once that format is perfected, it is time to open up the box of possibilities and branch out to different types of writing.

I have a few other notes for the week, most of the them being from the Romano book. In this book, I liked the discussion that it had about the importance of free writing. I already commented on this a bit, but I want to reemphasize my newly realized value of free writing in class. In life, we always seem to be writing for a purpose. We are either writing for a transaction or to be creative. However, we never write for ourselves. Writing is really a way to organize and gather thoughts. We can learn so much about ourselves and our beliefs when we take the time to write them down on paper. In our heads, ideas swarm around without meeting any true cognition. However, when we take the time to put them on paper, we become more aware of what we are actually thinking, as we take the time to really bring them to fruition. I want my students to take the time to write for the sake of writing. You never know what ideas may develop.

Finally, I also wanted to briefly note what Romano said about giving student poetry that they can enjoy and that makes them believe that they can actually write a piece of poetry themselves. I thought this was a simple but thought-provoking statement. When students are only reading canonical pieces with poems that they have to analyze and dissect in order to understand, poetry can become rather daunting and perhaps boring. I think that it is important to provide poetry that they can instantly connect with that makes them believe that they too can create a piece of poetry.  A work of art can be simple at the same time that it is beautiful, and I want to make sure that my students understand that. Too often we think something has to be difficult to understand to be good. Too often we lose sight of the purpose of art. We forget the aesthetic appeal that comes from personal response and connection.


For my resource for the week, I've included a site that looks at different tips for how to teach poetry. I think that this is one of the most daunting things for both teachers and students. This site includes fun activities to make poetry a bit more accessible, such as creating a poetry tree or cutting out words from magazines and forming them into poems.

10 Tips for Teaching Poetry

Week One Response

Reflection

The readings this week made me think a lot about the importance of writing in the classroom and the amount of time that has to be dedicated to it. I think that we all realize that as teachers we are going to have units that deal with writing a 5 paragraph essay, developing arguments, etc. However, most of these articles and chapters have discussed the need to have constant and dedicated time for students to write each week. In the Atwell chapter, he suggested dedicating 3 days per week on the sole act of writing. The entire classroom was set up in a way to accommodate this writing process and he found time to meet with the students on a daily basis. When reading this, I thought that it sounded wonderful. I would love to have the time and space for that in my classroom. But how realistic is that?

I do think that more emphasis needs to be given to the writing process in the classroom. Students need to be able to explore their own personal interests and genres, as they are given more freedom and time to write what they want to write. For this reason, I think that I am going to steal an idea that was discussed in the Dornan book about dedicating the beginning of class to writing in a journal. I think that this is a great way to give structure and flexibility to the classroom.  The journal can adapt to the needs of the day or lesson. Sometimes students can write about whatever they want, sometimes I can give them a prompt, sometimes they can even use the journal to do grammar work or respond to a mini lesson that I give in the beginning of class. My cooperating teacher plays with this idea a bit as she frequently gives the students little writing prompts to respond to. She has the students write their grammar notes and responses all in one daily journal that they turn in several times a semester.

When doing this journal, I also think that it is important to respond to the students. I would often have them fold down pages that they especially want me to read. I would also give them the option to mark pages that I should not read. I think that it is important to have this be an accessible form of communication. Sometimes, I might even have them write a letter to me that I will respond to. It may be a lot of work, but I think that it should be done a few times throughout a semester.

One other thing that I think was important from our readings is the idea of response. Obviously it would be fantastic to be able to individually talk with the students on a daily basis about their works. However, that may be a bit idealistic. While the Atwell chapter stated that students fail to even read the comments that are written on papers, I still do not know if I am going to abandon this process. Sometimes this is just the most efficient way to communicate with students. However, I do think that when the students are working on larger writing projects, it is important to dedicate class time to individual workshops. These readings for this week gave many pointers for this process as they talked about the need to look at the students, not the paper, ask the students questions so that they can discover their own issues and things to work for, and also to give the students many options when they are stuck about how to move forward, so that the writing is still their own. These one on one meetings are very important to give a feeling of ownership and reflection to the students so that they can truly revise their work effectively.

Resource for the Week


For the resource for the week, I chose to find a site that looked at the writing process, especially prewriting activities and peer workshops. I think that these are two of the hardest things to make work in a classroom. Often getting started is the greatest struggle. I found a great resource from the writer center website at the University of Minnesota. Attached is a site with more prewriting activities created by Todd Arnold. I found many of them to be innovative with rich possibilities!

10 Tips for Effective Freewriting