One thing that I always find difficult is to somehow write something worth saying on a topic I don’t have a lot to write about. One way that can be avoided is by knowing something about what I’m writing about. I have a problem with that sometimes. If I don’t already know something going into a paper, or don’t find the readings interesting I can’t seem to bring myself to do the kind of research necessary to actually have something to say on a topic. I’m sure that there are ways around this besides just sucking it up, but I have to find some sort of motivation to either find those tactics or find the interesting pieces to read, and the problem really comes down to motivation anyway, right?

This is a problem that I would love to be able to avoid with my students, but don’t see any simple way to do so. Maybe by keeping this sort of thing in mind over the next semester in which I will undoubtedly have several papers to write I will be able to find some sort of strategy to share with students.

Honesty

One thing that I remember thinking a lot in high school is, “Why do I have to know this? When will I ever use this?” I hope to have the sort of classroom in which students don’t have to ask those questions because I make it clear to them how the material will benefit their future. While it may not be the easiest thing to do in an English classroom, I do believe that it can be done. Part of this I believe is being honest with students in the fact that as far as essays are concerned, they probably won’t be using those skills in the future. Instead the part that they are learning is the art of learning. That is to say that they are learning how to be prepared for the challenges that they will be facing in their inevitable careers that they probably won’t like anyway. \\

Or maybe I’ll be honest with them and say that in high school they aren’t really learning anything other than how to get through college, and in college they will be learning things that are relevant to life after school. (I don’t believe in the idea of “The Real World”.)

One thing that I always wondered in high school was why I had to do things that my teachers didn’t have to do. This mostly applied to my PE classes because in the rest they kind of did have to do what we were about to do in order to show us how. I hate the idea of my students thinking that I’m wasting their time on something that I would never do myself though, so I think that when I ask them to write a weekly blog, I will do the same. A public blog for my classroom that allows them to see that I’m doing the same activity. I’m sure that it will take some learning of how to walk the fine line of appropriate, but I have faith that I will be able to find a way to write about what I’m learning and what I’m wanting to teach without slipping too much.

I think I’ll also challenge myself to join my students in writing one of the assignments that I give to them each semester. Perhaps I will even let them decide somehow which one I do. By doing something like this I will have to keep on the same timeline as I expect them to do, and I will have a working example for them to use that I haven’t gotten sick of reading over for the last several semesters. I will however remind them that for each paper they write I will have 30 or so to read, so doing all of the papers with them is not an option. Perhaps my willingness to join them in the seemingly mundane tasks will give students a different perspective on the typical, “I’m the teacher so do it” tone that some teachers have.

I expect that this may also give me some good perspective on just what exactly I am asking of my students. If something is too difficult for me to pull off, why is it that way, and are students facing the same sort of challenges? Maybe that assignment will have to be modified to be either longer or more accommodating.

I have been really bad about journaling this second half of the semester, which probably isn’t the best thing when one of the writing prompts I have written for class and very much intend to use when I have my own classroom is a weekly blog. How can I actually expect my students to write once a week when I can’t seem to do the same when it’s assigned to me?

I really do believe that writing consistently is the best way to improve one’s writing and learn what does and does not work for an individual style, yet I’ve let other homework and other stresses get in the way of a simple 10 minutes a day that is all it takes to keep active in writing.

Since I’ve been so lax about it this semester I have decided to challenge myself to sit down twice a day to write for at least 10 minutes. This will not only help me to finish the assigned journal entries, but also get something worthwhile up on my personal blog, get me to write regularly again and help me to understand more what I’ll be asking my students to do!

Overloaded

Ok, so my barrage of posts right before the first round was due seems to have left me a little bit dry.

In my time away I've been very overwhelmed with schoolwork. Apparently it's not recommended to take both 125A and 125B in the same semester. I did not know this before, and I completely understand it now. Though, it would be a lot easier to handle without a certain selection of any of my other classes right now.

It's got me thinking about high school, and how teachers semi-coordinate their assignment schedules in high school to avoid overloading students with too many big projects all due at once. While I appreciated the efforts while in school and having less homework to ignore at any one time, I'm now wondering if it does some harm as a manner of college prep.

For the students who actually did their homework and got used to a sort of even work load, how are they supposed to deal with midterms and essays all being due within two weeks? Especially for those who are working full time and dealing with other things that high schoolers often don't have to think about at all.

I do like the idea, but think that maybe it should be done in moderation, maybe only in the first half of the year. That way, student can get a taste of the insanity that they're going to be facing in only a few more years. Every high school is a college prep school now, right?

Taking my own Advice

It’s not until now, less then an hour before this first batch is due, while I’m finally putting them all together in a Word document that I noticed my suggestion to myself in the very first entry.

I’m starting to think that it’s kind of a good thing that I’m such a scattered student right now. This should allow me to be my own best teacher in managing to get a student back on track. I mean, if I write things down for myself and then don’t follow them, I really can’t expect anyone else to follow them either.

So the next round of these should be a bit different than this first one has been. I’m going to start trying to make time to do everything in a way that I can be proud of. While there have been times that I’ve wanted to focus more on being funny and having people come back because they enjoy reading this blog, the good writing should follow if I’m paying enough attention to what it is that I’m saying. Heck, I might even find a way to be funny while saying something worthwhile!

I hope that the lesson I learn from this isn’t so much how I work best, but to really teach myself that people need to find their own best practices and go with that. My biggest problem with high school was that my teachers always seemed to expect me to do things their way rather than my own, when I could have given them a much better product had I been allowed a little wiggle room. With a little luck, I’ll really be able to learn that for my own students.

Procrastination

Now that I’m less than two hours before the first batch of these journals are due, I’m glad that I had this blog to be keeping up with them. Sure, I’ve already written two today, and after I finish this third one I’ve got one last one to go, but that’s still a whole lot better than I know I would have done without the blog. This brings up a good point when dealing with students. While I would love to have been totally different than most students, I know that in the issue of procrastination, I am not. If we give students any amount of time to complete an assignment, they will wait until the last minute because they have things to do that are not only more interesting, but more important to them.

So how does one little teacher find a way to get students to give the sort of attention to their work that it deserves? Especially a teacher who doesn’t always do that for her own work!

I have no answer to that question. Maybe using blogs in the way that I’m doing is one way to help with it, maybe there will be some other huge breakthrough I have while actually in the classroom. Maybe I’ll simply get an awesome group of students who want to do their work and won’t trouble me at all!

Hey, I can dream, right?

Revision

I really hate when I get a paper back (from any assignment) only to read it and find a million things that aren’t the way I intended them to be. Sure, there will always be something that I miss or that I could correct, but to have totally just gotten it wrong because I refused to go over it is a little silly. Without fail, if I haven’t spent some time going through a paper after I’ve written it, it will not have the message or clarity that I want it to have. I’ve seen this going back though some of these entries. Some of them are rather unclear and unfocused, though that may be due to the nature of the style in which they are written.

Journals by nature, to me, are not always thought through and complete. Especially when they are half written during classes and then typed up later (and in theory wrapped up then as well). Now, I’m not admitting to and such debauchery going on for these entries, but something is causing them to be less than ideal.

Back to the point of this entry though! For all of those times that I’ve gotten a paper back on to wish I could revise it, there must be a way to really cement in my head how beneficial that revision is. My first taste of really knowing that came last semester in my advanced comp class, when I would go through turning in multiple drafts to my professor. I started thinking then about how I could incorporate such things into my own classroom.

The most creative idea I’ve come up with yet is having students bring their last paper in within the first week of class to be re-worked and revised. Hopefully seeing the difference in the quality of the pieces is enough to motivate them to find the time for an early draft and revision on the rest of their papers through the semester.

Portfolios

One thing that I like when it comes to assignments is being able to have my own input. I don’t just want something that they teacher assigns and have to do just what they are expecting. That really doesn’t sound very interesting at all for me to create, much less for the teacher to read if they’ve assigned this same task in previous semesters. That’s why I’ve chosen to do this assignment through a blog, though the description was a journal and I was very happy to get the support of my professor to continue it this way.

This is also why I like the idea of a semester long portfolio for over all grades. These would be items that have been worked on all semester, and maybe revised once more before final submission, chosen by the student to represent his or her work as they see it.

I did my own first portfolio submission just last semester. It wasn’t quite as free as it could be, seeing as how we had 4 assignments during the semester and those were the pieces that would end up in the portfolio, but the individual assignments were a little looser with their expectations.

What I’m thinking of to assign my own students would be a little bit more free form than anything I’ve heard of yet. Rather than limiting them to the pieces they’ve written in my class, I’ll open them up to anything that they have written for any class in the last year. Meaning something that they wrote in their previous English courses, or any other class they’ve taken. The challenge though would be that they must revise anything that wasn’t written in the current semester.

I think that this would be a great way to allow students to see that writing across the curriculum does have something to do with each other and hopefully allow teachers to tie them together in a way that will also allow students to tie different aspects of the different styles of writing to come together. Once they see that, hopefully they will be able to put together on their own some sort of puzzle with different attributes of different styles of writing that will work best for the individual.

Crazy

One of the biggest reasons that I want to teach, is the fact that they current public school system took a toll on me. While I wasn’t a perfect student, I was still a pretty good student before heading into middle and high school. I’m not exactly sure what happened in the switch from multiple subject to single subject learning, but something made enough of a difference that I went from being in good standing, to failing more than one class at a time.

I can remember a few specific instances standing in front of a teacher in high school and them telling me that I while I was currently failing their course, I would do wonderfully in college. Those comments always made me smile, but confused me at the same time. Why is it that if there is some sort of system already in place that will work for some students, we can’t make that work for high school? In most instances that I was failing a class, the teachers were stumped because I was also acing the tests, but they knew that I wasn’t cheating. I still don’t fully understand how a teacher can know that a student knows the material and refuse to find a way to pass them.

I’m sure that this is the sort of thing that I will fully understand when I’m the teacher. That also scares me a little. Like I might end up working with and for the system that was so bad for me in the beginning. The whole reason that I want to teach is to be able to change this system for the students who slip through the cracks like I did, so a part of me doesn’t want to understand why the system can’t be changed. Instead, I just want to find that change and make it work for my students.

The only ways that I can think of doing that right now would involve a whole lot more effort on my part, and because of that I feel like it probably won’t happen for the first few years that I’m teaching. I’m not stupid enough to think that I have better ideas than experienced teachers right off the bat, so I’ll have to settle into my own rhythms before trying anything crazy.

I’ve got some good experience with crazy, and it works best added in just a pinch at a time until it’s not even noticeable.

I dyed part of my hair green tonight. I’d kind of been getting the itch to have unusual colors in my hair again, and since right now is one of the last times that I will be able to do that without having to think about what other people with think of me, why not? I started thinking about it though, and why should things like hair color, tattoos or piercings not be something that teachers can have?

I’m a big fan of different people contributing different perspectives to a well rounded curriculum, and having only people with no visible tattoos or piercings, and who use dyes that are within the spectrum of “natural” hair colors doesn’t seem to lend itself to as diverse a group of people as we could be having to teach our youth.

I understand the inclination to want someone you know you can trust to be teaching your children, and that for a long time the idea of someone trustworthy was someone just like you, but things are changing. People are starting to understand that their chosen aesthetic does not automatically put someone into a specific category. Someone who is covered in tattoos or has different colored hair is not automatically some sort freak who will only lead children into devil worship, drugs and alcohol.

Hopefully these ideas are changing rapidly enough that I might be able to get the tattoo that I’d like on my wrist and not have to constantly wear bracelets while at work. It’s a phonetic symbol for crying out loud, is that not completely appropriate for an English teacher?

This week I have become totally overwhelmed with working too much while in school. So much so that now that I’m sick, I don’t seem to be able to get over it. I think this is because I’ve been going so long without a break, that my body is forcing me to take some time off.

That’s why I’ve already decided that once I start teaching, I’m taking one day each weekend that I’m not working. I know it’s not entirely realistic, but it’s definitely better for all involved. I will stay much saner, which we all know will benefit the students greatly, as well as anyone who happens to know me at the time, or just comes into contact with me on any given day.

It should be interesting to figure out how that will work, since I love to procrastinate and not get things done. I guess the attempts that I’m making now at getting on top of my work will go toward that.

I think that some time to be oneself is important to being a good teacher. Absence is supposed to make the heart grow fonder, right? So not being in teacher mode every day of the week should help to some degree to keep me going in the whole not getting burned out thing, right?

Help me, help me, help me!

This weekend was a test on my career choice. I work (as I believe I’ve noted before) at a music store, and this weekend we had a few groups of several young teenagers “shopping” without and sort of adult supervision. The rate at which these kids annoyed me was astounding and one of my first thoughts was, “Why is it that I want to work with these morons?” I even went as far as to ask a co-worker, “They’re different in the classroom, right?”

Her answer was a not-so-encouraging, “No.”



If we’d had more time to discuss it, I might have asked in more detail about my hopes that they go a little wild in public because they don’t have a direct authority figure to report to. I’m seriously hoping that, although they will be difficult, the kinds of issues that come up will be much different than I experience as a retail clerk in a store popular with teens.

There are a lot of differences in their environment that indicate to me that their behavior may be different. For one, they don’t have control over which of their peers are in their classes, which will hopefully mean that groups of friends are separated into different classrooms, and cannot stir up the same kind of excitement and frustration that they can as a unified group. Another aspect is that direct authority figure in the room. They are free to use any sort of language they want in public, but with a teacher in the room I don’t remember any of my friends letting a single curse word loose while I was in high school.

I really hope that my ideas about different attitudes in different environments is true and that I won’t constantly have to deal with the idiots that we sometimes have to kick out of our store. I’m a little discouraged because I don’t change my behavior too much based on my company, but in talking with friends I’ve recently come to realize that I may be the exception the rule and that maybe most people do.

Here’s to hoping I’m a freak!

Using the words we’re allowed.

Listening to the radio last week I was really surprised by the reporting on protestors at the G-20 summit in Pittsburg. The protesting itself didn’t surprise me, people can find reasons to be upset about anything, especially on the global level now. What I was more concerned with was the fact that the police were there to break up what was being reported as a peaceful protest and were doing so without much cause of the breakups being reported. Sure there was some activity of questionable behavior that might call for some intervention, but the biggest offense brought to light was that the group of about one thousand protesters didn’t have a permit.

Seriously?

A permit to gather peacefully? Excuse my language, but that is complete bullshit.

I can understand that on some level these permits are to protect the protestors themselves as it was in the case of protesting for and against proposition 8 in California last year, but the real reason behind a permit is obviously to be able to deny certain protests, or to keep them contained to a “safe” (read unobtrusive and ineffectual) location or distance. Aren’t we given the right to peaceful protest in our nation’s constitution?

Hold please while I do some research on that.

Ok, so maybe I had the wording off, but we are given the right to assembly. The problem with that is how vague it is.

Since this is supposed to be about my Writing and the Young Writer class, you’re probably wondering where I’m going with this. I promise I have a relevant point.

If I were currently in the classroom, I would use an opportunity like this to share with students the importance of not only knowing our rights, but also using them to our fullest capacity.

So they won’t let you protest the way that you would like to, what else can you do? Write about it! Write to your local paper, write up a flyer to give out, blog, whatever. This is also where using the writing skills that one learns in high school and college come into play. Words are not enough if they do not convey the message that you want them to.

This could even turn into a decent writing assignment. I don’t think that I would want to bring my students’ personal political opinions into the mix, but maybe something about school policies that they would like to see changed, but for whatever reason could not protest. Instead they would have to write a flyer, or letter for the school paper, or even a letter for the local paper to bring more attention to the issue outside of campus. I’m liking this, I think later I shall expand on it for my writing prompts assignment.

It's all in the phrasing.

I’m a bit of a hippie. I will fully and openly admit that. I try to reuse anything I can and use fewer resources whenever possible. I’m not actually that good at this whole green living thing, but I’ve got some good Catholic guilt going on whenever I don’t bring my reusable bags to the grocery store, or take a shower that’s longer than necessary. So, even though I may not be so great and example of living green, I do try to contribute where I can. That includes simply not taking a bag if I’ve bought something that I can carry without it.

Along with that, I encourage others to do the same.

I work at a music store and a lot of customers buy only one or two items at a time, definitely a reasonable amount to carry without assistance for most people, especially those with a decent sized purse. More as a means to cut costs (because Dimple is cheap) we don’t automatically give every customer a bag with their purchases. The practices that each of us use to find out if a customer wants a bag vary a bit.

I’ve recently heard a lot of, “Do you want a bag for this?” When I ask a customer, my question is whether or not they, “need” a bag. Just that one little word difference is a whole different message. I don’t know how many customers are swayed by the one little word, but I hope that enough of them are.

With words having such a significant meaning, I can only imagine what one could really do with a full essay. Let’s hope that I find a magic way to communicate that to some teenagers within the next couple of years!

The point being?

One of the words that I most despise in writing is “thesis.” It conjures a mental block and will not allow me to write anything that resembles what a “thesis” should be. I’m about 96.7 percent certain that this is because of the importance that has been placed on the writing of one’s thesis in my writing education. Sure, having a clear idea of where you’re going and stating your direction from the beginning is important, but does it have to be the first thing that is created in a paper? Not at all. The times that I have been most successful with creating a concise statement for my thesis have undoubtedly been after I’ve written my arguments and asked myself, “Ok, now just what is it that I’m saying?”

That is precisely how I intend to present the idea of thesis writing to students when I have some to call my own.

Rather than using such an intimidating task like “write your thesis” I plan on having them organize what it is that they want to say, then actually say it, and make sure that is where their paper went before committing that to a “thesis statement.” That way will introduce them to the idea with the first paper that they will write. For a second essay I will have them bring in that first assignment to remind them of the process. Then they will be asked to tell me in one statement before writing what they “intend to prove” through the rest of their paper. Or, for an even simpler phrasing, “What’s your point?” This way, for teachers and professors they will encounter later who are fans of the thesis first method, they will be prepared.

Hopefully I will have lost some of my thesis phobia before then!

Supercalafragilisticexpialidocious!

Showing off. It’s a big reason that I like to write. I consider myself to be an intelligent person, and what’s the point of being that if no one else can ever see any evidence of it? Making it known in conversation can be tricky though, that requires a level of wit that I have yet to fully grasp, and verbally it is easy to come off as though not only to I think that I am intelligent, but that I think I have to prove it, or that I believe myself to be more intelligent than those around me. (That’s definitely not always the case.) Writing is a bit different though.

When I’m writing I can let the words come as they may, celebrating for myself the moments that they come very quickly, and not caring if it takes me 20 minutes to figure out the precise word to express the correct sentiment. I can take the time to show off the expansive vocabulary that I am proud of, and even expand it further when the right word is just out of grasp but a thesaurus is not. Finding the right phrasing and proving a point in the black and white print of the page is not something that someone can “one-up” me on in the moment, and if I do it right; they can’t really “one-up” me at all.

Vocabulary is really a big motivator though. I love knowing a lot of words and using them. When writing a paper I can look them up again and make sure that I am using them in the correct context, rather than throwing them out there in conversation and risk someone knowing that I just completely bastardized the actual meaning of the word. Sure, the look on someone’s face when I use a word that they obviously don’t know is pretty awesome, but is it worth that risk of being found out and not quite as clever as I was trying to show myself to be? I don’t think so, I’ll stick to the written form.

I think that everyone has something to show off with their writing, whether it be good ideas, or kick ass arguments, or a vocabulary that completely eclipses mine, I can’t wait to see what will develop in a student’s writing throughout a semester and what other people enjoy showing off!

Mary Poppins had it right.

Once begun is half done right?



That’s the way that I’ve always heard it. I definitely think that this phrase applies to writing. At least for my writing. I hate to commit anything to paper (or screen) that isn’t phrased precisely how I would like it to be. Because of this, I have issues getting my first sentence out. I know that this is an issue for a lot of students, and maybe even for a lot of people who happen to call themselves writers, but that doesn’t really make it easier to get over.

I’m not sure just what the difference is, but once I’ve got that first sentence and my thoughts are going, I definitely don’t have a problem spitting out anything that comes to mind.



For some reason that first line needs to be something that I feel I’m definitely going to keep, but the rest of it can be complete crap, and I’m comfortable with knowing that I can throw it out later. What’s so different about that first line? I don’t have an answer here, because I almost always end up getting mad at myself, forcing myself to get over it, and just typing anything that will come through my fingertips.

I know that sometimes I’ve thought of the perfect phrasing for the idea I want to convey, but by the time I can get to the computer or a paper I won’t lose, I can’t remember the exact way that I’ve put it, and I get stuck on recreating whatever it was I had before.

I give the advice to other people all the time that no matter what it is, get it out and you can edit it later, so why can’t I follow my own advice? Well, tonight I did. I’m still not happy with what it is that is my first sentence for my Writer’s Autobiography, but I have some time planned tomorrow to edit it, and I may be able to find something else that I’m happy with.

If this works, I think I might be just a little more confident in passing on this advice in the future!

Helping others really helps yourself.

I just gave my email address to my brother’s friend. He was complaining about his English 300 course at Sac City College and that he believes he’s a bad writer, to which my brother and I replied that no one is a good writer. Good editors are called good writers, but no one gets that the first time through. He asked what I meant when I told him that the key to a good paper is editing, and I told him to get feedback from any and everyone he can to help him to identify where he is unclear or where his argument is weak.

He says that he has issues with over using certain words, so I told him to read through his paper looking only for those words and highlighting them as he finds them. When he’s identified them all I told him to go through and either rephrase things or use synonyms for anything in abundance.

I offered my email address if he wanted someone else to help with editing through out the semester and I look forward to seeing the types of issues he encounters throughout the semester. I hope that it will not only give me insight into the different types of issues encountered by different types of minds, but also some really great prompts for journal entries!

I look forward to a semester of helping Nick through his English 300 course and Nick helping me find some insight into young writers!

Motivation Such and Aggravation

This will be my first post in that blog for my class as soon as I can come up with a name for it I like.

You know that technology is having a huge impact on school when one can turn a simple journal assignment into a blog only to motivate themselves to complete it more thoroughly and in a timely fashion.

Such is this blog. For what looks to be quite an exciting course, I must keep a journal of thoughts related to writing and the teaching of writing. With the help of Google Analytics, I will be able to motivate myself to keep writing so as to keep some sort of audience interested. On that note, I have my first self-created prompt for this journal…

How on earth am I actually going to ever get a student motivated to write before the eve of the assigned due date?



Having been one of those students, I know exactly the thought process of the ones who are more than capable of doing any mundane task assigned, but not coming anywhere near caring enough to do them. In the first meeting of my American Gothic course today I was reminded of Professor Sweet’s practice of short quizzes on the assigned reading material and it got me thinking about applying something like this to writing.

Because I had her for American Lit a year ago, I know that Prof. Sweet’s quizzes are very simple ones, only really intended to motivate and reward keeping up with the reading assignments. As much as I hated them at the beginning of the last course, I came to love the easy credit for just doing what I should have found my own motivation to do.

I’d already attended Writing and the Young Writer when thinking about these American Gothic quizzes, and thought that if there was a way to modify this practice for writing, one might just be able to show high school and middle school students the benefit of staying ahead of their writing from the beginning. But just how would I ever be able to do that? I guess I have a few years until I’m in a classroom, and I have lots of teachers to learn from until then, so maybe I shouldn’t worry about it for the moment. If I can figure out a reasonable way though, I can’t wait to try and actually get students motivated.

I love how much better my writing is now that I start my writing earlier and have a chance to edit it. I wasn’t ready to admit that I needed that in high school though, and I’m sure I’ll run into plenty of students who feel the same way. I also feel as though I was able to scrape by and get B’s on papers that I pulled out of my ass the night before, so what real incentive did I have to start earlier?

Thinking about it in those terms has me remembering just last spring and my Advanced Composition course with Professor Dunstan. That’s actually where I finally found the drive to truly edit and give myself time to write. Dunstan was able to get me to see the light by having us turn in papers that were due at the end of the class around mid-terms, and giving us what our grades would be if we turned in that paper. Even the one that I had a solid B in then wasn’t enough for me when I still had the time to improve it. The notes that he’d made, made it very easy for me to spot what I didn’t like in my own writing and edit it to be more clear and definite.

I think before I write again I’ll pull out my old syllabus from that course and see if I can’t draw more inspiration from that, or in my current course with Dunstan!