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.

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!

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!