Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Fragmenting my focus

I am reading too many books, talking to students about too many topics, and I can't keep up with my responses to student papers this semester.

It's my own fault that I'm behind. Not only am I teaching an overload--2 sections of first-year composition and 2 sections of Teaching Writing--and directing the writing center, but I've agreed to too many "classes by appointment" (one-to-one teaching arrangements that allow students to take a class that conflicts with another class or take a class in a different semester than the one it's typically offered in, etc.). So I meet with one student to discuss 19th-century British novels and another to discuss writing memoir and another to discuss contemporary lit and another two to discuss YA lit. And then there's the research I'm doing on Julia Alvarez, re/reading all her books, looking up critical material, watching videos of interviews and talks.

But it's making me feel a bit like I'm suffering from multiple-personality disorder. This week I'm reading from a book on 6-trait writing assessment, rereading a memoir about growing up in a dysfunctional family, combing through something like 20 recent books of poetry to select poems I really want to share with a student, rereading a YA novel about a protagonist who's falling apart emotionally, and rereading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao along with In the Name of Salome. (Actually, I'm beginning to see a couple of emergent themes, just listing these books--except for the 6-trait writing assessment, that is.)
I'm split between the freshness of immigrant experience and the familiar, loved territory of canonical Victorian texts, between making sure I know all the well-established critical arguments about a text and forming a critical perspective on poems and novels that haven't yet been loaded with the baggage of a dozen critical arguments.

The good thing about all this is the fun of sitting down with a pile of books, telling myself, "I'll assign myself about 50 pages of the YA novel, and then I'll read about 25 poems, and then I'll reread the last part of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Then maybe I'll read 3-4 of my students' essays comparing the graphic novel American Born Chinese with the play Golden Child. And I'll check a couple of the logs that my upper-level students turned in."

The bad thing is that at some point I suffer brain fatigue, and I start watching Japanese anime, or I find a really good reason to go scoop out the cats' litter pan, or I get out my cell phone and watch all my videos of my infant granddaughter. Hmm, as I'm writing this, I'm thinking it's about time to get back to those essays . . . or maybe that YA novel . . . or maybe video . . . .

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Writing Circles

Thanks, Jim Vopat, for a wonderful idea--the writing circle. I selected the book Writing Circles (Heinemann, 2009) for my Teaching Writing class, on the basis of a quick review of the exam copy, and I've been delighted with it. The writing circles are modeled on literature circles, and they incorporate all the elements of writing workshop and process that I want students to be conversant with after taking the class, but they also give an extra dimension of structure to a couple of workshop features that can be challenging to manage: peer response and student choice of topics. The approach is suggested for all levels of writing instruction, and I look forward to incorporating it in my first-year and upper-level writing classes next year.

Personally, I've long been ambivalent about peer response, and I really distrust peer editing--something I've never implemented but that some of my students have participated in at some point in their writing careers prior to college. When peer response happens only a few days throughout the semester, it can be awkward and artificial. I usually give somewhat specific guidelines for peer response sessions, but I feel that students often go through the motions--knowing that what "counts" is the teacher's response because it's the teacher who gives the grade.

Moreover, I'm a great believer in more or less individual choice in writing topics, within certain parameters. It can be difficult for students to respond well to their peers' writing if their peers are writing about different topics. Yet I really like giving students some control over topics. In first-year writing, sometimes this takes the form of giving them a choice among readings from a limited list I've generated, and then writing essays in response to their readings that have specific parameters--such as a research base, or a requirement that their essay refer specifically to material in three different chapters of a book they've read, etc.

In the writing circles approach, the small group selects the topic all members will write on, but each student chooses the genre and style for the writing, the length of the text, and so on, individually. What this suggests, to me, is that students can explore a topic together, so that they share a knowledge base that will help them think critically about each other's writing. But the individual choices they make will mean that they aren't looking for cookie-cutter essays that follow teacher dictates.

The book has a lovely chart (on page 7) that shows how the small-group approach creates an important balance between student-directed and teacher-directed activities. Vopat also includes great suggestions for building rapport, generating ideas (with an impressive list of potential genres), incorporating the writing notebook, selecting topics for minilessons, giving response, and assessing writers' progress.

My Teaching Writing students, upper-level undergraduates who plan to teach at all levels from kindergarten through college (and some in Special Ed), have been practicing writing circles for several weeks. I've been impressed with their investment in their writing for their peers, and most days they sound like they're having fun reading aloud to one another and selecting the next topic. I'm really happy that I selected this book.

Why blog?

Why blog anyway? That's the question I ask myself after long lapses between my posts. Nearly every time I start writing again, my writing is prompted by an assignment that I've given my students, when I ask, "How can I ask them to do something that I have such a hard time keeping up with myself?" I see two questions emerging here: (1) Is a teacher obligated to complete the assignments she gives to her students? (2) What are the advantages of writing in a blog as compared with other venues or genres?

(1) I believe that a teacher should complete a fair proportion of the assignments she gives, to make sure that she understands the effort and time involved in the work. When I assign poems, for instance, I think I should write in the same genres because I don't often write poems, and I need to remind myself of the challenges they pose: succinctness, use of metaphor, rhythm, precision in word choice. When I assign memoirs, I need to remember how scary it is to be nakedly honest, as is necessary in good memoir writing (and to remember it's especially scary to share that honest writing). When I assign blog writing, I want students to write regularly and to choose a tone appropriate to the subject of the blog--and to maintain a reasonable succinctness (something I have a hard time doing myself). Practicing blog writing throughout the duration of the assignment helps me appreciate the time and thought that goes into this regular writing on the web.

(2) Which brings me to the second point: why the blog, particularly? I think the blog is the best current venue for timely professional exchanges of opinion and ideas about teaching. When we articulate our ideas for the potentially larger audience that reads blogs on the web, we need to think through those ideas more thoroughly than often happens when we're writing for the classroom audience in a (relatively) safe space. When students know that the English teacher will give them another chance with revising, they sometimes turn in really rough rough drafts. In another manifestation of their feeling of safety, many students will write just about anything for an English teacher's eyes, sometimes confessional writing that I'd really rather not read! In contrast, much of the writing we do in the "real world" is not one bit safe--as young adults have been learning in social networking sites, sometimes to their great harm. So it seems to me appropriate to ask students to think carefully about what they can say for a potentially wide audience of people they don't know personally.

Today I got an email from someone who'd happened on one of the webpages I've posted as a resource for students and colleagues. The sender informed me that one of the links no longer works and suggested an additional link, something I really appreciated. I haven't used the page and haven't updated it for several years, and I'd completely forgotten it was still on the server. This email was a timely reminder that the web documents created for a specific, timely purpose remain available to a wide audience, once they're on the web. It reminded me that writing for that large, unknown audience puts us on our best professional behavior--a lesson worth learning by prospective teachers.