Allie's Blog

Thursday December 3rd

hardmaal — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:17:33 +0000

For my lesson plan, I was going to focus on invention strategies. I found this to be a very important, helpful topic in getting students started while writing. I was thinking of having 5 big papers taped to the wall with a different picture for each (no celebrities). The students would go to each station and invent the character, each station focusing on a different aspect. They rotate stations and when it is all said and done, share what they have with each other. This allows them to not only work on developing a character they would want to read about and feel connected to, but work with others in the process. This activity is good to do before students start writing a narrative or short story in order to have a well-developed character read to use. I think this lesson is appropriate for high school level students, or at least I targeted it toward that. It was a lesson I did during my first field experience with a freshman English class and it went rather smoothly and they really seemed to enjoy it. I haven’t figured out all the logistics or started on the paper yet, but I am making good progress with it!

Tuesday, November 17th

hardmaal — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:42:07 +0000

I really enjoyed reading Kate Ronald’s piece. It was really cool to read about style, especially after sitting in one of my other classes this morning. We had a discussion on it and how student’s use it. Sadly it appears as if style is being taken out of the student’s writings, as they feel they need to write to the professor. One of my classes is like this. I don’t put any voice or style behind my writing because I am merely caught-up in writing what he wants to hear (we get a bad grade if we don’t). Then I go to my next class and the professor is all about style, voice, making a piece your own. Needless to say, I love that class. I think as teachers we should be instilling the importance of style and voice in students and how that can shape them, as writers. Focusing on this might help them in the future because it makes their papers more interesting and is what keeps the readers wanted to read on. The only question I can think of to ask Kate Ronald is: How do you get your students to stray away from the idea of writing to the only audience they think matters–the teacher?

Thursday October 29, 2009

hardmaal — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:34:50 +0000

On your blog, discuss how you are going to “code” your data. What sorts of themes or patterns will you be looking for? What has jumped out at you so far? How are you going to make sense of the data you have?

In looking over my friends essays, I am going to code her data based on themes I find throughout her essays. I am going to determine which essays she excels at and which one’s she appears to struggle more with. From this, I will be able to see her strengths and weaknesses in writing and hopefully help guide her in future essays to gear her writing more towards the style she likes. Currently she writes to her professors liking, but it appears even in doing that, the essays she gets better grades on are the essays that she writes the way she likes.

**Late because I just got my new password!

Thuesday, October 13

hardmaal — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:33:46 +0000

While you were gone I though the class went surprisingly well. The girls did a very good job of having everyone actively engaged in the class discussions, as well as drawing about new ideas we were able to think about. My favorite part was the beginning when they did a simulation of the way a “bad” teacher would teach. They didn’t joke around with it at all and made it seem completely serious, shutting down students ideas left and right. It was rather humorous actually. The idea that was brought up about not calling it pre-writing, I didn’t necessarily agree with. Unlike some students in our class, I was taught that in order to produce a good paper, the students must have multiple copies that they have worked on to make a final draft that is clear and articulates ideas well. I didn’t get into the discussion on this topic because I felt as though it was a lost cause with the strong opinions in our class however, it was a very interesting discussion to listen in on. I know you don’t want us critiquing Emily and Sarah as teachers, but I would just like to add that they did a very good job and explaining the articles and making them interesting to the class. Although we got out fifteen minutes early, they didn’t spend to little or too much on one topic making it a very good lesson!!

Tuesday, September 22

hardmaal — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:51:01 +0000

The most interesting part of the reading I thought, was about “Invention Possibilities For The Writing Class.” It talks about useful methods of helping students to generate ideas. While reading, I thought of ways I could be using that in my classrooms. Currently I am out doing field experience at Hamilton High School. The students are in a lower level “academic” group, one step above special needs. The class is doing a project where they have to make a “quilt” and draw 9 boxes on it and fill them with things that represent them. This seemed pretty easy to anyone learning at a normal level however, for these kids it proved to be a challenging activity. I actually unknowingly helped them elicit prior knowledge by going up to each group and discussing with them their interests and activities. By having the students work in groups, they were able to bounce ideas off each other and come up with better ideas for their quilts. By sharing all their ideas with each other, they were able to stay on task and get much of their project underway. It seemed as though they were better at discussing with each other than they were if they were to just go into it writing because like Clark states, “students are better at talking than writing because they have had more practice” (87). When they focused and generated ideas together, they were able to better communicate everything describing themselves because they were more specific and descriptive in their descriptions. I thought that was a really neat experience and it’s amazing how it tied into the reading without me even knowingly doing it!

Thursday September 17

hardmaal — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:49:52 +0000

LOCKERS

List as many elements of this culture as you can:

metal, colorful, books, mirrors, posters, make-up, hair things, pens, pencils, trash, food, backpacks, coats, sweatshirts, shoes, lock, shelf, notebooks, folders, binders, wrapping paper

How does the group define itself with most/least important characteristics:

Most of the students that are a part of this group tend to define themselves with how their lockers are. There are those who decorate (more times than not, girls). There are those who never clean out their lockers (more times than not, boys). Those who share lockers with their friend/boyfriend/girlfriend

Girls: Decorate, put up a mirror, have make-up and hair things in it, put up pictures, tend to keep it clean and put only what they need in there for school (aside from their “personal shelf”). Decorate other friends lockers when it’s their birthday’s. Don’t use their locker at all because they need to be with their boyfriend/friend. Make it very personal.

Boys: May put up posters, never throw out any old papers or trash, end of the year it looks chaotic. Don’t keep it very organized, have backpacks and sweatshirts in their, probably gym shoes and shorts. Don’t make it as personal.

Tuesday Septemeber 15

hardmaal — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:00:03 +0000

I really enjoyed this article. I thought it was really interesting how the writing process is only split up into 3 components (prewriting, writing, rewriting). It seems as though the writing process is made up of a lot more components than just 3 things, but I guess everything I’m thinking of would fall under those broader categories. I only had one teacher in high school that would have us follow the writing process and teach us about it instead of just one finished product. It was really great because she would have us turn in parts of our papers on certain days (intro due on Monday, 2 body paragraphs due Wednesday, etc). It taught us not to procrastinate, but it also made us more aware of what we were writing and allowed us to go back and edit our work piece by piece. I think this is the only way a teacher can make sure every part of the writing process is met. I also enjoy that Murray gives us all these “implications” and it’s almost like a “how-to” in teaching students the writing process. This is interesting to me because when I read these articles, I start to think about how I would use them in my classroom or how I would go about teaching them. When authors tell us exactly how we should go about it, it’s nice because we can see a method that’s being used in the classroom and change it to make it our own or use what they have provided us with.

Thursday September 10

hardmaal — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:54:03 +0000

In the reading, it went over different definitions of rhetoric over time. Although some of them made no sense to me, two of the five sounded similar to what we thought rhetoric to be in class the other day. Aristotle’s definition brought in the idea of persuasion being tied to rhetoric, which was one of the things we as a class decided to be true. St. Augustine’s definition is more about how you express your ideas in regards to emotion. The article then goes on to give more definitions of rhetoric and what it encompasses however, I don’t entirely agree with any one of them in particular. The only thing I do agree with in its entirety in this article is that there is not one set definition of rhetoric and it goes back to the idea that language is always changing. While people seemed to believe that rhetoric was merely for persuasion purposes decades ago, they now believe that rhetoric not only uses the power of persuasion with logos, pathos, and ethos, but also draws out emotion in the reader whether it is arguing a point or not. As I am reading further in the article, the author starts talking about how rhetoric “created” the outcome of certain events. This is interesting to me because it makes it seem like the author is taking the definition straight back to persuasion, which is not all rhetoric encompasses. While all of these readings on rhetoric are good in furthering my understanding, I think they are just confusing me more as to what rhetoric really is because there is no one set definition!

Thursday September 3

hardmaal — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 04:31:10 +0000

I decided that I really enjoy reading Murry. It is probably the most enjoyable, entertaining, and helpful text I have read so far at college. I really like that I can take things from the text that would be helpful in teaching (or student teaching). It actually makes me less nervous about going into the classroom because of all the ideas I am obtaining from the text. Okay, now that’s out in the open, time to respond to ideas I found interesting in the text.

1. “Instructors can’t teach effectively until there is writing, drafts rich with potential, individual, quirky, failed drafts ripe with possibility.”

This was something I took out of the text that I feel I could use in a classroom. I like the idea of having students write something of their own and then over time, working on it and learning from it to make it better. This makes the most sense to me. Why on earth would I have my students doing worksheets on grammar and sentence structure and everything that makes up the writing process when they could easily use their own writing and building off of it to actually create something.

2. “I have read thousands of student evaluations through the years and been stuck by how highly most students value organization.”

This was another thing I took from the test because honestly, I think it is the only way someone can judge you as a good teacher from day one. Students need to know what the teacher is expecting them to take from the class and how he/she is going to accomplish those goals from the beginning. I know when I was a student, the first thing I would do when a teacher handed me a syllabus was to flip to where the class schedule was listed. Students need to know what is coming and when, it is only fair to them.

Tuesday September 1

hardmaal — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:33:44 +0000

In Susan Wyche’s article “Time, Tools, and Talisman’s,” she talks about writing rituals and successful things to do to focus when writing a paper or in her case, a dissertation. I found this article to be really interesting because it forced me to think about my habits and rituals as a writer. Like her students, I too sat down and answered her five questions. Some things I came up with were: I would sit down on my computer and write, looking up the information as I went along. If I already had the information, I would disable my Internet so I wouldn’t be tempted to get on Facebook or anything like that. I’m aware of where I get my best ideas, on the third floor of King library. I am also aware of everything I do that takes away from my focus. In high school I was probably more like Marcia, but now I find myself becoming more like Sam.
Wyche states that “rituals help writers pay attention to the conditions under which they choose to work” (43). I completely agree with this statement. When I created rituals sophomore year of college, I found myself being more and more successful when I finally sat down to write whether it was at 1pm or 1am. I found this activity to be extremely intriguing and one that I would definitely take into a classroom to make my students more aware of their writing and hopefully, become more successful in it.

The second article we had to read was written by Joan Didion titled, “On Keeping A Notebook.” This article I did not like as much as the first one I read however, I felt that it was still intriguing nonetheless. In a way, it could go hand-in-hand with the first article because if you keep a notebook you have places to write your ideas down so later, if you were to write an essay you would have ideas at hand.