Final Reflection - Mar. 16

How do you believe different kinds of writing will inform your teaching in your content areas?
           First, I would like to say that I love writing. Teaching is and always has been my first career choice, but writing professionally has always been a close second. I hope to share that passion for writing with my students, no matter which course I am teaching.

           I hope that I am able to inspire them to grow their abilities and improve their writing without making it feel like I am constantly assigning 'boring' writing tasks. I feel there is a fine line there and I hope I am able to tread it without falling into the rut of redundancy. I would like to be engaging and inspiring. I would like to teach my students to express themselves and to explore new ideas. I would like to explore new tasks, challenge my students to make discoveries and to record everything. I especially like a lesson I learned in English last semester about making journals and having students record in them each class. While I am not always a fan of doing reflections, I think they have their time and their place, and there can be merit to them when done correctly.
            As mentioned earlier in this blog, I like the lesson put on by Mike Ward that discussed how to structure your week so that students are doing their own research and following their own interests. There are all kinds of different styles of writing we can do as a class to grow our skills and our abilities. We can write essays (I know, boring). We can create journals. We can make blogs and learn to integrate technology. We can write reflections. We can write book, journal, or article reviews. We can write research reports (or really all kinds of reports). We can write creative fiction pieces, or historical non-fiction. We can write poetry or stories. We can engage in explorations and self-analysis.

Above all else, I would like to teach my students to follow their dreams.

Rita Pierson: Every Kid Needs a Champion - Inspirational TED talk

Third Visit to Hawthorne - Mar. 2

             So far on our excursions to Hawthorne my work with Prince has focused on trying to refine ideas for his creative fiction piece he is working on. I have still been unable to get him to focus on any class work and he maintains that he has nothing which needs to be done. He promptly turns our focus to his extra-curricular work and excitedly shows me what he has accomplished so far.

             I feel Prince and I have made a lot of progress through our writing workshops and he has begun to develop in his writing abilities. At the beginning of our time together he presented me with a writing sample which contained many ideas jumbled together and spit out onto the page in a somewhat cohesive manner. There were a lot of holes in his plotline, a lot of inconsistencies in his writing style, and a lot of indications that he was still developing as a beginning writer. I used the Beginning Writer’s Continuum to evaluate his work and determine where he sat in terms of writing ability. I found that Prince showed a lot of promise and a lot of the hallmarks of a developing writer who was still fine-tuning and growing his abilities. To that end, we spent most of our time together focused on developing ideas and editing pre-existing work to try and develop some consistency. Our work today focused on editing what he had already written.

            We looked at his use of dialogue and tried to normalize how he interjected dialogue (in some areas it would be introduced, in some cases he used quotation marks, in others he used the French style of using a dash, in others he did not distinguish it at all). We also looked at his sentence structure and tried to work on his overall grammar. He made many common errors that could be easily corrected through proof-reading. We worked on his use of tenses – Prince often tended to switch back and forth between past and present within a single paragraph, or even a single sentence. We looked at his sentence structure and tried to eliminate errors like run-on sentences of areas where he had lost his train of thought and the story seemed to falter. I think having another set of eyes to read through it with him helped a lot. We would read the text together and he would look at the errors as we got to them.

We also continued to make adjustments to the story outline and to jot down ideas for where he wanted to take his tale. One thing Prince is still working on is trying to come up with a central theme or message for his work. I think at this point in his development he does not yet understand the notion that great works of writing all contain a central theme or message which the author is trying to share with his audience. The story is a medium for relaying that message. We talked about this a little bit in our work today and tried to explore what kind of commentary he was trying to make.

            I feel that Prince has come a long way in his writing since we first began to work together. He has learned how to effectively outline where he intends to go in his story and to make a visual representation of all his ideas so that he can decide what will best fit with his storyline. I think the biggest obstacles for Prince really revolved around getting that outline down and deciding on the purpose and direction of his writing. Once we were able to sort those out, a lot of his corrections were just cosmetic – spelling, grammar, sentence structure. In a second Writing Continuum which I have found online, I have assessed that Prince is transitioning from a Fluent Writer, which is typical of children ages 9-11 to a Proficient Writer which is typical of children ages 10-13. He achieves some of the benchmarks from both categories and is steadily working towards honing his abilities. Prince has a lot of great ideas and a lot of drive to pursue his writing. I think he will go on to complete many great works and I hope that he has benefitted from our time together and the skills and tools I have shared with him.

Taylor Mali - Totally like whatever, you know

Second Visit to Hawthorne - Feb. 23

              Today I worked with Prince on developing the ideas for his story. Our first task was to try and develop a clear outline for Prince’s story. I had noticed in my original read-through that there were a lot of inconsistencies in storyline and the plot was rather unclear. I got that it was set in a post-apocalyptic world and that it involved aliens, mutants, robots, and humans; but the roles of each were rather unclear – and indeed Prince had not fully flushed out what he intended each of these factions to do within the story. In light of this, we sat down and had a very productive session of brainstorming. I showed Prince a couple of different mind mapping templates and discussed the benefits of having a clear outline of your story already written down. Prince is very keen on keeping his ideas safe in his mind and is not a big fan of the idea of writing things down until they are ready for the story. While this could be manageable for a short piece, Prince keeps talking about making this an epic tale that could span several books. In light of such magnitude, the story is going to need some clear direction which he can follow in his writing.

We hashed out some very interesting plot possibilities and Prince used me as a sounding board for his ideas. I helped him to bridge the gaps in some of his ideas – such as what the purpose of the alien queen might be in coming to Earth in the first place, or why Scarlet needed to combat the robots. We were able to work out a main conflict for the first story – the humans all live below the surface at different levels, the better off you are, the farther underground your residence. Recently, large subterranean mutants had invaded the lowest level of residences, pushing the higher class humans up into the next level, which in turn pushed that level up, and pushed the third level up onto the surface. Our story takes place on the surface where Scarlet and her troupe now have to face the invaders to save mankind. We developed the characters of Scarlet and Bug, and tried to determine their relationships to one another. We also tried to eliminate some of the meandering subplots such as Bug’s incessant need to wander off for no conceivable reason, and to either take them out of the story, or tie them into the action in some understandable way. Prince has come up with some very interesting ideas and found a way to lay out the groundwork for where he wants his story to go.

What Teachers Make -- Taylor Mali

The Game Plan - Hawthorne Student Mentoring

February 23^rd

Our first task will involve brainstorming and mind-mapping techniques to forge a clear storyline for our tale. I will bring some templates and some techniques that we can use to try and develop a clear outline of where the story is headed and who our main characters are [i.e. what kind of people are they, what kind of roles will they play, and what purpose do they serve to our deeper meaning?]. We will also explore the five main elements of a short story – Conflict, Theme, Plot, Setting, & Character. We will look to generate some new ideas and try to develop an overall schema for the entire story.

March 2^nd

Our second task will involve proof-reading the text he has already produced. We will aim to look for and correct minor problems with his grammar, sentence structure, tense usage, and word choice. We will also look to edit how he incorporates character dialogue as this is fairly inconsistent within his writing. I would like to teach him how to review his own writing in terms of using proper pronouns by asking himself the questions; who or what am I referring to? And is this clear from my sentence structure? I am hoping that through this instruction he will be able to improve his writing not just in this piece of work, but in all future endeavours as well (because it sounds like he intends to go on to become a fairly prolific writer).

March 9^th

Our third task will involve putting these elements together and working on further developing our main characters. As mentioned earlier, Mr. Harder has spoken about the need for identifying and developing the self in all our writing. As Prince is attempting to write from the perspective of a female character, this is a new and unknown realm for him and will require some fine tuning. Our aim for this session will be to improve upon our presentation and to attempt to incorporate a consistent representation of the characters we have encountered thus far.