Social Class Reproduction

Four Rules for Teaching Writing:
Image result for image: joy of writing
Always give writing assignments that

1. you will enjoy reading;
2. students will enjoy writing;
3. students will enjoy reading what others in the class have written
4. you will enjoy writing.

If any one of these conditions were not true, then it probably wasn't a very good assignment.

Advice I give to my students: When your words surprise you, you know you are writing.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Coming Alive

I have  three things I would like to write about--but as soon as I open them up, they open into a web of other interests. Let me see where I go:

First, I wanted to get down what I meant by unguided peer response and how students can learn from each other by osmosis rather than critique.

If we can imagine subjects close to our students' lives (and that's not hard if we get off the academic, evidence-based writing cliche), we can have students write meaningful essays about their lives and what they're thinking as they try to imagine who they are, what they're doing, and what they might do. Then we create a venue in which they openly and unrestrictively respond to each other as people communicating to each other. This isn't the guided response in which I have specialized for most of my pedagogical career. It's responding to what was said, not how it was said (although the how might merge with the what).
reasons to love being alive | via Tumblr
In my classes, I have ways of encouraging an even distribution of responses so that everyone gets read (by read, I mean gaining meaning through being responded to); still, some writers get more, longer, and more sincere responses, readers responding to them as people. My students notice (and I have them write about this) which kinds of essays get those responses (this has to do with vulnerability). They pay attention to how the most-responded-to writers wrote. And then they think about how they might have written and use that knowledge the next time they write--if they would like responses, notices of their existences.

I had other subjects, but I'm going to stop here. I think that what I've written above might inform our own lives, how we live, how we do or don't open up to each other and how we gain meaning by having others notice that we're alive.

5 comments:

  1. Irv why do comments disappear?

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    1. Well, at least yours remained here, Dan. I don't think they disappear. I think you just have to click on comments under the post in order to see them (I'm still a beginning blogger--would appreciate anyone else's insight).

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  2. I am enjoying these posts immensely. I'm using contract grading for the first time this quarter as part of an attempt to encourage experimentation, to relieve the intense grade anxiety most students here seem to have, and to reduce the artificiality of the writing situation somewhat. Your posts are helping me articulate the rationale for this and other curricular decisions. Thank you.

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    1. Hi, Sarah. Thanks for your comment. In my experience, both teachers and students seem to be captives of grade-addiction. When released, they all seem to enjoy writing and being more. I think that all students simply need to have confidence in the teacher's intent to grade fairly and without buying into the tough-teacher fallacy. We sometimes forget that our dominant purpose is to help all students with their writing as much as we can.

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