That Thar Larnin’ Done Me Some Good

It’s been two months since I blogged a single word.  Honestly, I needed the break.  The fall semester closed with a lot of small tasks to complete — and several big ones (finals, anyone?). When the three weeks of holiday came around, I spent a lot of time relaxing.  And then the New Year kicked in and I was fighting off an illness that took me two weeks to overcome.

As the year began, I told people, “2012 — 1.  Me — 0.”  My stress levels were high: I had a new class to prep for and then the dreaded internship.  It wasn’t dreaded because I’m terrified of teaching.  It was dreaded because I didn’t want to do it.  The petulant child in me wanted to scream and cry and stomp my feet.

“But, I’ve been a teacher for almost five yeeeeeeaaaarrrrrsssss,” the tantrum began.  “Whhhhhyyyyyy do I have to do this?  I’ve taught high school, dual-enrollment, traditional college students, non-traditional students.  Students who were labeled ‘Basic’ and those who were labeled ready for college.  Whhhhyyyyy?”

And then there was the rational part of my brain that just said, “Suck it up.  This is one hurdle.  It’s a sucky (yes, I used that word) hurdle, but it’s not one that is so daunting you can’t do it.”

Of course, the rational side of my brain won out, and when people would make this face when I told them I had to do an internship (and they knew I was already teaching), I would calmly tell them: “It’s just a hoop to jump through.  It’ll be fine.”

And it has been fine.

I’m lucky enough to have a cooperating teacher who is open to my ideas and who embraces what I think about writing — that it encompasses so much more than an essay.  The first project for the junior students I have is a pop culture fact-finding mission.  And they aren’t writing an essay. They’re mastering information literacy and writing paragraphs.  In fact, before that, she let me teach them a handy, dandy method for paragraphs that I stole from the wonderful Dr. Bob Evans.

What I’ve seen from this class is a lack of stress about “writing assignments” — and that’s what it’s all about in the end.  In the last year of my teaching, especially in the last year with Dr. Woodworth, I’ve challenged my definition of writing and assignments and even how to approach writing.  From these experiences, I’ve learned to start small, to start manageable, and to start as if my students know nothing (which is sadly the state most of them are in).

I’m seeing the application of all of the theories and thinking I’ve done through this blog.  And it’s done me some good.

Play Time, or Why I Have Done What I’ve Done

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.  — George Bernard Shaw

I like to play around in learning.  I like to play through ideas and music and videos and words.  I like to play with new concepts and new technologies.  And I love when there are people around me who love to play as much as I do — people who see learning as being a sort of play time just as much as it is a serious endeavor.

When I had to decide what my projects would be for the term (projects which have altered and evolved as the semester has gone on), I ultimately went with material I wanted to play with.  I had skirted around writing a literacy narrative for awhile — I even wrote miniature versions and shared them with students.  But I had never tackled the longer beast of that project.

So this semester, I finally did.  And it was fun.

Then for the second assignment, I decided I would design a course, but the idea here was the same: I could play with this.  Putting together a course is a lot like a puzzle where I have to figure out what the major objectives are, how they’ll develop during a term, how they’ll be assessed, and then how they’ll be sequenced.  It’s a time consuming endeavor, but I love it.  of course, that changed.  It wasn’t that I couldn’t have created a course, but I realized that I wanted to create something more detailed.  My original idea would have been vague with overall objectives and general units, but the module gave me the opportunity to dig deeper by researching grammar in a basic writing course.  I wanted to create a grammar unit that would fit within a basic writing course — and one that fit with the guidelines of “acceptable grammar to teach basic writers while also teaching them to write” (that’s quite a long category name, but I found a lot of research that suggested this was the way to go).

I finished that assignment.  And it was fun, too (especially the part where I turned it into a detective theme).

And for that last assignment, my original idea was something I wanted to play my way through.  I had created a case study on Ole Miss’ writing across the curriculum initiative, so the thought of re-visting their concept for WRIT 0100 and WRIT 1010 intrigued me.  I wanted to know why they had done it, how successful they felt they were with it, and how administrators reacted to the different courses.

But then I changed my mind because I found something else I wanted to play with: graphic organizers.

I love working with visual brainstorming and outlining activities because they give me a chance to incorporate creativity (one of those habits of mind) in an environment that often gets labeled as “hard” or “difficult” or “stiffling.”  And until this semester, I hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to graphic organizers beyond what I knew already.  But then I found “The Ladder” and “Cornell Notes” and “The KWS Chart” — all of which are really handy, and all of which cover tasks I already have the students complete (but in a less pretty way).

But at the core of all of these assignments is my need to learn and have fun, rather than be bogged down with another research paper.  Turns out, I end up learning more this way because I spend more time working with the content (I chose it, so of course I’m engaged *cough* another habit of mind *cough*).

Idea Purge: My Next 20% Assignment

Originally my idea was to create a Basic Writing course for one of my 20% grades.  It’s doable, I can do it, and I’ve done it in a really quick time frame before.  But I wanted to spend some time hashing out some new ideas churning in my head, ideas I plan to incorporate in later classes.

So here’s the revised idea:

I’m going create a really detailed module for one part of the course.  For this module, I’ll set out instructional and student objectives, formative and summative assessments, and even explanations of the daily lesson plans.  I’m going to justify the module with research from the WPA, Mina Shaughnessy, and various pedagogy texts I have.

And then I’m going place this module within a larger framework of what my direction for the course will be.  The larger framework is centered on an inquiry-based learning idea, and within this, students are going to address the question/problem of this: “Someone has told me I’m in this class because I didn’t know enough.  Why is that?  And what am I going to do about it?

I will give a brief explanation for every module in the course and how I think those module will build up better emerging writers.

I should thank Amy for helping me see what I could really do.

31 October 2011 Note: I’ve decided to create a module on grammar, especially because this is the one area that I used to shy away from in my first year of teaching.  I had to learn what I know about grammar through teaching BW (I did the exercises with them).  With Mina Shaughnessy’s suggestion about starting with the basics of sentences (parts of speech and sentence types), I’m going to create a module titled “You’ve Been Sentenced!” (Did I mention that I was using a writing detective theme for the course?).

P.S.: I stole the name for the unit from the game of the same name — super fun!