Writing to teach, teaching to write.

One thing that every author we've read so far seems to agree on is that keeping a writing journal is important for students. It is a place for them to come up with ideas, reflect on their readings (and in life as well), and grow as readers and writers. I don't know whether high school was too long ago that I don't remember having a writing journal or if my teachers didn't ask us for one. Either way, I think it would have definitely helped me as a young writer. I remember my teachers asking me to brainstorm before writing and I just spent the duration staring at the paper sheet of paper in front of me. A journal/WRN would have help developed my writing tremendously.

How we ask students to write in their journals seem to be where the opinions begin to differ. Linda Rief asks her students to write for up to 3 minutes. Peter Smagorinsky asks his students to write at least five hundred words. Dr. Kajder has mentioned before that she prefers an allotted amount of time over the minimum word count. I can see the merit in both but I'm curious which method works better. Personally, when I have a time frame to write in, I spend a portion of my time looking at the clock. Of course, this is not something I want my future students to do but I feel like it is human nature. I look at the clock and get nervous because I always feel like I need time to write more. Even though I know I am wasting my precious few seconds looking at the clock, it is a habit I cannot help. However, not all students who are looking at the clock feel the same way. What if they are just riding the clock out in order to avoid doing more work then they need to? A minimum word count also has it negative effects such as the student's writing becoming focused and unauthentic due to length. This is an issue I think can't truly be answered.

Another concern I have is with confidentiality. Rief does not mention confidentiality at all. She reads through all of her students' journals and writes comments that may help the student form their quick writes into a longer draft. However, what if it is something the student is not comfortable with sharing? Smagorinsky gives his students the option of putting an X over the top of pages they don't want him to read. Smagorinsky's approach is great, but what if the student uses that excuse to not do their assignment? Should we give students an amount of X's they can put on top of a page? What if that one journal page could truly transform into something great? Great writing often asks us to confront the things that concern us the most, which could be very sensitive subjects. I think this is another issue that has two sides, both of which have great merit.

Perhaps both of my questions don't have answers. Everyone is different. No two students are the same. Perhaps different classes have to be given different guidelines for their WRN/journals and that is something we have to figure out for ourselves.

Reading Mini Lesson

When I first thought about becoming an English teacher, I thought about all the great things I've learned from literature. I often felt lonely when I was younger and reading was the one thing that always made me feel not so lonely. I didn't think much about teaching students how to read an informative, non-fiction text.

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail" could have been taught in many different ways. I still believe that teaching students to decipher the 5 W's is important but I wish we worked more on the literary devices MLK used that made the text so powerful. Because the essay worked as such a great persuasive piece, I think we should have focused more of attention on that aspect of the text. It was originally in our lesson plan but because we overestimated how much time we really had, we didn't get to the part of the plan. We might have been able to go through the 5 W's with just the word cloud alone and then dive into the text afterwards.

Professor Kajder made a point about how different the timing would be if we had actual 9th graders in the class. They need much more time to skim through the piece, more time to process information, and more time to understand the lesson. We might have been able to go through the whole lesson plan if we were making the entire lesson based the letter.

I think the word cloud was a good hook that prepared the students for the text they were about to read. I'm curious how actual 9th graders would interpret the words. Obviously graduate students who are familiar with a wide range of texts can piece the puzzle together quicker but I'm guessing 9th graders predictions would be somewhat different.

Overall, I think the biggest take away from this mini lesson for me was to manage time more wisely. I think as teachers, we have to decide whats most important and what students really need to learn and build from there.