Confessions From a Digital Hermit

"Through their active participation on sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Xanga, students are acquiring various digital literacies for engaging audiences in ways that allow them to display competence and make social contacts." - Mr. Richard Beach PhD

Ok, so I have a confession to make. Of the three online entities mentioned above by Rick Beach, I am a member of all three. I have been a member for several years. Now you all know it. I have a blog. I have had a blog for the last three years and it is awesome and I even have 17 subscribers.

About three years ago, the younger sister of one of my collage roommates died, and she used her blog to deal with some of her grief. She wrote amazing, sometimes heart-wrenching, sometimes humorous blogs about the memories of the past 19 years with her sister. It was during that time that many of my friends and I started our own blogs so that we could subscribe and comment and keep a dialog of this shared experience.

For the next few years, we built our own little blog community just to keep tabs on our day-to-day activities. I would find myself writing little blog entries in my head all day long. I would often get to where I was biking and immediately pull out a pen so I wouldn't forget that great idea for my next blog entry. I never really considered myself to be a writer of any sort, but my blog gave me an excuse to try different things and the more I blogged, the more confident I became, and the more I wanted to do it. Since I started this program, I have given up my personal blog, due to lack of time, but for those two years that I was actively engaged in this format, it really did work to keep me writing (even if sometimes that writing was just about what Bob Barker did that day on TPIR).

I don't think I really need to say it, but if you get kids excited about your classroom blog by building an interesting, enthusiastic blog community, it can work wonders. I think just getting them started and interested is most important. After that, Lord knows what can happen.





My link of the week:

Book Crossing

This is just fun, and students might get into it as well!

Everyone gets an "A"!

I find myself thinking about grading a lot. The subjectiveness of giving a grade to a personal essay, justifying grades to over-protective parents, not stifling creativity with a catchall rubric. I think the Dornan reading for this week brought up some helpful points for dealing with all of these things. I like the idea of using a portfolio approach, and letting students decide which pieces of writing are getting a grade and which will just go toward participation type points. Once again, we are back to the fact that the more freedom and choice we give to students, the better off we will all be. We will have better, more interesting papers to read, and hopefully our students will enjoy our class and get something more out of it than a final grade on their report card. I can tell you one thing that do not look forward to in my life as a teacher is reading yet another plot synopsis of The Scarlet Letter, or a teeth pullingly boring, to the line analysis of dramatic irony in Oedipus Rex. Thank god for lenses, writer's workshops, and multi-genre, right?



My link of the week:

http://www.rhymezone.com/

This is just a fun little site that could be a warm-up for poetry. I typed in the word purple and it does confirm that there are, in fact, no words in our language that rhyme with purple, but it does appear 16 times in works of Shakespeare. So at least it has that going for it.

Grammar, schmammar

Grammar is the thing that I hate. I wake up in a cold sweat thinking about grammar. Horrible, horrible grammar. I have a t-shirt that proudly states, "Bad Spellers of the World Untie!" (I know that spelling and grammar aren't necessarily the same, but I, like many high schoolers group it in with the entire grammar nightmare). People find out that I am going to be an English teacher and then they ask me things about grammar and I always end up having to look up the answer just like they would have and it makes me feel awful incompetent. I am not a fan or grammar.

This is one reason that I decided to read the book, Mechanically Inclined for my book study group. That book and the readings for today have really helped me realize that in order to successfully teach grammar, mechanics, and revision, we can use many of the principles that we would use to successfully teach other parts of the English curriculum. Grammar needs to be taught in context and should be made relevant to a student's life, or they will end up shutting down and turning off just like I did when I was force fed it in my school days. The importance of demonstrating to students that mechanics and revision can be incorporated into their writing process and doesn't have to be a painful, tedious task will make it easier on everyone involved. Breaking it down and taking it one spoonful at a time in conjunction with our other writing stages will hopefully make it go down a little easier.

Take heart my fellow grammar haters and know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and if you want real world application strategies, to go along with the great ones in "The Writer's Toolbox," check out Mechanically Inclined (it has some very useful stuff!) Also, to look on the bright side, remember that your distaste for grammar can only help you be better at teaching it- at least that is what I am finding.




My link of the week:

Grammar Slammer--English Grammar Resource

This site has a bunch of grammar help including links to common mistakes.

Getting Hip to the Multi-genre

I would just like to say that just like the article, "'It would be fun to do again': Multi-genre Responses to Literature," I am totally down with the implementation of multi-genre projects and the wide-spread use of multi-genre techniques in the classroom. I think our program has stressed this a lot and I agree that we need to be aware of and use as many different tools as possible to help our students be creative, free-thinking, independent citizens.

Ok, so that being said, I do have a couple of concerns that would not necessarily stop me from doing a project like this, but that would cause me to pause to think about for a few moments. First off, I think that Ms. Gillespie was smart in aiming high and making this assignment bigger than what she knew her students could handle. I think that there is a potential with a project like this to have students rush through and get done very quickly. This is not always because they are rushing to get it done and out of the way, but because they are so into it that it may seem easier because they are doing something that they actually enjoy doing. This can be especially tricky if you are giving a lot of class time to work. If Crosswinds taught me anything, it was to always have a good backup activity.

Following this train of thought, I am going to leave off with some questions that I have been pondering and could be applied to this and most classroom projects and assignments. How much in-class time are we expected to give students to work on assignments like this? Do today's students expect to get class time to work on projects, or can we expect to do something like this as homework? In an English classroom I wonder how much is too much? I know that every classroom and school will be different, but I have just been thinking about how we tell if our multi-media/multi-genre infused students these days are being too overloaded (just how many wonderful and rich supplementary texts can I pile on)?

My website of the week:

http://midwestteensexshow.com/

This is probably not a website that you would be using in class! I am putting it up because it is funny and I think that some of our students may be aware of this site so it doesn't hurt if we are too. If nothing else, I am making this my site of the week to remind us that our students are definitely not thinking of English literature at all times of the day (not even at all times of English class).