It’s now October and I’ve had the opportunity to assist and watch my MT teach her first unit of the year: a novel study. As the students are wrapping up this novel study, the final assignment is a writing assignment- each student is to write an epilogue for the novel in which they include themselves in the story line as a character. While the students balked at the idea of reading an entire book (the horror!), they have mostly jumped right into the idea of this writing assignment- probably because they can use the chrome books but whatever works! While assisting the MT and conferencing with students in the last three class periods as they have been writing this epilogue I have noticed some interesting things about the writing:
- Some of the students beautifully summarized the novel itself but added nothing to story nor made themselves apart of the story. The distinction between summarizing the novel and creatively adding to the novel had to be made several times using an example of my MT's own epilogue before some students quit trying to write a book report. Imaginative writing of this nature was very laborious for some of the students. Though they quickly breezed through a summary of the book, adding to the book with creativity thought up by themselves stumped quite a few of them.
- The way the students spoke and the way they talked were almost completely parallel. There was almost no formal English in the writing- distinct speech patterns became distinct writing patterns and I think that if names were removed from the individual epilogues, I could still make a pretty good guess on whose was whose.
- Myself being a very strong reader and a strong writer, I was amazed at the difference that the students went about creating an epilogue out of their imagination and the way I did. I very quickly wrote myself into the story by creating a new role and new interactions between the main characters and myself that tied back to the story line. It took a matter of minutes and I didn’t pull from any direct source around me to come up with my modified storyline. However, a large portion of the students pulled directly from other sources of literacy in their lives and I could read it in their stories. One student basically rewrote a story that had been on the news but instead made herself and the characters the focus of the story; another kid took the theme and details of a popular video game and put himself and the characters into the game. I also noticed that some of the students wrote the epilogue around the drama of going on in their lives: boyfriends breaking up with them or 'cheating' on them, friendships broke up, and other issues along that thread.
When reading the epilogues of various students during class time and conferences I tried very hard not to get caught up in surface editing. Instead of spending time correcting punctuation and sentence structure, I tried to instead complement each student on their storyline and suggest ways to make it stronger or suggest a different turn the story could take. Of course, I did remind them to include punctuation at the end of a sentence, capitalize the first letter of the sentence, and capitalize names and other minor details such as that I tried to not to overly focus on grammar. I think that if I had made a big deal of the grammar aspect of the writing process a lot of the kids would have shut down and accomplished nothing on the assignment.
As I begin planning my unit to teach in the classroom, and the one I will turn in for a grade, I have made creative writing a large part of them both. I think the thing most students struggled with the most was putting their own opinion onto paper- even though I told all of them numerous times that they had great and interesting things to say, a lot of students struggled to convince themselves that their stories were 'good enough'. They were engaged and they were struggling. As I have been making the plans for my unit, I have weaved creative writing into every single day; when the class gets to the last project (writing of course) I want them to be much more comfortable with the idea of using their own ideas to create an essay.
Overall, I am really enjoying getting to know my students writing styles and I can't wait to see if my unit works well with them! I love all the students in that class and I was amazed that I was thinking of all of them while I was planning.
Bailey,
ReplyDeleteI like the push in the "write" direction you are doing with your students! You are approaching their lack of confidence in their own writing as a challenge for your own future unit and I admire that. You have identified the problem that they are running into which is that, "Imaginative writing of this nature was very laborious for some of the students" and that for some of them they do not think their ideas are "good enough." This is such an interesting idea because I have run across a similar issue in my own classroom. our students will doubt themselves thinking that their ideas are not quality ideas when in reality they are inquiring the way we want them to. I feel like many of our students are not sure if their ideas are right so that makes them fear putting it into writing out of fear of being wrong. Maybe that is something instilled in them at a young age? This fear of being wrong can be detrimental to creative writing. It is our jobs as teachers to make them never fear being wrong, especially when it comes to writing because that can make them fear writing as a whole. I love love love your approach to mot pointing out grammar mistakes or anything of that nature because it will definitely make them more confident in their own writing. I am excited to hear about your approach to writing in your own graded unit and to see the way the students interact with their own writing. Good luck!