Skip to main content

On Surveying Students

I began my Creative Writing course this year surveying students. I adapted the Personal Writing Inventory from UNC-Chapel Hill's Writing Center for this.

Having finally had the time to sit down with them on this sunny September afternoon, I learned a lot about the diverse set of ninth-twelfth graders that comprise my CW course.

For starters, I learned that some participate in online writing communities. They turn to these groups for positive feedback, criticism, and inspiration. I know I can leverage these students within their own writing groups to be leaders that will help others grow.

I learned that some students only write for school. This is the very reason they're in this course, they said. They want to learn to "brainstorm better" and "come up with ideas." They are frustrated with always "writing to someone else's prompt."

I found that most of my students write outside of school and not just tweets and texts. So many of them have journals in which they write about their dilemmas and lives. I can't wait to talk to these kids about mining those same journals for inspiration for larger pieces.

I learned that many students yearn to inspire readers, to create that goose-bump sensation while writing. And I know that I can plan lessons for this by talking about audience and how to appeal to ones in particular.

I learned that some students have authors they look up to. Overwhelmingly, J.K. Rowling made the list of authors. But I also learned that there are some students that don't look up to any writers, creating a need for dedicated Sacred Reading Time (SRT) in my classroom.

I found out that some students are afraid to write because of spelling, and others are afraid to write because what they might write is too real, too raw, too honest. As an English teacher, I've found that we are uniquely positioned to learn so much more about students than others because we strive to make connections between content and students' lives.

I learned that some students see "important writing" as college application essays only. I want to expand their understanding of importance and get them to see purposes of other pieces of writing.

And I learned that far too often students don't engage in personally relevant writing assignments despite their passions for them.

Sometimes it's important that we sit back and let students tell us about themselves. Teach us, the teachers. Let them share their past experiences and preferences, and then spend a little time shaping our course to meet not only their needs but their passions and interests, too.

Comments

  1. I like creative writing too. But I am just learning. I dream to become a professional writer. To get more experience I am going to practice on this service 99 papers

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very nice essay! You have a talant in it! As for me it always was a big problem to write an essay or other kind of writing, I usually look for the best resume writing services through the Internet.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I would be worthy if you would learn from me, because I'm just a terrible writer and it's very difficult for me to write absolutely any kinds of compositions. Usually for this I use https://academic-consultants.com/ but I still hope that someday I will learn this.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Handwritten Cue Cards in the 21st Century

I just stumbled upon this behind-the-scenes clip of Saturday Night Live's cue card process. This is intense writing. This is writing that is dependent upon trust and checks and balances. Over a short period of time, skits are written, drafted on cards, revised, and the cards revised over and over again. I also really love that SNL continues to use cue cards and not a teleprompter. Like Wally points out, technology can fail. Handwritten cue cards ensure the show goes on. Comedy is hard work. Writing is hard work. Changes are made up until the last minute to get things just right. This is a form of real-world writing.

Six Things to Keep in Mind When Your Class is NaNo-ing

Students recently drafted their reflections about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), so I wrote beside them about the lessons that I had learned. Here they are: Limit the other work you give . While you may feel the pressure to have copious assignments in your grade book (there tends to be a sort of teacher shaming if you don't have many assignments in, as if there is a magical number), you have to recognize what is valuable and what is not, especially during the 30-day writing frenzy that NaNoWriMo is. I tried to make every assignment relevant for the month and their novels. Students encountered "daily challenges" (these quickly turned into every-other-day challenges) that focused on many of the necessary elements to good novels: dialogue, story world development, character creation, subplots, etc. Everything was designed so that students could use their work in their novels, and it allowed me to have short glimpses of the types of things they were writing abo

Past Secretaries of Education

After last night's hearing with nominee DeVos, I decided to research past education secretaries. Senator Alexander talked a lot about "precedent" when it came to procedures regarding the HELP Committee. Let us remember that the first education secretary was appointed in 1979. That's the same year that Congress created the department under Jimmy Carter. This is also the same department that Ronald Reagan promised to abolish. Even the first education secretary had experience in government. Shirley M. Hufstedler was both a federal and state appeals court judge. I'm going to say that because of that experience, she's probably familiar with law and how laws work. As we saw last night, when Betsy DeVos was redirected a question because her answer implied that states could choose to implement federal law or not, she might need a refresher. Then we had Terrel Bell, who was a high school teacher, bus driver, and served in the Marines. Again, a long list of public