Because I like you all so much, I'll be perfectly honest: I have only read one of the assigned articles so far. When I came home from class tonight, I found out that our phone line--thus our internet connection--is out of commission for a while. The repair guy cannot come until tomorrow night. Ugh. Do they not know that like 70% of my life is lived online?! Nonetheless, I have managed to hack into one of my neighbors unsecured wireless networks. The connection keeps going in and out, so I am going to take advantage of it while I can. I am pretty fired up after reading the Gillespie article, so I shall share my thoughts about that.
I am in one of the groups doing their "book lesson" on the Romano text, which Gillespie references in her article. After spending some time with the Romano book, I really was not too excited about it. I thought that the ideas were great and creative and fun, but I was a little bit bored by it all. Gillespie changed that. Personally, I am not very excited about doing "creative writing" and have put much thought into how I will incorporate or address it in my own classroom. After reading Gillespie, I cannot see how I could ignore it! Even though she basically summarized Romano's ideas, the way she did it really hit me. Her description of the A Single Shard multi-genre project was quite inspiring; I would like to be in her class! I really enjoyed reading what some of the students wrote in their reflections about their projects. The reflections give me hope that students do have intrinsic motivation when given an opportunity to choose the best type of project, writing style, and/or genre for themselves.
This Spring I will be teaching the book Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli; I am really looking forward to incorporating this multi-genre approach while we are working on this text. Stargirl is a novel about a very creative, free-spirited high school student and how she is accepted--or not accepted--by her peers. A multi-genre approach would be great since the character of Stargirl is too unconventional to be truthfully handled in a traditional 5-paragraph essay, or some other prescripted form of writing.Woohoo! I'm back online! Gee, what prompt service Qwest has for fixing customers' problems: 24 hours. Really, what if that was my only phone line? What if I needed to call 911 but couldn't because they wouldn't come and fix my phone? Could I sue them? Hmmm...if this teaching thing doesn't work out, maybe that's how I'll make my millions. Okay, on with the assignment...
Resource link: Today I observed at my student teaching site and was a little frustrated by their lackluster social issues research papers. They writing 7-paragraph essays; he has given them a handout explaining what each paragraph should be about. Boring. Given this experience as well as Candance's suggestion in her comment, I looked into websites about combining a social issue research paper/project with the multigenre approach. This article, "Exploring the Past through Multigenre Writing" offers practical suggestions for making the traditional research paper more interesting and meaningful.
5 comments:
Lisa,
I can understand your concern about only seeing multi genre as fitting for creative writing. But, if you liked Gillespie's take on Multigenre writing to respond to literature, you should look into all of the Multigenre writing used to do research papers. Writing about the death penalty in the form of a poem or recipe can be much more intersting and persuasive than the standard 5 paragraph essay that students so often choose for research papers. I look forward to seeing your group's take on multigenre writing.
Candance
(I hope that you are back online soon)
Lisa, I *love* the book Stargirl.
♥
Thanks for reminding me to secure my network.
Lisa,
I'm looking forward to hearing about the multigenre writing approach in action! I am also interested in taking this approach with the novel I will be teaching at Park Center. We did something similar in my 7th grade English class, and it has always stuck with me as one of the best educational experiences I've had. Being that we are in a curriculum design group together, I look forward to collaborating with you.
In regards to what you observed at your student teaching site yesterday, I had a similar experience as well. I read a bunch of essays some 11th grade AP students had written for the novel Jane Eyre (5 paragraph essays). Boring, boring, boring... Although it might be more difficult and time consuming to grade multigenre writing projects, I think the benefit to the students far outweighs this minor annoyance to the teacher.
Lisa- I feel your internet pain. I sometimes feel like I don't have much of a social life outside of my computer (my boyfriend), until now that we are having are weekly "debriefing" meetings at my house on Wednesdays. It can be really stressful to be without a major resource like that though, especially with this program.
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