My Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing

I believe that teaching writing does not always have to be taught in one specific manner. There are many different ways in which to teach students the art of writing. In my future classroom, I plan to incorporate journal writing along with on-demand writing prompts to assist the students to write faster when they are pushed for time. Along with having on-demand prompts, I also want to create a Writing Workshop where the students write a creative piece and share it with their classmates for critiquing. I really enjoyed doing this in my Teaching Writing and Composition Class and feel as though it would be an effective tool for the future.

Included with teaching writing is the teaching of grammar. My belief about the teaching of grammar is that it should not be forgotten or ignored. Students should learn the rules of grammar in high school so that they are prepared for college. To teach grammar, I want to execute it in an inclusive way that helps the students see their mistakes in their own writing. The problem with the standard way of teaching grammar is that most students do not apply the work they complete on the grammar worksheets to their own writing. To fix this error, I plan to hold workshops over various grammatical errors that I often notice occur in my students’ writing. This way the entire class can benefit from the given exercise. I also hope to teach Harry Noden’s Image Grammar because it helps the students vary their sentence structures and create more descriptive and effective sentences.

Lastly, I believe that grading students’ writing can be extremely subjective. For this reason, I plan to utilize Holistic, Analytic, and Narrative techniques to grade my students’ writing. I also plan to hand out a rubric for each writing assignment so that my students will know exactly what I want for each prompt or assignment. This way there will be no unknowns in my class and every student will have the opportunity to succeed. Finally, I want to create a learning environment in my future writing classroom that inspires every student to believe that what they have to say in their writing does matter because I truly do care.

Final Reflection

I feel as though I am reflecting on the reflections on which I have already reflected, but here goes another reflection. If that sentence is confusing to you, it's meant to be because we have written a great deal too many reflections in both the Practicum and Teaching Writing and Composition Class. Though I see the good in reflecting upon what one has learned, if it is done too often, the reflector can begin to sound a bit repetitive. Not that I'm complaining, but constantly reflecting about oneself can get quite tiresome. For the future classes, I think the reflections should be cut down or re-considered into maybe a different form such as oral reflection in class. I believe that the reflector can gain a more positive experience from reflecting upon what one has learned with his or her peers.

Now onto a different aspect of Teaching Writing and Composition Class. Overall, this class has provided me with a plethora of teaching ideas that can be tweaked to fit almost any writing lesson I create in the future! This will definitely help me out a great deal! In addition, I enjoyed the Writing Workshop because it inspired and forced me to work on a writing of which I have been wanting to start for a long time: My Firenze piece. I also feel that the Writing Workshop would be an effective tool to use in the classroom because it gives each student the opportunity to showcase their piece and fix it according to their classmates' suggestions. Students can actually learn a great deal from their classmates because I know that I have this semester! In addition to the Writing Workshop, I thoroughly enjoyed that we created writing wikis. This will be an effective tool in the future as well.

One problem I had with the class besides the amount of reflections was the two-week unit. I felt so completely unprepared to write and teach this unit. I feel as though we need to be taught how to write and create units before we actually created one on our own. Maybe during the junior and sophormore year the INLA students can create mini-units and lessons to work up toward creating the dreaded two-week unit. It just was a really stressful process, and I honestly did not know where to start. Luckily I had a great cooperating teacher that helped me with it all, or else I probably would have crashed and burned! In addition, I feel it would assist the future INLA students to have some experience teaching, maybe only even a one day lesson to high school students. Throwing us out into the classroom and expecting us to teach a two-week unit for the first time in our lives was extremely stressful. I felt like I was being thrown into the water with weights on my feet (my other content classes) and with no floaties (previous experience) and expected by my superiors to swim. It was really tough. I just feel that the amount of stress can be lessened for future INLA students by giving them the chance to experience teaching high school students earlier in their college experience. Overall, though, my experience in Teaching Writing and Composition Class has turned out positive, and I feel that I have truly learned how to think like and become an Integrated Language Arts teacher.

Reading, Reading, Reading...Oh, and Winter Break

Many people cannot wait for the semester to be over. I, on the other hand, wish it would not end. The end of the semester only means more work for me. Over break I have to read the plethora (and by plethora, I mean plethora) of novels that I will be teaching next semester. In addition, I have to start to create, and hopefully finish, most of the units I will be teaching. I also have to study for the Praxis: PLT that I will be taking January 9 at Kent. Oh, and I have to work 40 hours a week to be able to not work during the 12 weeks of basically having a full-time teaching job and not getting paid for it (aka student teaching). Fun! So, please semester, do not end!


Now that I am done ranting about the next four weeks of my life, (don't even get me started about the next 12 weeks or else I may have a nervous breakdown) I will showcase the books I will be reading over break. The first on my list is The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

I am only 20 pages into this book. And, though it has hopes for maybe becoming interesting, I really feel that all they do is walk...a lot. If anyone has read this before, please give me hope for later in the novel! I also saw that there is a movie of The Road, so after reading it, I plan to see the movie to compare. The trailor looks interesting, so hopefully the book will become interesting later.

The next book on my list is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. :)

Having read this in high school, I will only be re-reading this novel. I am excited to re-read it, though, because I remember really enjoying it in high school. This is also the first unit I will be teaching to College Prep English 12, so I will have to really analyze this text when I read it.

After The Great Gatsby, I plan to read Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts.

Because I already watched the movie, I'm wondering if the book will be as interesting to me. I will see soon enough. Quite honestly, I'm not looking forward to reading this because I already know what is going to happen. 500 pages of reading something that I already know the plot to does not seem that thrilling to me.

Another book I have to re-read over break is The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

I really enjoyed reading this book in the past, so I cannot wait to start the unit for it. Because we are currently in a time of war now, I feel as though the students will really be able to relate to the themes of this novel.

Now that I have overviewed a few of the books I will be reading over break, I will simply list the rest of the books I have to re-read or read.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Piccoult

I will be teaching all of these books during my 12 week student teaching experience, in addition to teaching writing units. I have a great deal of work to do over the next few weeks, thus why I REALLY do not want this semester to end! I hope everyone else has a more exciting break planned that I do! Happy break, everyone!

Making Comics

At first upon glancing at the Making Comics book by Scott McCloud, I felt completely overwhelmed. There were pictures everywhere, and I did not know where to start. When I grab a text based book to read, I like to overview the chapter titles and skim through the similar looking pages. In this book, everything seemed crazy because no pages looked the same. It made me feel as though I have Attention Deficit Disorder and cannot concentrate on one particular item. Finally getting over my overwhelming feeling, I glanced at the first chapter "Writing with Pictures" and found it to be extremely interesting how the text stories we read come to life through pictures. On page 16, it explains, "The cartoonist only picks one moment per action, so each panel helps further the plot and keep the pace brisk." The written words in books become pictures in comics in order to advance the plot. Another aspect of this book I enjoyed was the creation of emotions. Seeing the author's emotional faces on page 96 was quite humorous. It is interesting how comics convey such complex ideals as emotions through their pictured characters. A line that also proved to be powerful was, "Symbolic expressions are closer to the written word in the sense that their meaning is fixed regardless of how they're rendered.--Just as a word means the same thing regardless of handwriting or font choice" (McCloud 96). So, whether the comic character is drawn expertly and with a frightened face, or drawn quite simple and with a frightened face, it means the same thing. That fact intrigued me as did most of the book. Too bad I cannnot draw or else I'd consider creating my own comic!

Using the Making Comics book in my student teaching classroom would actually be quite effective because I had a student create a heroic journey movie presentation through the use of comics. Many of the students in my class found this student's unique idea to be interesting, so I will definitely show her this book while student teaching next semester. I am also thinking about creating a final assessment that gives the students the option of creating their own graphic novel story. There are many talented and bright students in my Honors English 12 class, and I think that many of them would respond positively to this sort of assignment. Now, I can't wait to implement it!

The Professor and the Madman

What does it say about the English language when more than 1,000 definitions and words were created by a mass murderer and resident in an insane asylum? Hmmm....well, my guess is that portions of the English language are completely arbitrary. I think this aspect is important for our future students to realize because no one single person has all of the answers. Language is a constantly growing thing where new words and new meanings to old words are constantly added to dictionaries. English teachers need to keep up-to-date on their definitions of words and make sure they are using terms in the right context. Because I read this story, my view of the English language being arbitrary was only confirmed.

On another note, the storyline about the character of Minor completely intrigued me. Here was this genius who contributed more than 1,000 words to the Oxford English Dictionary, the most valid dictionary in today's time, who turned out to be too smart for his own good, which in turn made him become insane and start murdering people. To me, that is pure craziness. I guess it goes to show you that sometimes there is a downfall to being too intelligent. In high school, I heard somewhere that anyone with an IQ above 175 would be considered partially insane. Taking this in and analyzing my own IQ, I realized I'm clear and not insane. Whew. It is just interesting how the human brain, a three ounce object, can lead to such greatness, harm, and insanity.

Image Grammar

As I read through portions of Harry Noden's Image Grammar book and recalled his class last semester, I realized that I wrote a research paper over Image Grammar in my sophomore year before I even had the faintest idea who Harry Noden was. In my research paper, I explained how Image Grammar was a good tool to use to help developing writers learn how to deviate from the usual "subject, verb, object" sentences. It also shows the students how professional and famous authors use their writing to create images in their readers' minds, and then instructs the students on how to write in the same way. Writing a research paper about this book, I definitely feel as though I learned a great deal on how to teach and use Image Grammar.

Because the Image Grammar book is an effective teaching tool to assist students in deviating from their usual sentence structures, I feel as though it is important for me to use this in my classroom. The grades I feel would benefit the most from lessons in Image Grammar would be grades seven through nine. Any grade after ninth, I feel would possibly be bored and disinterested in a lesson over Imager Grammar. I could be wrong though. By teaching seventh through ninth graders Image Grammar, I feel as though the students would start to see their writing in a different light. Instead of viewing it as a forced assignment where all the facts must be written directly on paper, maybe the students would start to view writing as a fun assignment where they could use their words to excite their audience and put detailed pictures in their readers' minds.

Pleasure Reading: Ghost World

Recently I decided to venture from my usual text novel reading to read Daniel Clowes' graphic novel Ghost World. I have to say that at first, I found it to be extremely vulgar. The characters used the "F" word on many occasions and there were various sexual references. Looking past the vulgarity of the text though, I could see how these two female main characters could relate to teenagers today. The major theme of the novel was finding one's identity and dealing with change. In the end, Enid, the main character who hates everything about herself and life, decided to attend college and get out of her small town to become a new person. It seemed like a depressing ending, but when she came into the last scene of the comic, the reader could tell Enid was happier.

The movie turned out to have a different motive than the graphic novel. Enid once again was trying to find herself amongst all of her cynical ideas toward the world, but she did so through another, slightly creepy man named Seymore. I did not like how the Director interpreted the story in this way. Also, Enid denied a scholarship to attend college in order to stay at home in her cynical life that she hated. The Director definitely changed the entire idea and moral of the novel by changing the story in this way and it thoroughly disappointed me. Though it was disappointing and different, it still turned out to be interesting and both stories related to young adults, which in turn would relate to our future students.