Not so long ago, I was very content as my students and I wrote together with pens on paper in what Donald Murray called the daybook. If some of my administrators hadn’t encouraged me to integrate technology, I don’t know if I ever would have tried to weave it into our writing. The students and I are still after intellectual seeds on paper, but we’re all also typing up our drafts into blogs, customizing the looks of the virtual pages we publish, and we have much easier access to each other’s work. Students who used to write just for the teacher now write for an authentic audience: at least their classmates or if they choose, for thousands on public blogs or in their Facebook posts. It used to look like the world was gravitating towards a seat on the couch watching television or playing video games, and now many of my students are daily, sometimes obsessive, writers. I’m excited and also anxious about what all this will mean for literacy.
Author: Torg
Writing Teacher at App State, Head Women's Basketball Coach at Watauga HS in Boone NC and podcaster at Torg Stories
Hey English Teachers and Writers, any suggestions for a class that looks like this?
When I begin to write a syllabus for an upcoming class, I usually first think about the course’s goals and what the assignments should be. Once that’s decided, I try to plan a schedule that will help us reach the objectives. As I began this process for my upcoming summer courses, I was feeling kind of bummed out thinking about diving back into that same old work. Class never ends up much like my ideal writing day, and so I’ve decided to mix up the structure for how I think about planning a course. I’m starting with what is closer to an ideal writing day for me, and using that routine to give the class structure. Here’s what I’ve got so far. I’d love to hear what you think.
Daily Course Structure for Prof. Torg’s Composition Class
For me, to be a writer and thinker means to live within a mass of habits. I believe there might be as many ways to write and think as there are people engaged the acts. By living in this routine three days a week for six weeks, I hope you’ll begin to think about how to craft your own routine for thinking, or it might be that you’re more of a person who will create an anti-routine.
(20 minutes) Writing Studies / Annotating a Text
Let’s see what other people have to say about writing. When I say annotate, I mean that I want you to try and have a conversation with the writer on a copy of their text. After that, let’s practice using MLA guidelines to integrate the thoughts of others into our own texts.
(5 min) Warm Up with Rich Language (I provide or you choose?)
Read something that will challenge your intellect, the sort of text that might introduce you to a new word. Log the word, the context, the title of the work and the author into your daybook. I think I’ll start you with Poetry magazine.
(10 min) Teacher as Text.
This is like the first twenty minutes, but you’ll do this on your own with a text of your choosing. Read something that you’d say is among the best of the sort of text you are trying to write. I recently adapted my novel and so early each morning I tried to challenge/inspire myself by reading from Alan Ball’s American Beauty and Diablo Cody’s Juno. Look for one writerly observation of which you might make use. Log the example in your daybook. Make sure you take good enough notes that you could quote from this text and cite it in a works cited entry for your Writer on Writing Paper.
(20 minutes) Write a Draft of Something you Need to Write.
Most, if not all of us, write on a computer screen with lots of distractions. Here, we’re going to try something different: we’ll write on paper ignoring our cell phone, instant messages, and the latest email to come dinging into our inbox.
(20 minutes) Small Group Workshop.
Here’s something you might not be used to: a real audience. You can share what you just wrote or something that you’ve written and brought in. It’s best that we all have a copy, but it is also fine if we don’t. Readers should annotate the text: underline phrases that get your attention, challenge the thinking, explain what you learn, and ask questions of each other and the writer.
(10 minutes) A Lesson From Prof. Torg. Usually, there’s something coming up that I need to explain.
(10 minutes) Work on Your Group Technology Project.
Your group is to make a movie and write a paper that focuses on one aspect of writing studies.
(5 minutes) What happened worth mentioning today?
Let’s hear from a couple of the writers in the room. What happened today that you can share? Is there something you’ve written or read that you are willing to read to us?
(10 minutes) Prof. Torg on a Text for Grade.
For this portion of the class, I want to show you the best I can what goes on in my head as I read a text written by someone I’m going to have to give a grade.
(10 minutes) Research at Work.
I’m going to show you clips from a variety of documentaries and/or the work of previous students. I see these films/texts as examples of those who are asking meaningful questions and pursuing answers.
How can you get students interested in writing or research? Establish writing territories.
Writing Floats on a Sea of Conversation
—Dr. Samuel Watson
It used to be that I would often ask the writers who entered my classroom, “What do you want to write?” Their most common response was, “I don’t know.” The following prompts are meant to plant intellectual seeds that each writer might choose to grow. During one of our first class sessions together, we make lists and talk about them. Our conversation helps us add to our lists and we are all able to begin to think about what we might write. I call our responses to these prompts “writing territories,” a phrase I first encountered in Nancie Atwell’s book In the Middle. She explains her own territories as “subjects I’ve written about or might like to, genres I’ve written in or would like to try, and audiences for whom I write….”(120).
Respond to these prompts and pause to discuss your answers. What my fellow writer says might allow me to add to my list.
1. Make a list of topics you know something about.
2. List the main parts and/or roles in your life. For example, I’m a teacher, a husband, a father, a runner, and much more.
3. Make a list of places you know well.
4. What is your major? What do you hope to use it for?
5. Make a list of topics that you wish you knew more about. Or, what are some classes you wish were offered and that you could take?
6. Do a sample schedule of your life. Try out a school day, the weekend, summer, and a holiday. At 8:00 a.m. you…. And then you…
7. List some political/social issues relevant to your life.
Following the creation of these lists, we can all choose to start writing: tell us about one of these, use this list to begin a research project, or can you tell us a story that comes from one of these territories?
You can check out my You Tube channel for related videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/Torgersw
You can get a PDF handout for this activity in the blue box on the lower right of my blog page.
Does a teacher have any business being on Facebook?
This is pretty interesting considering all of us who have Facebook accounts. It comes from a Computers and Composition article written by Gina Maranto and Matt Barton. They report:
“In October 2007, the Ohio Education Association sent out a memo advising its 131,000 union members to avoid joining social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook and urging teachers to “complete the steps involved in removing their profile” (as cited in Wildeboer, 2008, para. 1). While acknowledging that “this advice might seem extreme,” the memo claimed that “the dangers of participating in these two sites outweigh the benefits”
I’m looking forward to taking a closer look at the above article and some others like it. What do you all think?
Marah at the Bowery Electric: May 27, 2010
It would be hard for me to know less about the NYC music scene, but after two years of moving to the Northeast, I’m finally getting out of the house to see Marah at the Bowery Electric. Love to hear from people who could tell me about the band or the venue. A friend pointed me to this article by one of my favorite writers, Nick Hornby. Here’s what he had to say a couple years ago about the band:
But what I love about them is that I can hear everything I ever loved about rock music in their recordings and in their live shows. Indeed, in the shows you can often hear their love for the rock canon uninflected — they play covers of the Replacements’ “Can’t Hardly Wait,” or the Jam’s “In the City,” and they usually end with a riffed-up version of the O’Jays’ “Love Train.” They play an original called “The Catfisherman” with a great big Bo Diddley beat, and they quote the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” and the Who’s “Magic Bus.” And they do this not because they’re a bar band and people expect cover versions, but because they are unafraid of showing where their music comes from, and unafraid of the comparisons that will ensue — just as Bruce Springsteen (who really did play “Little Latin Lupe Lu” for an encore, sometimes) was unafraid.