Week 7 reflection

Not going to lie, the last thing I want to do is reflect on the week that was. Tragedy hit our high school campus this week, and I have not even begun to process my own feelings on it because I spent the last two days helping students process it. My first year on campus we had a teacher die unexpectedly, and I have helped students process the death of two students in three shorts years as well. I am not ill prepared for this type of thing, but it does not make it any less hard. How do you look at the faces of teenagers and tell them awful news without crying? You don't.

I forced myself to slow down and relax last night. After getting home from school and reading from one of the novels for one of my Lit classes until about 7pm, I forced myself to stop. My wife and I bought dinner, and watched movies until like one in the morning. It was the latest I had stayed up since New Year's Eve, and it was the longest I had gone without doing school work or lesson planning or grading since Sac State classes started in January. It took nearly one whole movie (Dark Places, based on a Gillian Flynn novel of the same name) to not feel guilty for taking the night off too. I also turned off my 6am Saturday alarm, which meant my usual Saturday routine was thrown out of whack. I needed a mental health morning, so I cut myself some slack to that end.

I went back to the regular school routine today. Prepping teaching Catcher in the Rye for my AP Lit class, putting the finishing touches on my expository writing unit for my regular eleventh grade classes, reading 100 pages of Portrait of a Lady, reading 60 pages of Phineas Finn, and I even started putting together my binder for my Into the Wild unit for next year's AP Language class, which is starting to take shape entirely based on the stuff we are doing in Teaching College Composition. Students who get a 4 or 5 on the AP exam will not take FYC at many schools, so I need to treat it like a FYC style class.

Oh last thing, after weeks of stressing out over observations, I finally have a professor who is not doing presentations during the week I have free to observe. I am going to have to pick up a third day another time, or I can see this professor teach a different FYC course during the same week, but not sure that works. Any way, during Spring break from Sac State I get to stay late at my high school to finish the yearbook due in two weeks, and during my spring break from high school, I get to get up early and do observations.

Okay actual last thing, none of this talking about being busy is me complaining. Eight years ago I was so depressed I did not get out of bed for four months. Being busy is way more awesome than that. Okay, I think it is time to go to my actual notebook journal now. Ta-Ta for now.

Responding to Hesse

In my life outside of the classroom (both as a teacher and student) I spent years and years performing in musical theater at the community theater level. Doing so brought me a whole host of delightful artistic friends. A few years back there was a massively successful song by Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams and T.I. called "Blurred Lines" that the estate of Marvin Gaye thought had a baseline too similar to a Gaye track, and they sued for writing credit and tons of money worth of royalties. The Gaye family won the case, and it was the cause of a ton of conversations between my musician friends about ownership of a groove. To them, and to most people, "Blurred Lines" did not sample from the Marvin Gaye song, and to my friends, this set a dangerous precedent for ownership of anything that could possibly sound remotely like something else.

All of this is a way of me asking if ownership of writing is a good thing? As I read Hesse's delightful speech, I kept wondering if "Who Owns Writing?" is even a question we should be asking. In his piece Hesse makes a point of mentioning blogs and Wikis as newer types of text and writing with freer ownership. He uses the phrase "sanctioned knowledge" as the opposite of what Wikipedia allows. The use of sanctioned is especially important, because I think, in effect, he is wondering if writing should be owned either, or maybe what he is getting at is that ownership of writing needs to have a much more open definition. Ownership of writing implies mastery, but of what? Is there a certain type of writing that is valued higher in terms of ownership? One of the barriers I feel like I am constantly trying to break through with my students is the idea that writing does not have to be scary. But, one of the problems with writing through students' eyes is that they see ownership of writing as being something academic, and unfathomable to get control of.

The idea should be to take ownership of writing and show students that there are different levels of ownership, as well as a wide variety of writing ownership out there. Hesse touches on this when he wonders if the word "writing" is the problem. The act of writing causes anxiety for students, probably because they do not claim ownership of it. As an instructor, the goal should be to extend a kind of ownership to the students. I am still trying to figure out how. Does one have to attain mastery to have ownership? In my opening story, ownership means being the first one to create a generally used and accepted groove line, but there is no correlation to a groove line in writing, or is there? Does one have to understand a certain syntax before one can have ownership? These are the questions that fired in my head while reading the article and have stuck with me for a week since.

I begin a new expository writing unit with my eleventh graders tomorrow and as I reminded them all of that fact on Friday they groaned a groan so loud and heavy that I am still feeling it on my shoulders. They get to choose any career they want, research it, learn about it, then write about it. They love the idea of researching and learning about any career they want, but the minute I say write about it, or if I mention the final product is an essay, they freeze. I have 9 more weeks to try and help them take ownership of their writing.

Week 6 reflection

  At the end of the introduction to the Basic Writing Pedagogy chapter in the Guide to Composition Pedagogies book there is a list of five principles and practices for Basic Writing Pedagogy. The second I read the five things, I thought about ways to display those five things in my classroom as a reminder to both me and my students. Those five points get at the heart of what I try to do in my classroom to varying degrees of success. It is quite a juggling act, and I like to think that I am good at what I do.

This school year has tested my confidence though, and this course, and learning about composition pedagogies has helped me stay afloat in the rough waters of eleventh grade English. At the moment I am stuck on the idea of students finding value in what we do in the classroom. The biggest complaint I hear from high school students is that they are not learning skills to help them in their lives, and they struggle to understand the abstract way school prepares them for a job or for life as an adult. It has been eating away at me this year, causing me to second guess many of my assignments.

As I am mentoring a first year teacher, and she is following what I am teaching this year, we mapped things out at the start of the year, and it has been frustrating the last few weeks as I have thought of cool things to do because of this course, but I have to put them on the backburner for next year. This school year has roughly ten more weeks, and I am already planning a summer full of changing up my entire curriculum. Not exactly the relaxing summer non-teachers think teachers have.

I have been finding that focusing ahead has helped limit the anxiety of grad school on top of a full time teaching job. I am constantly worrying that one is going to suffer in order for me to do the other one well. So far, that balance has been fine, but last week I felt like I was neglecting my duties as a teacher, well, as a grader. The problem with grading is that it builds and it can feel insurmountable if you get behind. I have known plenty of teachers who have taken a day off from school to catch up on grading. Instead, I leveled with my students and told them to give me the two assignments out of the four that they felt represented their best learning, and they could keep the other two. It cut my work load in half, and allowed me to see what the students thought was important/their best work. Win/win right? Right?

In my professional life, I told myself Saturday night was my night. No matter how many papers I had to grade, or lessons to plan, or books to prep, Saturday nights were my night. Since grad school started, every Saturday night has been dedicated to school. My night is now Tuesday from 5:45-6:15, which is the length of time it takes me to leave Composition class, walk to my car, and drive home. I cherish that thirty minutes of solitude, and force myself to not think about anything. It is bliss. 

Genre Pedagogies

The Genre Pedagogies chapter spoke to the English teacher in me, especially looking at genre critiques. It gets right to the idea that everything is a text, which is a concept I try to teach. I was struck by Coe and Freedman’s list of “critical, meta-rhetorical questions.” Teaching students to look at why a particular genre is used in a particular way, or at a particular time, can foster deep critical thinking of what all texts can do. That first question of the aforementioned list “What sorts of communication does the genre encourage, what sorts does it constrain against?” gets directly at the big idea of studying texts in general. If a student can come to understand how to critique genre, as opposed to simply regurgitate a particular genre, the odds are increased that the student will be better able to approach unfamiliar genres.

Of course, the biggest hurdle that arises out of genre critiques, and out of education in a broad sense is the transfer of skills. Students are getting so much thrown at them that it can be difficult for them to comprehend how learning a concept in First Year Composition can help in Biology. I see it on a daily basis with my students. The three points laid out by the chapter through Anne Beaufort’s case study are a wonderful place to start, but ultimately buy-in is always going to be the biggest hurdle. Reflective writing, not just on what they wrote, but on how and why they wrote can work well, but if the students are not convinced it is important, reflective writing is not going to help.

That being said, I find myself drawn to the idea of designing a course around many of the concepts found in genre pedagogy, because it works in my AP literature class as well as my regular English classes, and will work in AP Language next year. In fact, it is right up the alley of AP Language.