Six Degrees of English

Sometimes I forget how crazily connected this old world is, but let me tell you about the craziest, weirdest, connected-est thing that happened before I taught this past Thursday.

We were starting a unit on non-fiction, and my lesson plan was about how to choose a piece of text that is appropriate to the issue that the students chose to focus on.  My CT had gathered a bunch of different non-fiction articles, and she arranged them on the back wall, using manila envelopes to hold multiple copies of each article.  On the front of each envelope was a copy of the article that was inside.  I was glancing over them, and I happened to flip to the second page of an article about language in the classroom (I think it was about respecting students' home languages).  A name at the bottom of the page caught my eye: it was the name of my 9th grade English teacher.  The article quoted her on the issue.  WHAAAAAT?!!  Okay, maybe it's not that big of a deal, but it seemed crazy to me, since she taught me at a school in the middle of nowhere in NC, and I'm about to send my students in 8th grade in TX to possibly read an article in which she's quoted.  Call it what you want, but it gave me a nice little sense of purpose on Valentine's Day morning, as my students lugged their four foot tall teddy bears and bouquets of roses into class.  (I'm mentioning these things to let you know that their minds weren't exactly on the topic at hand.  They were probably more interested in the non-fiction of what was going to happen at the dance after school.)

Anyway, segue to the connectedness of readings for this week: the male Bomer's chapters about writers' notebooks definitely reinforced what I've been learning about the importance of WNBs in my female Bomer's class as well as what I've been observing at school.  As part of our Teaching Comp class, we are required to keep a writers' notebook, and it helps me understand why it can be so hard for students--it's really a stretch to make myself write in it on a regular basis.  I definitely see how it's helping me create longer drafts and exercise my writing muscles, and I think it's really important to remember that we need to continue keeping a WNB as an example for our students and a tool for modeling.  My CT actually puts up her various notebooks at the front of the class, so that when she's looking for an example, she can flip back through them for an example of a kind of entry or how she revised an entry.  It also places value on writing--it's not just an assignment that you'll toss away at the end of the year, but it's a way to look back on your growth as a student and as an individual.  As Bomer mentions, my CT wants students to include both writing and reflections on reading in their notebooks, so they have different sections (the first half and the second half) devoted for entries on each.

I've noticed that lots of the students go through multiple notebooks over the course of the year, and they definitely decorate them to their hearts' desires.  Some girls paste pictures from magazines all over the outsides, some guys keep love notes taped there, and one girl taped a small mirror to the outside.  (Her friend informed me that it's because she likes to look at herself a lot.)  One student told me that she doesn't decorate her notebook on purpose--if it looks boring, then she explained that people are more likely to not want to look into it, and she writes a lot of entries for personal purposes.  Also, I think her mention of "personal writing" is important; the bulk of what she writes isn't accomplished in the classroom.  All of the students transport their WNBs back and forth, and this gives them the opportunity to do the kind of writing that Bomer talks about.  This is a big difference from what I observed previously.  During my observation last semester, I noticed that the students continually lost their notebooks, wrote for class on random sheets of paper, and never wrote about anything that wasn't an in-class assignment.  I think this is largely because they weren't allowed to take their notebooks home!  They always had to put them back into their assigned crates at the end of class.  (I still don't understand how so many students STILL lost them.)  I know that this policy was in place because the teacher was afraid that they would lose them, but they didn't seem to feel a sense of ownership or personal connection to their notebooks.  There seems to be an amount of trust that you have to give to students before they can truly be involved in the real work of writers--and I don't think that merely answering in-class assignments gets to the heart of real writing.

Also, Smagorinsky's different assignments were interesting, but some of them seemed a little gimmicky.  At this point, I'm still getting acclimated to what levels 8th graders are at and where they should be in reading and writing, so I think you'd really have to know where your students are at before you can begin to think about which assignments would be helpful and where to include them.  (It seems like these could perhaps be included in unit-long plans, but there'd be no way you could anticipate them in a year-long plan, I think.)