An Experiment in Visual Literacy

I may have taken a different approach to this assignment than most of the cohort. I decided to create a visual essay that explains the many thoughts and emotions that I am experiencing with student teaching fast approaching. I must say I am fairly pleased with my end result. The pictures could represent a map of my current brain activity. When approaching this task I first had to decide on a topic to focus on. Considering, I pretty much only have one thing on my mind right now, I chose to focus on student teaching. Now when it came to the process, I wanted to think of something unique, yet simple. I eventually decided it would be interesting to construct a visual essay using words that describe my current state. Each word was then put into a Google images search. Now this may not sound very unique to anyone, because most of you probably did this, but instead I chose the First Image Only from every search. The result is slightly confusing, but I think the final product still does a good job of expressing my angst. When it comes to visual literacy, this project has has made me fully respect the ability for images to tell a story. The image of a head exploding says so much more than I ever could with words. (Random Shout Out to Maggie of the Week: Notice what kind of image showed up in my visual essay, could that be an lol cat? I think it is!)

Welcome to the Digital World!

With the focus this week on Digital Writing, Jenkins offers why and how teachers can incorporate more progressive activities into the English classroom. I agree that these genres of writing are the way of the future or I should say the wave of the present carrying us into the future. I believe we cannot overlook this trend and we need to start incorporating it into our classrooms. One thing that is extremely encouraging about incorporating these strategies is the fact that students are more perceptive to this type of instruction. Students would much rather engage in role play activities where the act out a scene form their text. Appropriation allows students to interact with multiple texts in ways never before imagined. One activity I thought of was having students rewrite the endings to books and then discussing the implications on the story. Lastly, Collective Intelligence is something we should all be overly familiar with by now. Having come through the U of M's education post-bac program, if the echoes of Johnson and Johnson and cooperative learning are not still resonating in your head then I would claim you must have slept through too much of class this summer. My only question is how much can we focus our curriculum on this type of learning? I would love to show up everyday and have my students play out role play activities, but it just isn't practical. Especially when we have standards to meet. My only question is how much is okay? Because I don't want to fired from my first job, because I was the nutty teacher too concerned about digital literacies.
For my Resource links for this week I will attach three. First is a link to Second Life. This community is perfect for students and teachers to play out any and all of the types of activities involving performance. (Side Note: I guarantee that Maggie mentions Second Life in her blog post.)

Next, is a clip of another trailer re-cut that I sent to Candance of "10 Things I Hate About Commandments" These trailers re-cuts are perfect examples of Appropriation that Jenkins mentions.





Lastly, For my link on Collective Intelligences I have provided a link to the U of M's page on cooperative learning and the Johnson and Johnson boys! (Oops! Wrong link for JnJ!)

An Ode to Mr. Hokkanen!

My high school English teacher Mr. Hokkanen used to take forever to grade every paper he assigned. I used to give him such a hard time when we would return to school after a long weekend or school break and Mr. H, or Chazbo as some of us called him, would still not have our papers graded. I used to think, if we have to turn these in by a certain time why can't he grade them with equal timeliness? As the dawn of my teaching career draws near, I am starting to have something for my old English teacher. I'll admit the one thing I am not looking forward to as a teacher is all of the grading. One comment I hear consistently from people I tell I'm becoming an English teacher is, "But all those papers to grade?" I usually just shake my head and reply, "I know."

Grading papers has been something on my mind since deciding to come back to school and get my teaching license. Ideally, I would love to be the teacher who brings all of his students papers home the first night, reads them, grades them, and return them all the next day. I read an article about an 80 year old woman who did this for every paper she ever assigned. Wow! Exhausting just thinking about it. But we all know this is not realistic. More realistic would be picturing me with skyscraper sized stacks of papers to grade trying to read and grade them as fast as I can. For those who don't know I am the slowest reader on the planet. One problem I recognize though is that I know in order for students to become better writers they need to write. (As a side note nobody wants to be the teacher that the department head and other teachers are talking about in the staff lounge because you don't assign enough papers and your students are advancing grades unprepared. Believe it, it happens. I've been in that staff lounge.)

With all this being said, I'm glad we finally read something that addressed this issue. Dornan's chapter on writing assessment gave me a much better outlook on assessing my students writing. One of the things the honestly never crossed my mind was the idea of not grading everything the students write. It seems very simple, but it never crossed my mind. Maybe my teachers graded everything, but probably not and I never noticed. There really is something to the philosophy: Write More, Grade Less! Now as Dornan states I don't see this as a cop out for teachers because as a teacher I would still take every opportunity to provide constructive feedback with everything a student writes. I like some of the alternatives that Dornan lays out as well. I especially like the idea of students writing a body of work and then they get to select which pieces should be submitted for grading. I just hope this wouldn't lead to any students toiling over which piece to submit and then beating themselves up if they didn't get the grade they had hoped for. I still think that it would be important for students to write every paper for credit but then they could still pick and choose where to be assessed.

The last issue I care to address is th idea of rubrics. Dornan et al like most of the other experts we have read seems to glorify the rubric. They acknowledge some of its downfalls yet still sings its praises. Question: How come the job of assessing a students writing cannot be left to the teacher to do objectively without a rubric? The big word behind rubric is that they are a explanation for why a students paper has been graded a certain way. Why should we have to defend why we graded anything the way we did? I know we will, but why? If as a teacher, I cannot explain to a student/parent/administrator why a certain paper was given a specific grade then why was I hired? As teachers we are hired to make objective judgments, and the ability to assess students as experts in the field we are being asked to teach. Then why can we not grade based on our own analysis and critique of a students writing? As a teacher I do not want my students to learn to write for the rubric as I have done numerous times in my education (see Rodgerson's class). Maybe one day I will change my song on this issue, but until then I still find the need for rubrics to be overstated.

For my resource link of the week I found an interesting entry about grading on the computer. Eventually all of our grading will be over the computer so this looks like a good way to grade papers and leave feedback for students.
http://visuallounge.techsmith.com/2007/11/screencast_of_the_week_grading.html

Yay, Another Blog Post!

Nothing really jumped out and inspired me in this weeks readings, so I apologize in advance if my post seems a little flat. If it does then atleast it will be a good example of voice in writing. What intrigued me most about this weeks reading was the attention to teaching grammar in the English classroom. Most of us a probably experienced direct grammar instruction growing up, but evr since I began this path towards teaching English I have always wondered how I would approach grammar instruction. I have always felt that grammar instruction is one of the reasons why students hate English class. Think about it: In math when you get the correct answer you are rewarded or applauded, you have achieved this accomplishment. But in English correct grammar is not treated any of thes ways it is merely expected. The only time a student hears about their grammar is when they make a mistake. I have always felt that the need for direct grammar instruction should always take a backseat to teaching students clear communication of ideas. Honestly I assumed our texts would not feel the same way, so I was pleasantly surprise to read that Dornan had a very similar position on the topic. I don't feel that all grammar instruction is bad, everything is necessary in moderation, but we certainly need to what is the purpose of fighting arbitrary rules established on the stationary grounds when the rules of vernacular English are ever changing. With all that being said here is a great site for grammar info.

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/

What's a 5 Paragraph Essay?!?!?

There are many pros and cons to the 5 paragraph essay. This format stifles creaivity in students, but it is necessary for college preperation.

I have no major beef with the 5PE like one of authors does. I completely understand how, YES if we teach are students this is the only way to write, that can be limiting. But most students coming into high school do not know how to organize thoughts, points, and arguments in a paper. The 5PE is the best starting point for these students. Just think, if we did not teach it all, the challenge we would be faced with then. Any teacher that claims that the 5PE produces bland and boring writing from their students is not doing a very good job teaching. I put the burden on us as the teachers to pull out the creativity and style. For the advanced writers this will be no problem, but for our struggling writers, if we do not provide them with this foundation they may never rise to a new level.

Secondly, if we do not school students in the 5PE we will be setting them up for serious failure in college. I'm not saying that every college class or professor expect the 5PE, but the truth is most do. If we do not in grain this type of writing into our students they may onyl fail outside of high school. Many standardize tests expect the 5PE , so the teaching only helps our students succeed when the stakes are the highest. This doesn't mean that all we ever teach has to be the 5PE, but itcertainly needs to be a part. We must teach our students to recognize their audience. Sometimes it is suitable to ignore 5PE form when exploring more creative forms, but when writing academically they may want to know what may be expected of them. Overall the biggest danger of ignoring the power of the 5PE is to inadequately prepare our students for what will be expected of them in college.

In conclusion, teaching 5PE is invaluable and in the end it only makes a students less formulaic writing stronger. To close this week I have selected two videos to show how standard oraganization and creative organization can both be successful. Coldplay's video for "Yellow" is a great example of basic structure and organization. It is straight forward, and everything happens in order.

Coldplay's video for "The Scientist" on the other hand is a great exaple of how nontradtional structure can work so well.

The point is there are many ways we can show our students the benefits of both traditional and nontradtional structure. I also suggest the film "The Princess Bride" and "Memento" for teaching this same concept. I will let you guess which film goes with which style.













Oh crap...that wasn't 5 paragraphs?!?...uh..well...now it is!

Response to 6 + 1 Traits

I must say the text I enjoyed the most this week was the from 6 + 1 Traits of Writing. This text reads a lot like the Gallagher text from last semester. You all know what I'm talking about. Why couldn't all of the texts I read in college been practical? Anyway, one thing I liked right off the bat was the way Culham distinguishes between "Revision" and "Editing". I know these two terms were used interchangeably during my education. Whether we were peer-editing or self-revising, as students we were being asked to clump everything into one activity, and this activity was supposed to handle all of the many complex tasks required during these process'. Plus, I believe making this distinction for students makes the process' more approachable. I know as a student I hate to revise and edit. Those of you reading this may notice that when you notice many grammatical and speeling errors (jk: spelling) in my posts. Good things these blogs aren't being graded on these traits. I have often pondered how I would convince/motivate my students to do something that I often skip over in the writing process. This point to explored further in the future. I truly look forward to reading the rest of the Culham text.

A note to the blog readers and Candance: Sorry my posting was not done before 9:00am today. My incredibly crazy life prevented m from finishing on time, but please read my blog posted prior to this one entitled, "Protest", for more info.

As far as my resource link is concerned, if you do not know about dictionary.com yet then you are truly oblivious. I hate to post such a well known and commonly used website, but my blog this week was about revision/editing, and this is hands the one site I use the most when in this process, and during drafting. It is so much more then a online dictionary, so if you do not use site yet, be sure to start!

PROTEST!!!!

I am outwardly protesting the time shift for the due date for the blog postings! I am doing so by refusing to post until after the changed due time, but still before the original due time of 5:00 pm. I will state my case more profoundly in class, but here is my beef to those of you who were responsible for this change. First, last semster people complained all of the itme that we had to get our posts in so early. Many of us, including me, didn't get our posts in unitl after the allotted time most of the time. (Genevieve this is definitely a reference to you! Plus, I hope you are feeling better.) Second, the only reason we changed the time is because we have to grade these posts. Well, the way I understand it we only have to grade them one week. In my opinion I would rather have more time to post every week and less time to grade the ONE week I have to grade. Plus, if I know ahead of time when I am going to have to grade I can schedule for that. Third, I am assuming we are going to have to do the readings for our posting and I would like as much time as possible to get the readings done since Cynthia seems to want to assign a bazillion readings too. I have no problem with lots of reading but I just need time to read it. Anyway, moving the due time gives all of us even less time to finish the readings. Fourht and last point, moving the due time to 9:00am is pointless. The point of having a due time in the middle of the day is so that people can post that day before the due time. How many of you are going to wake up before 9:00am to finish your post? None, if you need to finish you will get it done the night before. Anyway that is my rant. For those of you who read this, you will probably hear it again in class, and for that I apologize. I just had to say my peace, because honestly this decision was ludicrous. Weekly post to follow!