A New Ecology

When I started this blog, I thought I wanted to tell stories about everything from forgetting my classroom keys to scuba diving. But by the time I was finished writing a story, I was never sure exactly why I was telling it.  And I always wondered how students would feel if they learned my thoughts on our class or their city this way. 16 unpublished posts from November and December.

This week I’ve been working on a wiki for my classes and a ning for my department. When I remembered this blog, I remembered that I wasn’t the only one who created this blog. We started it for me to use, because “teachers have to use the tools that they want use in their classrooms.” I am going to ask more students to publish their writing this year. While I will always be sensitive to their reluctance, as a blogger anew, I will also be better at helping them through the writing process.

I haven’t posted anything on this blog for almost a year. It is too late to go back and relate my first year of teaching and living in Honduras. (I’m sure that floods, power outages, violence, nepotism, earthquakes, abstinence only education, team dinners, kittens, futbol and political unrest aren’t very interesting anyway…) I’m going to start up from where I am now: more familiar with technology, more confident about what I have to say about teaching and learning to teach, more excited to build relationships that only technology can facilitate.

This is a great and important question. One I ask myself all the time : )

I started the year with a lot of short, structured writing assignments. We wrote almost every day for the first four weeks of class. We wrote literary letters, quotation responses, college application essays and Anglo-Saxon boasts.

Some of my goals:

• to learn about the students and their writing
• to establish a writing environment in and for the class
• to suggest that the integration of personal anecotes is a form of intelligence
• to establish expectations for formal and informal writing
• to get some brainstorming done before we start writers’ workshop

The writing had to be short, for general sanity.

The writing also had to be structured. The students like structure (format, number of words, pen color, deadlines) in English class. The fear of failure is rampent. No matter how many times I tell the students that there is not always a wrong answer, they have anxiety about their work being “good enough.” Is it mean to tell them that ”good enough never is”? Maybe I am missing something.

I don’t always like structure, but I’m working on that. Giving clear expectations, albeit superficial ones, makes it easier for me to give students positive credit. And they are very concerned with credit. It also protects me. As a writing teacher, I was/am worried that my first marginal impressions will expose cultural assumptions  and implications that I am not aware of yet. It is difficult to nurture thinkers and writers that I know little about.

I think the best way to discover and work out cultural differences is to write along with the student. So, I do. We share stories and thoughts. We laugh a lot.

Here is part of my boast: Hail to the Senior Class!!!

Kimber walks,      wit-wrangling and weary,
from a milky      limestone lair
to a scholar’s home     sur, in Sula.
I bring brain-broadners       to board minds abroad.
I face this fuerza-inter   with academic armor aimed
to nurture empathy    in English and Earthsense!

PS. As far as reading goes…English 12 started with Beowulf. I won’t start with this text again, at least not the text book version. I thought a chronological approach was a good plan. I’m rethinking that, not boasting about it. AP Literature started with “What is the Use of Art, Anyway?” by Coomaraswamy. I’ll stick with this one and recommend it.