Tuesday

Tuesday

I’m behind in my grading. Oh well. I got home from our game last night at 9:30 and didn’t really feel like grading a batch of essays. I’ll take care of them today. Sometime.

Yesterday morning a colleague stopped by to see how I handled getting all my grading done and my grades posted with coaching hogging so much of my time after school. I didn’t really have an answer for her. She was dealing with the same thing because she had just finished organizing home coming and the magnet arts trip and some other things. I didn’t know what to tell her. I just grade papers when I can (which makes me realize how much I hate that term ‘grade’ papers. I read essays and tell the writer what I really like about it. Then I tell them what they can do to improve it and make their personality more evident on the page. When I must, I use a rubric and attach a grade to the essay. But that always stinks.).

In Composition my kids are writing their rough drafts for theme #3 (epiphany/rite of passage). I still have to grade theme #2 (childhood narrative). One of my favorite quotes is from Flannery O’Conner - “Anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his life.” So I use that to begin theme #2 (childhood narrative). Then I use an idea I found in a book by Bill Roorbach called “Writing Life Stories” (a book that I can’t recommend highly enough for Comp teachers. Lots of useful stuff.) in which students create a “childhood map.” I give them a piece of tag board and they draw their old neighborhoods or farms or apartment buildings or room. Roorbach used this with college students to get them to unlock childhood narratives. It works wonderfully. I always do a crappy map of my old neighborhood on the board for the kids and am always amazed at the old memories that will serve as the seeds for my narratives that come back to me. I always end up dredging up memories that I haven’t encountered in dozens of years. That alone is worth the price of the book. As kids are drawing their maps, I have them jot down a list of ten memories that they feel are rich enough to mine for narratives. Once they have ten memories down, I have them select one to develop into their essay for theme #2.

In College Comp my kids got their theme #1 back yesterday. I had to miss yesterday for our game, so I had my sub hand them out. Evil of me. Then I had them do a focused free write on what they thought of my evaluations of their grades. I CANNOT wait to read those. I was rather brutal on some of the themes. What helps me here is that I’ve had several of these students as sophomores in my Comp class. So I can tell who is being lazy and who has real issues. What also helps is that I had the students write three essays for theme #1. I read each and offered advice and suggestions for revisions. Then I had them choose one of those initial essays to revise and develop and then submit for theme #1. So I can tell who really revised and who just did spell check or - God help us - tacked on a conclusion. No five paragraph themes allowed here!

Today we begin theme #2 - a personal narrative. I guess that’s the general title of the theme. The first essay they are responding to is -- “Write an essay in which you show your best attribute, talent, or passion.” My hope here is to get them to focus. Most of these kids are beyond the normal crap like “My best attribute is being a friend” or “I am most passionate about football.” I’ve already hit them hard about showing rather than telling. My hope is they may have a generic topic like that in mind (read - thesis statement) but I am trying to challenge them to select one moment or image that best illustrates their attribute, talent, or passion. To help them with this, I’m going to show them last year’s yearbook. We’ll select a picture from one section. I’ll talk about how that is one moment frozen in time, a moment taken from millions of moments that make up a school year. But that moment is frozen in time for all to see and inspect. That moment also suggests so much more. If it’s a picture of our quarterback scoring a touchdown in the section championship game, then that picture serves to symbolize their success. It might symbolize all the hard work they put it. It might symbolize the culmination of a career. And it will symbolize different things to different people. I want them thinking like that while writing their essays. They have all that power at their disposal when selecting their moment in time to freeze and examine. Or at least that’s how I hope it goes. I have a couple of great essay examples to read and explore too.

Once that essay is completed, I want to have them write a couple more before selecting one to revise and submit for theme #2. All the essays will deal with passions, talents, and attributes. I just will have them shift angles on them. All of that reading will eventually get to me, but for now I think it helps them to be able to draw from a wealth of material for their final essays. I am toying with the idea of having them take all of their essays for theme #2 and combine them into a braided essay. I love braided essays and realized that I first wrote one when I was a senior in college, only I didn’t know what it was then. Since then, I’ve written them all the time and find them to get me much closer to the truth of my essays than that of a normal format. So I would love to try to show my College Comp kids how to do this - or at least offer it as an alternative. I know I have some who would do well with the new form. Others would be lost. I might have to put the idea on hold in the name of getting through the curriculum. Maybe semester I’ll be able to combine the braided essay with the curriculum a little bit better. We’ll see.

All of this thinking in my writing has gotten me pretty fired up for fourth block! Giddyup!