So, here I am endeavoring to write for at least fifteen minutes today. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what I should write about. A myriad of topics floats through my cranium, but nothing is sticking. It must be this multi-tasking world we live in. It seems that most writing these days is just done in blurts and splurts and hiccups: a text, a Facebook status update, a Tweet. Perhaps we eke out a blog post if we’re waxing verbose, but that’s only on a good day, right? Is that symbolic of how fragmented our lives have become? I wonder.
It’s been pretty hard to get my 7th graders to string together complete thoughts this year. Forget paragraphs right now; we’re working with capitalization + (subject+verb) + punctuation = complete sentence. Hopefully soon there will be some progress. Don’t get me wrong, the ideas are there, and they’re pretty dang spiffy if you ask me; I don’t think I’ve had such a unique (to be read “random”) group when it comes to generating ideas. But the conventionality distracts even the best readers from coherent meanings.
I did an activity today where I took their “final” drafts, which had supposedly been revised and perfected, and orally exposed their flaws to the entire class. My tongue and lips tied themselves into knots worthy of eleven-year-old scouts. And they couldn’t even see the egregious errors in homophones, which we had supposedly just covered! I’d post some examples, but no one should suffer as I did today.
The point? I think they caught how they need to be courteous to their readers, how revision (especially oral) really does make a difference, especially if they have an audience.
My new goal this year is for my students to put several related thoughts together and convey them meaningfully to a given audience. Oh wait! That’s what it already was. I guess I have my work cut out for me this year. Gotta break the textspeakers! LOL ;P
No comments:
Post a Comment