Final Blog!!

Final Final Blog Post!

Hi Observers,

I’ve been treating the last few blogs as my “final blogs,” but I think this one really is.

Wednesday was our last day of class! It was also my birthday, which made it a super special day. During our class discussion I found myself thinking about my dad. When I was in high school he told me, “If you can write well, you can do anything.” I remember the moment he told me that I was trying to decide if Id follow an “English major” path, follow my writing heart, or go in a different direction. That pretty much decided it. I knew that my father’s view was biased (he is a creative writing professor), but I also knew that he wouldn’t steer me wrong. Today is seems laughable to think of myself doing anything other than this. His advice, “If you can write well, you can do anything,” is what has propelled me to this point. The heart of this statement is transfer. When people joked about the usefulness of a Dramatic Writing degree, the value in poetry and words, I simply shrugged. The degree wasn’t what was important. I can write well. Everyone needs a good writer. I realize this isn’t a sound life philosophy. Even so, it pulled me through some times when I felt my writer heart was broken.
When we argue about transfer, the usefulness of the English classroom, the future Freshman Year Composition, I feel my writer heart break. Again, it is mended by my father’s advice. If you can write well, you can do anything.
In my ENC 1101 class, I want to teach my students how to write well so they can do anything. Yes, writing   a biology report and a creative essay are completely different. However, I think there are many points of good writing that are universal. Critical and Creative thinking. Critical Reading. Grammar. Technique. Another part of teaching students to write well is to show them how to enjoy writing, how to see themselves as writers, not outsiders briefly visiting the writing world. When students can write well, the process of transfer comes naturally.
Maybe that’s a little naïve, but it’s what’s propelling me forward now.
In my imaginary classroom, transfer is part of our vocabulary from the start. Transfer is present in the classroom as we grow and learn as a community.

From the mirror,
Claire 

Reflection Blog 2011

Hi Observers,

It’s hard to imagine that only six weeks have passed since I first entered this “Teaching English as a Guided Study” classroom. Indeed, it’s strange to look at my blog and see only five posts. Is that possible? I keep scrolling through them, convinced that I’ve somehow misunderstood the assignment. I whisper to Bethany, sitting to my right, “Only five?” For the amount that I’ve learned this session, surely I should have 100 blog posts, not some measly five (well, six including this one). Bethany gives me a puzzled look, then scrolls through her own. “That’s how many I have,” she says. Now we’re both questioning whether or not we’ve fulfilled the assignment.
The truth is, five is right. It just doesn’t feel like it should be. Today I feel very far away from the girl who walked into this classroom six weeks ago, late, flustered, nervous. I didn’t even really understand the “Key Term” assignment. I knew so little about my future classroom that choosing a key term seemed nearly impossible. I felt there were simultaneously too many options and none at all. I don’t know my class yet, so how can I choose a term for them? It felt like such a strange place to be in, talking about these hypothetical students, imagining what will and won’t work for them. That’s why I used the “one-way mirror” metaphor in my first post. Ultimately, I chose “Classroom Community” because that was what all of my favorite classes in undergrad had: Community.
            When I chose the term, all I knew was that successful classrooms had it and I wanted it. Slowly, I started to break that down into some more manageable pieces: Respect. Accountability. Honesty. Safety. I traced my term through the readings, and once I entered my internship, my hypothetical class at least started to seem a little more real.
            Sometimes, though, I struggled to see my key term in the readings. These readings were heavy, and not necessarily stuff that I’d ever read just for kicks. A lot of it covered concepts that I’d never encountered in my undergraduate career, so I was constantly referencing other sources just to try to understand the one I was supposed to be reading. Sometimes I’d sit down to write my blog and really not want to write about the readings. I’d want to write about my internship or those favorite undergraduate classes of mine. BUT! I found that through rambling in my blog posts, I often came around to my key term and the readings without even realizing it.
            Now I understand that classroom community isn’t something that a class just has. I know it’s something that really has to be worked at and cultivated, nurtured by both students and teacher.

from the mirror,
Claire 

Hi Observers,

            Can you believe that internships are officially over, and we only have a week of class left? Less than a week. Four days. Unbelievable. I remember being terrified about my internship and really wishing there was some way I could get out of it. Going to class, doing tons of critical reading, thinking and writing…  Fine. That I can do. But when DCT said, “You’ll be teaching one day with your mentor in the room and one day on your own,” I wanted to cry. It struck me as the most daunting task ever. A task I was in no way prepared for. That was only five short weeks ago. I’m proud to say that when I left my internship on Thursday I knew each of those students names, their strengths and weakness, and I could honestly write on their last papers, “Your writing has improved so much!” Even better, they insisted I return for an encore performance on Wednesday, and I was more than happy to say, “of course!” I’ve learned so much from those seventeen students and my mentor, more than I’ve learned from the hours of class spent discussing pedagogy and more than the hundreds of pages I’ve read on theory and practice. Every day when we discussed readings, workshopped papers or read aloud the writing activities, I asked myself, “Why does this class have such great community? What’s going on here? How can I bottle this up and use it in my classroom in the fall?”
            I know now that it isn’t just one thing. And, sadly, it’s not something that can be bottled and transferred from classroom to classroom. It’s something that must be cultivated and nurtured by instructor and students. The recipe for classroom community has lots different ingredients, many of which I’ve discussed in past blog posts. One activity that, without a doubt, nurtures a sense of classroom community is workshopping among peers. It’s something that we do every day in my internship.
            This week we read an article by Muriel Harris, Collaboration is Not Collaboration is Not Collaboration, in which the author outlined the similarities and differences between writing center tutorials and peer response groups.  The benefits of workshopping are undeniable. Peer-response groups encourage honesty, accountability and respect among students. These are three key ingredients to classroom community that, without workshopping, would be hard to effectively cultivate. The article notes a number of different benefits of peer response groups, which includes that it “develops a better sense of audience, reduces paper grading, exposes students to a variety of writing styles, motivates them to revise, and develops a sense of community” (Harris, 372).
            This weekend I’ve been creating my course schedule for my fall section of ENC 1101, and it seems that every week we are doing some sort of peer-response group, be it as a class or as pairs or as small groups. Every day the students will be encouraged to share their free writes with their peers. Although sharing and peer response groups can be scary at first, I think that students will immediately see the benefits. I’m confident that my classroom in the fall will have a strong sense of classroom community.

Bring it on, Fall 2011.

from the mirror,
Claire 

Authorship and Classroom Community (and another weird extended metaphor)

Hi observers,

Last week I spent some time with my cousin’s children, Drew, 4, and Brady, 6. We were swimming in the pool at my apartment.  Drew would swim to the left, so would Brady. Drew would swim back to the steps, so would Brady. Drew would plunge under the water, so would Brady. You get the idea. Drew emerged from the water exasperated.


Drew: (Whine)
Brady: (Whine)
Drew: Stop it!
Brady: Stop it!
Drew: He’s copying me!
Brady: He’s copying me!


In my head, I replaced the word copying with “plagiarizing.”


Drew: Stop plagiarizing me!
Brady: Stop plagiarizing me!


The change in language made me giggle, which further upset Drew, but also altered the way I thought about plagiarism.

I dislike plagiarism for a number of reasons, one of which is I, like Drew, find it terribly annoying. The other is that it is constantly changing, which is also incredibly irritating. Price notes in her article that one of the main obstacles to solving the problem of plagiarism is people like me who just want to pretend that plagiarism is “something fixed and absolute” (Price, 89). Ok, so it isn’t a static problem, and pretending it is won’t solve any problems. The simple fact that I could see plagiarism in a petty argument between 4 and 6 year-olds further illustrates that this issue has many different manifestations.


Drew and Brady were at each others throats for the rest of the day, partly because they were both tired and hungry, but for the sake of this blog let’s pretend it was due to Brady’s plagiarism. Because Drew saw himself as the “author” of his actions, he was pissed off, and rightly so, by his brother’s blatant copying. My key term is classroom community; as I watched Brady and Drew, I couldn’t help but think that if they were my in my classroom, Brady’s actions would have been detrimental to the community.


I want all of my students to see themselves as authors. Too often students see “authorship” as something far from themselves, separate from what they are doing when they write a paper for class. Kelly Ritter touches on this in her article “The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition.” She pinpoints one of the many problems creating plagiarism as students’ “negligible desire to do one’s own writing, or to be an author, with all that entails in this era of faceless authorship vis-à-vis the Internet” (Ritter, 609). By reinforcing the role of the author in my classroom, I hope to erase this sense of “faceless authorship.”


We are all authors. Me. Brady. Drew. The students in my class that I haven’t met yet— yep, authors. All of us. Articles don’t write themselves. Neither do the essays you can buy online. And plagiarizing any author, anywhere is a slap in the face to the rest of us. Classroom community is dependent on trust, integrity and respect for the author. Although the definition of plagiarism is always changing, I doubt it will ever fall under that classification.

The bottom line is plagiarism is not a victimless crime. In fact, it’s a victim-full crime. Plagiarism anywhere fucks with the rest of us, from just pissing us off to inspiring fear that our own works may be plagiarized too. So, I challenge my students to think of it this way:


Ladies, when you go to prom and that girl who sits next to you in math is wearing the SAME DRESS as you (and you know she knew you were going to wear it because you were talking about it in class) it pisses you off, right? That nasty ho, she knew exactly what she was doing when she bought that dress…. Yeah, think of that next time you consider plagiarizing another author’s work. Don’t be a nasty ho.


Fellas, you come up with a killer date idea to win over Cindy, the hottest girl in school, and you share it with your pals over lunch. Then Adam steals the idea, and gets to Cindy before you do. That sucks right? And it’s clear that Adam is a lame friend who will never amount to anything in life. Think of plagiarism like that. You don’t want to be a lame friend, do you?


(Do those examples even make sense? Maybe a little?)


From the mirror,
Claire


ps- look at this:  http://badplagiarism.weebly.com/

Hi Observers,

Ah, technology… as all the articles this week make explicitly clear, there’s no escaping it. For the record, I’m not a technology person, but technology doesn’t care how I feel or that I spent an hour crying while trying to set up my wireless router. Technology keeps progressing despite my trepidations, despite how I say, “Whoa, technology, let’s take things a little slower. I’m not that kind of girl...” Technology doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow down. So, despite how it pains me to say this, I’ve got to start thinking about how technology will impact my classroom.

Fine, I’m thinking about it. And this is what I think: Technology plays a large role in all our lives whether we like to admit it or not. I’m typing on my Macbook Pro, my Blackberry is within arm’s reach, Facebook is open, itunes is playing, my Wii is glowing, and when I’m done typing this I’ll post it to my fancy blog. For a non-tech person, I’ve got at least the standard amount of technology surrounding me at this moment, and the odds are good that even the “non-tech” students of mine will know more about it than I do. But is all this technology really good for us?

My key term is classroom community, and I’m having a hard time figuring out why I’d employ technology like blogs and blackboard when we can just have the real thing in the classroom. Why do we need to have blackboard discussions when we can have real life ones? I realize that blogs can help create a sense of community, but I don’t want to create a virtual community, I want to create a real one. I don’t want my students to feel protected behind the computer screen. I don’t want to reward anonymity. I don’t want to teach students that they only way they can speak their minds is if they do it from a keyboard.  We are a generation shaped by technology, but that isn’t an exclusively positive statement. Kids can set up a wireless router better than I can, but they can’t carry on a normal conversation or form a thoughtful argument without a computer screen in front of them.

So, yes, I concede that technology is very much a part of my life and a part of my students lives. I just haven’t come to terms with how that technology is going to help build community, when all I see it as doing is creating a flimsy, virtual sense of it. Yes, online communities are very real to those who participate in them, but my classroom isn’t an online community and it doesn’t need to be. We’re an in-the-flesh community, and I want my students to do in-the-flesh things to build relationships and knowledge.

I know this isn’t the end of my discussion with technology. This is only round one of many, many rounds, and even though I seem angry and bitter, I’d like the day to come when technology and I can reconcile our differences and create an even better, even awesome-er classroom/virtual hybrid community.

From the mirror,
Claire 

Room for Voices

Hi observers,

Welcome to week two, blog two.
Official Key Term: Classroom Community.
            This week I started my internship in an ENC 1101 class, and officially stepped from behind the mirror into WMS room 120. Initially, I was terrified. As a person with some hermit-like tendencies, I was nervous to move from behind the safety of my dark observation window into daylight. After meeting with my mentor, I secretly fretted that he and I were a bad match. If I had to choose one word to describe each of us, his would be “intense” while mine would be “sensitive.” Only occasionally do people call me intense, and it is usually to say I’m “intensely sensitive.” I wrung my hands. Is there room for “intense” and “sensitive” in one classroom? Where do I fit? How can I make my voice heard? How do I step up and make “sensitive” as loud as “intense?”
Three days of observation and participation yielded these answers: 

            A successful classroom allows room for all voices, be it a dissenting student’s voice or the tentative voice of an inexperienced intern.  In fact, a classroom with strong community encourages those differing voices to emerge. One way I think this is achieved is by an equal distribution of respect amongst teacher and students and by balancing criticism with praise. The teacher needs to create an environment where all voices are valued, no matter how intense or sensitive. I think this environment is achieved by explaining to students that we, as scholars, are situated on an even playing field—a playing field where the ultimate win comes from challenging ourselves and learning from each other, not from speeding through assignments or disregarding differing opinions.
            After three days, it was clear to me that my voice as a “sensitive” person didn’t have to work in opposition with my mentor’s intensity.  Just as student’s voices work together to create a more whole learning environment, my voice and my mentor’s can compliment each other.  


Classroom Community Lesson : Make Room for Voices


from the mirror,
Claire 

The Mirror

Hi Observers,

My brother and I both attended the lab school on Georgia Southern University campus for our preschool education. What I remember most about those days, other than finger painting and cafeteria lunches, is the one-way mirror. In my memory, an entire wall was dedicated to the mirror, and I regarded it as nothing more than a spot to try out my silliest faces. One day my mother took me with her to pick up my brother from his (older) preschool class. We were early, so she took us into a small, dark room. I remember the room was quiet and filled with desks. College students and parents sat quietly, watching the wall like children at an aquarium, enthralled.  After some moments of confusion, I came to realize that my mother and I were on the opposite side of the mirror; the picture on the wall that riveted viewers was really the interior of our preschool classroom.

During this first week of Bootcamp, I often got the sensation that I was again behind the one-way mirror— observing the way students learn, trying to decipher what works and what doesn’t, attempting to peek into the brain of the ever elusive, ever changing “student.” Each article we read broadens the one-way mirror, and the picture of my future classroom becomes less muddy, less hypothetical and more real. This blog is where I’ll write about my observations from behind the one-way mirror and how I’ll apply my key term to my future class.

I think the key to a great classroom often begins with the community within the class—the relationships that are built between four walls: room 216 at 8am on M/W/F. The effectiveness of a classroom hinges on the relationship that the professor has with the students, the students have with the professor, and the students have with each other. In the classroom, an environment of engagement and responsibility cultivates good writing.

So, my question is: How does one build community within a classroom? What can I do, as a teacher, to cultivate community among my students?

Some key terms that I’ve been thinking about (which relate to building community): 

Student Engagement
Revision/Peer review/ Shared Journaling/ Workshopping
Student Empowerment/ Voice/ Identity
Space/Classroom

From the mirror,
Claire