"40 percent of high school seniors never..."

I was looking through the Kajder text for a topic to write about and I found a statistic that I had highlighted.  Kajder's statistic, "40 percent of high school seniors never or rarely write a paper of three or more pages," shocked me at first, until I realized that I hadn't either.  I remember having to write my graduation project paper, which was the longest paper that students had to write in my high school.  This paper had to be between three and four pages long.  I remember thinking that there was no way I was going to have that much to say.  Little did I know, I would come to college and have to write papers two or three times as long.  Looking back, I wish I would have been required to write longer papers.  I wasn't prepared to write four page papers, let alone trying to write ten pages.

Story Trees- Without Using Technology

While in field, I had my students do an activity somewhat like Story Trees, except without using technology.  I gave my students a prompt and had them write the start of a fictional story for one minute.  Then, I had them pass their papers to the student behind them.  All students would read the story that they were given and continue to write for one minute.  I had the students continue this process until they got their own papers back.  Again, they were given one minute to write an ending to the story that they had started.  The students had so much fun with this activity.  Nearly all of the students wanted to read their stories aloud, although we didn't have time.  I have never seen students get so excited about writing, which is why if feel that informal writing is so important.  Because of my experience with this activity, I feel that students would really enjoy writing with Story Trees (using Webspiration) if they had the technology.  If not, this is an alternative activity that they would also enjoy!

To Teach or Not to Teach

In one of my classes we have been talking about the prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar issue.  We have been reading articles and studies that have found that teaching prescriptive grammar can actually be harmful.  It may negatively affect a student's reading and writing ability.  Although I do not know if these studies are true, it is discouraging to not know what to teach.  Should I even correct grammatical mistakes or should I focus only on the writing process? 

Pairing Movies with Books

“It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”- Quotation from Crash

What do you think this quotation means?  Does it apply to your life?

***This is an example of one discussion board post that I would have students respond to.  I would pair Crash with a related novel and use this quotation as an introduction to the movie.  I would also ask students to answer the same question after having watched the movie.  Do you think this would be beneficial?***

Pinterest!

Firstly, I LOVE the website Pinterest.com!  In class we have been talking about ways to use different websites in the classroom and this is one that I would really enjoy using.  Pinterest is so inspirational and I feel that it could be incorporated into the classroom for informal writing assignments (which are very important, in my opinion).  Given the picture above, I could write pages and pages about how this quotation applies to my life and to life in general.  This type of assignment would hopefully inspire my students and make them enjoy writing.  Any ideas??