Response to Narrative Writing

This week I really struggled to get the reading done for the blog post. I tried to take into account that last week we were advised to read the chapter first. While typically I enjoy Christensen's chapters, this week I just couldn't seem to focus. I also typically enjoy narrative writing, so I'm surprised I didn't enjoy the readings a bit more.

After reading the article The Politics of the Paragraph by Michelle Kenney, I ended up starting a conversation with one of my friends about writing. I very distinctly remember the thesis formula and how we were meant to come up with at least three ideas to dicsuss throughout our essay. However, as I got older I learned that you could have more than just three ideas. Similarly to Erica, I had to learn how to incorporate this into my thesis. Although I never faced nearly as much of a struggle as she did. While I always kept that 5 body formula in mind, and still do when I go to write, I don't strictly follow it.

I have always found a lot of the writing formulas my previous teachers gave me to be quite useful. There are really two formulas that I still think of today, one of which was a hamburger analogy and the other was a graphic organizer called R.A.C.E.S. R.A.C.E.S was very useful in getting my papers started. For those of you who never used this formula, the R stood for response to the prompt, the A stood for answer the question, the C was for citations, the E was to explain the citations and the S was a summary sentence. While these formulas don't particularly apply to narratives, they came to mind while I was reading the Kenney text.

When I was in high school I feel as though we didn't really cover narrative writing much after my freshmen year. While it took me awhile to get through Christensen's chapter, I do feel as though I learned quite a bit about narratives. I found that her dialogue strategy was insightful, as I have always typically shyed away from including dialogue in my works. I also learned about the "Read-Around Procedure", which I don't think I would ever implement in a class. While I was reading about it all I could think is how that would have been my absolute worst nightmare in High School, and would have most likely resulted in me skipping class or making myself sick in order to avoid that. Typically I find Christensen's strategies insightful and I think of how I can include them in my own future lessons, however the Read-Around Procedure is definitely one that I think I might avoid, as it puts shy students in a spotlight they might find to be horrifying rather than helpful.

Response to Poetry

Poetry was something that I always enjoyed analyzing. However, I hated when teachers made us write our own poems in class, it always made me feel extremely unconfortable. I would sit there just staring at my paper or computer screen trying to think of something but nothing ever came. So for me, poetry assignments were pretty awful. I did not find the same self expression other people did and thus I would always dread poetry units. I think this is because I never really learned how to write poetry. I could easily label all of the devices used in a poem and talk about the meaning, but actually writing my own poem was not something I enjoyed. It got to the point where I would sometimes just not do the assignment at all if I knew it wasn't weighted too heavily in my final grade for the class.

After reading the two articles and the chapter on poetry by Christensen, I've learned about how I can use poetry as a future teacher as well as why it is important for students to not just analzye poems, but also write them. One thing all three of the texts have in common is that all of the authors feel very strongly about how it is important for students to write poetry in order to get a deeper meaning from it. Kati Macaluso states that a poem "requires that the writer be keenly present to an experience, and all its characters, sights, sounds and senses" which is something she clearly feels is important for students to do. Jen McConnel, writer of the article The Teacher/ Poet in V Parts also discusses her experiences with teaching poetry. After she had moved to High School she mentions that she initially  stopped having students write their own poetry, soomethig she wishes she could go back and change (as a side note I would like to say that I appreciated the reference she made to Harry Potter with the time-turner comment). McConnel tells us that "If we want our students to be able to go beyond analysis and explore the forms and functions of poetry from a space of creative play, we certainly must encourage them to try on a poetic identity". It seems that both authors know the importance of encouraging students to write poetry.

Linda Christensen writes in her chapter different strategies to get students to write poetry. For some people poetry probably comes a lot easier than to others. I feel as though I never had clear instruction on how to write poetry and that made it much more of a chore. One of the strategies that Christensen tells us about is how she asked her students to "read back over each part and write in the margin what the poet is writing about, how you connect to that part, and why you think it changes his writing style in each section" (Christensen 34). This strategy forces students to look deeper into a poem. Christensen presents a lot of important information that I will be able to apply and use as a teacher one day. Her chapter gives me a better idea of how I can go about teaching this topic in an effective way that I would not have considered before.

Response to 2/12 Articles

The articles Dear White Teachers and Student Athletes Kneel to Level the Playing Field both stuck out to me this week a lot more than I had expected. For the last few years the topics discussed in Student Athletes Kneel to Level the Playing Field have been extremely relevant. I also felt as though I gained a better understanding of Colin Kaepernick and why he did what he did. I also found myself growing angry at the responses people had and still have to this movement, especially our president. The fact that Trump said “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out. He’s fired. He’s fired!’ is insanely infuriating to me. That quote shows that he doesn't really seem to know what is going on and why people are kneeling. If he does know what is going on than that makes me lose even more respect for this man.




Another quoate that really stood out to me in this article was "when we kneel you riot, but when we're shot you're quiet". This quote is sadly quite accurate. Some of the people mentioned in the article that had been shot or had been victims of police brutality I had never even heard of. However I remember hearing and seeing a lot of complaints about Nike after they featured Colin Kaepernick in a commercial. The fact that everyone was so passionate about Nike and claiming that they were going to burn their Nike clothes is insane, especially because I bet a lot of them don't fully understand the kneeling and are just being jerks, to put it nicely.

In regards to the Dear White Teachers article, I think a lot of important points were brought up. As someone who is white, these are points that I can take into consideration as a teacher. An important quote from the article is when a middle school student said "Only certain kids get sent out, for doing the same things white kids do, maybe just a little louder or bolder, so we get caught". I think itt is completely unacceptable for a young student to feel racially attacked at this age. Especially because schools should feel as though they are a safe environment.

Response to Elbow and Belanoff

After reading the article I couldn't help but reflect on my own High School experiences with peer review. While I do understand the importance of it now, when I was younger I used to dread those classes. I distinctly remember purposefully doing the paper at the last minute so that way when my partner or group would review it I could just say sorry I wrote this this morning because I forgot it was due, or make up some other lame excuse. I also remember feeling like I shouldn't be reviewing my classmates papers because they were usually great writers and I did not want to give feedback if it was incorrect.

Looking back, I can very much understand why I disliked peer review, my classmates in High School were extremely competitive and very judgmental, which made pe. People would often make fun of each others pieces or put them down.  I also remember certain teachers using several of the strategies listed by Elbow and Belanoff. Perhaps the one I disliked the most was when the teacher would have us read our writing out loud. I already hated talking to most of my classmates, and whenever we were asked to read out loud people would usually laugh or whisper cruel things. I think the first positive experience I had with peer reviews was here at RIC.

I found that  the reading gave us a lot of useful information that we can one day use as teachers. However, out of the readings we've looked at so far this one was probably the most tedious to read, while reading it I often had to go back because my mind would drift.