Surprisingly, the fact Christensen mentioned, in general, English teachers consider writing a narrative essay a child-play for high school students. What an attitude! As an English teacher, I find this viable to start with for my language deprived high school students Christensen made sense when she encouraged students to move up their narrative writing skills after capturing the skills and then study other authors' construction styles.
Playing with language is fun! Christensen repeatedly emphasized how important it is to let students play with the language after learning how authors construct their work. Not only this but also I like when she suggested that to write narrative stories will build community and connect their lives to the curriculum. She made more sense that the method of sharing stories are to bust the myth of our society and increase feeling safe to take academic risks.
I tagged a lot of the pages with notes in the book because I definitely want to use those ideas for my classes! I am feeling so excited and hope that they will bring the best out of my Deaf students. Speaking of one topic related to social injustice. I thought of Brett Kavanaugh and I discussed him for the quick write session. One of my female students mentioned that Brett has a "UGH" at the suffix of his last name. She said it was a perfect fit last name for Brett. I laughed at her for her sense of humor. I really enjoyed the discussion and what I learned from Christensen did work very well.
Christensen's suggestions to use the past, current, and ongoing issues to go at parallel with classic novels and short stories as part of a writing assignment. What a great idea!
My favorite teaching philosophy of Christensen's is she does not grade the papers, but to give them credit for their efforts and show how much they work on their essays through revision and edit.
Christensen focuses a lot on poverty and racial difference while I am not in the same boat. However, I am in a similar situation with the poverty part, but as for the students, they are more about being Deaf than their race. For example, Deaf students faced discrimination based on their hearing loss in employment, education, and society. One of the narrative essays Christensen's students wrote used a word that strikes me is "handicapable." How true! Most of the Deaf people hated the word, "handicapped." The Deaf community prefers to be called disabled than handicapped. After reading a student's story, I will go for "handicapable."
Michelle Kenney's Politics of Paragraph strikes me the truth behind 5 Paragraph rule. Almost daily, my Deaf students would ask me repeatedly, "How many paragraphs do I have to have?" I told them they need the basic 5 Paragraph to start with. They still did not get it because they would ask a very same question again and again. I felt like cringe them and say, "Please stop asking this question because it drives me crazy!" Thanks to Michelle, I know I am not only one! I enjoy how much she uses food as metaphors to writing tools. Now, I know the complete truth that there are not very many good English teachers out there right now because they are so stuck to traditional English teaching methods. Not everyone thinks like the Ivy League students.
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Danling Fu hits it on the nose when introducing Four Stages of ELL’s Writing Development. It is exactly what the teachers of Deaf and Hard ... -
Surprisingly, the fact Christensen mentioned, in general, English teachers consider writing a narrative essay a child-play for high school s...
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After reading about Linda Christensen, I was inspired to find out that she is from Oregon, my birthplace. I easily picture the images of Gra...
That part about Kavanaugh really got me. I never thought about that, but it is hilarious because that's just the natural reaction to hearing his name or him speaking.
ReplyDeleteTalking about the handicapable piece, I found reading it to be very thought-provoking because the student was really upset at being treated like a "charity case" just because their parents have a disability. As was stated, they had plenty of food and they were not unable to take care of their child, so why did those people feel the need to do something so irrelevant? I call that lazy generosity. When people do something that makes them feel good even when it doesn't help the recipient.
That student also turned away from their parents because there was that initial shame that resulted from being different than other families, which kids hate. All they want to do is blend in so that they don't end up targets for bullying or pity. Schools, and by extension society, does that sometimes. It creates these divides among people because they don't fit into easy categories, but that's not how life works.
Also it's great that you brought up students bugging you about how many paragraphs they need to do. There are certain questions that students will ask over and over again and we have to just keep finding new ways of explaining it to them and hoping it sticks this time. It's interesting because I think by giving students a default of five paragraphs, they'll adjust their ideas to fit the paragraphs. But if you tell them to figure out ideas and then decide how many paragraphs an idea will take, that gets them planning their own approaches to the assignment.
Deba,
ReplyDeleteI love how you brought in your own experience of teaching and how your students ask the same questions we do in class! Whenever we receive a writing assignment the first question we ask is "how long does it have to be?". I personally love that we never get a definite answer because it leaves it up to us. It gives us the freedom to run with it and do what feels right for us!
Deba, I like that you mentioned how Christensen doesn't grade her student's papers, but rather giving them credit for completed work, and noting if and when they make adjustments to their writing. I think it's important that we encourage our students to write, review, and edit their work not for grades, but because writing is such an important part of everyday life. I remember getting so frustrated when I would get a grade on an narrative paper, with the teacher writing about how what I said wasn't good or right. How can you grade someone on their personal experiences? My structure and format were good, she just didn't like the content. That's not fair grading, in my opinion. Thanks for your post, I enjoy reading your writing!
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