I've been thinking a lot about writing. I've never been a big writer at all. I've always wanted to be a writer. I've always wanted to keep a diary. I've never been able to. The only time I consistently remember writing is during the Myspace and xanga era and then again when Facebook notes were a thing. I've been told that I have a way with words (whatever that means), but I've never enjoyed writing on my own. Social media was my motivation. I like the attention. I love when people see me in between classes and tell me how much they loved my facebook status the other day. I love when my friends tell me they were laughing out loud over a piece I wrote on Tumblr. I, like my students, need a real world purpose.
Recently, reflecting on my teaching, I realized that I am not a huge proponent for writing. In my early essays and teaching philosophies, I stress that all aspects of English are equally valuable for students-- they need to be able to read, write, and discuss in order to fully grasp the content. In practice, however, I find myself gravitating towards fun activities and Socratic Seminars, mostly because my students hate writing. This is not a good approach, though. That is why, in planning my first unit for next semester, I made a conscience decision to include writing in a big way. The unit is Freakonomics, a very interesting book with just about zero unifying themes-- the perfect book for blog posts. I've comprised ten tough statements to discuss in a pre-reading activity. My idea is that students will continue to examine these ten statements throughout the reading of the text and discuss them in blogs. I want them to be able to pull quotes from the text to support their opinion on either side (the statements are things like, people will do anything if the incentive is big enough). This way, hopefully, the writing will be interesting for them because they will be expressing their opinions and they will have the real world audience of their peers and the rest of the internet. Like in this class, students will have blog partners and will be required to reply in some way to their partner's blog. Students will know that people other than me are reading their blogs.
I've also been getting into Thought Catalog a lot recently. I love the short, hilarious, non-fiction pieces and plan to incorporate this into one of my units (probably my Into the Wild unit). I think that the idea of getting their writing onto a real website is a cool motivating factor for my students. However, Thought Catalog is pretty selective, so there will need to be a lot of conferencing to make sure the pieces are good enough. I have anticipated, though, that if the students feel they've done a really good job on their piece and it doesn't get onto the website, it may be discouraging. I'm toying with the idea of creating my own class tumblr where I can put up students' exceptional writing. Students will still want to be good enough to get on the website, but it's less constrained.
Creative writing is what I'm most passionate about, though, and am so excited to incorporate poetry (especially spoken word) into my Raisin in the Sun and Great Gatsby units (as well as in my informational units, just not as prominently). The fact of the matter is, spoken word is freaking cool. I want to show my students that there are people out there doing this still, people their age, and encourage them to record their poems. I'll also create a youtube channel for that work. I really think that social media is a fantastic motivating factor for students of this generation.
These are all just ideas, but I want to make sure that I'm not neglecting writing. Hopefully I find ways like these to make writing interesting and meaningful for my students!
Please please enjoy some of my favorite spoken word videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgxU73Eifgs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVD-HsHoUNM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0QiFy8dmX0