Week 7, Response to Classmate's Journal

One of the aspects of creative writing I'm struggling with the most is the time spent in the classroom working on it. Block scheduling does have some advantages, because we have 90 minutes a class. On the other hand, we have so much material to cover in a semester along with all the standards that are on the American Literature EOCT. Right now, I'm doing it about once a week, but I'm not sure if that is enough. It's hard to balance the two things with all the other writing that we have to do. Does anybody else feel the same way? It's just something that I'm struggling with right now.--Chris 


Chris, I felt the same way last year. I tried a few things this year that worked really nicely with my students. As I have mentioned before, my students have a difficult time with purpose. I know that you are seeing this in your classrooms as well due to Facebook, texting, etc. For that reason, we looked at examples from both Facebook and text messages and corrected them. Then, students are responsible for answering a Blog Question each week online. (If you don't have access to myschooldesk.net --you need it). This allows them to write in a technical way that is still appropriate. Another thing I tried was having Writing Wednesday. I started this because last year, my students were not writing enough. I made it like workouts; I picked a day and stuck with it. My students like it because they don't have to bring anything but paper and pen on Wednesday. Also, we may do anything from writing an analytical paragraph to making a brochure. This has helped me integrate High Order Thinking as well as some of the strategies from class. Now, I know that all of these seems nice but useless in the face of testing. Actually, my students have been retaining the information and doing better on common assessments if they write about it. In fact, that's how I've been teaching literary terms. They define setting, they read setting, they write setting.