Students read them. They vote on which is best. They talk about why they like them. They find identifying characteristics that explain what one does better than the other. Dead silent classes and phrases straight off a rubric that are meaningless, this almost never changes the way students create whatever I’m asking them to create. And, almost as often as not, students vote in droves for the weakest example provided.

If students don’t know why sentence A is vastly superior to sentence B, and even believe that the opposite is true, what do I do about that? If that’s the case, why even bother showing models? Why not resort to direct instruction on one version of a successful sentence? Why not simply have all examples be high marks? Am I going about this wrong by showing highs and lows? Am I expecting too much out of my models? Maybe a long view is in order and the fruits of these labors will come to at a later date. Or maybe those fruits are even impossible to see.

An example: I’m using AFI’s curriculum, as I’ve noted already, with my Speech class. On the first day, we had five videos in the room to look at. I tried my best to just facilitate the group’s discussion of the videos, hoping that they would naturally reach conclusions about why one product was better than another. According to the class, all of the videos did the job, had the right number of camera angles, the correct tone, and pulled it off.

Of the five videos, one had the actor laughing the entire time (the scene is meant to build tension and anxiety), another had one steady shot the whole way through (the requirements stated five shots as a requirement), and a third was the exact same movement over and over filmed from five different angles. There was one video that clearly was better than the rest, but the students didn’t see it quite that way until I pointed a few things out. And at that point, the criteria becomes teacher centered, not student generated. I think that’s the exact opposite of the purpose of models. They have no ownership of that so it likely matters far less than if they reached those conclusions themselves.

I have a hard time separating myself from the use of models, but I also have a hard time gathering up data to advocate for their use. What has your experience been like? And I’m talking any “text” here, not just literature and not just writing. Art, math, science, history, what have you. Drawings, video, labs, live performance, what they do.

Handouts

These are some of the things I’ve used that come from student models.

• Introduction Models (PDF) (Word)
• Picture Write Models (PDF) (Word)
• Body Paragraph Models (PDF) (Word)

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Handouts

• OFOCN Writing (PDF) (Word)
• Rubric (PDF) (Word)

Topics

My experiment for this year was going to be a list of recurring images in the novel along with page numbers. Fog (13,14,42,101,116,119,242…), Animals (13,55,61,142,169,257), Cold (10,31,32,52,67,88,89,100,122,130,237…), Machines, Laughter, Combine, Cross/Jesus, etc. Their job would be to pick one of those images and explain why it’s there, how it adds to the meaning of the novel. I even hinted to the students that this is what we’d be doing, left a few conversations open ended and unresolved because I figured that would be a slight prep for having to come up with their own answers at the end of it all. A brief discussion about McMurphy’s and Harding’s hands stands out as one of these — quotations on the board with no point made about the differences seen and no time to discuss it. I felt this would give them food for later thought.

But when I sat down tonight to create the handout, it seemed like another one of my vague writing assignments that students have bombed on in the past. While I feel like I’ve paved the way for this and I really want students to write about a topic they pick, I can already see the tragic papers I’d comb through. So I switched things to a more traditional and well-defined piece of writing about theme. We’ll work in groups to come up with some ideas about possible themes that exist and then pick from that list for a focus. Our impending Socratic seminar should also help refine some of these theme choices.

Quite a few years on this job and you’d think I’d have basic things like this sorted out in my head. Do you ever run into the trouble of knowing what you want to give to students, but seeing how they can miss the mark? How do you handle it? Did you get a chance to look at the assignment sheet? What do you think?Similar Posts:

• OFOCN: Socratic
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Option One: “Just start with ‘The window broke’ and see where it takes you.”

Some would make like they were pouring over slim feedback from yesterday’s peer editing session, writing tiny notes in the margin that may or may not make it into their final draft. Still others were simply re-reading yesterday’s draft and not putting anything new on the page, executing the perfect thoughtful gaze used to make any teacher just walk on by. But today they couldn’t. I’d throw out one of the two sentences and they had to finish the thought. That was their one task for the next few minutes.

Option Two: “The challenge today is to use dialogue, so start with this: ‘Did you hear that?’ Now finish the story.”

Some students took off from that point, one writing more than I’d seen him write so far in class on anything. So that’s my challenge all year: for every writing assignment, always carry around in my head at least two beginning possibilities to give to a student. Any student not writing during our in-class writing time is given a sentence to use. That will be their first line and using it in the final draft will not affect the final grade.

We worked on First Sentences early on in the year and I’m starting to think that’s an activity to return to, creating a list of possibilities for each prompt we have. I could put together a list of those first sentences after the fact, after I’ve finished grading. I like the idea of starting with models from novels and moving quickly into models from student writing. I also like the idea of a wall covered with great first sentences. Throughout the year, I won’t charge plagiarism if one of the sentences posted in the room begins a paper.

Handouts

All handouts today are Word documents.

• Zombie Writing: Part 2 (narrative)
• First Sentences
• “Michelle on Tape” (how the dialogue challenge entered our conversation about narratives)

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• Good Bad Sentences
• Results
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Buzzing : Grammar Errors

You can hear his words, right? But that buzzing’s distracting, huh? That’s something easily fixed with just a little more time and attention. Recording clear audio is obviously not beyond his capability given the technical knowledge shown by putting this video together in the first place. Grammatical errors are often the same. Didn’t proofread, hit print mere hours before the due date, saw the error but didn’t want to go back and find even more to fix, there are lots of reasons lighter than lack of ability why “then” gets put in place of “than” and such. Is the final piece understandable? Sure, but it’s distracting.

URL “Oops!” : Typos

And how about that flub with how to spell Mozilla at the beginning (0:40)? That doesn’t encourage the audience to trust what this author is about to say. Taking the time to record the audio over again (lay down another audio track, edit out the part where he got it wrong, etc.) would have made this a much stronger piece, something an audience would be far more confident putting faith in. Typos achieve the same drawback: they cause the audience to question the author’s expertise.

There’s More

“You can click on Extensions and add other Extensions” (1:19). But what if the audience doesn’t know what an Extension is? That’s a safe bet about an audience that doesn’t know how to change their Firefox Theme. That search for “status bar… something” (1:28)? Why did he even search for that status bar extension? I thought this was about setting a new Firefox Theme. Seems unplanned, right? Clicking on a Theme he’s “never actually looked at this one, Zune, or something” (2:10)? Shouldn’t he know where he’s going if he’s creating a video teaching how to do something? I haven’t found any spot where he’s wrong, so he has his facts down well, but I also must admit that I stopped watching when I heard “I’m going to skip ahead, skip to, like, twenty or whatever” (2:33). That shows an author who is wandering around without a clear sense of direction, just picking page twenty at random.

In my collection of anti-examples, I’ll keep this video at the ready. Play the first few minutes of this and ask for comments. Ask how this might relate to this class. Later, compare it to the beginning draft of the latest piece of writing. The ideas are coming along just fine, but it’s so clearly a first draft not ready for final publication. More editing needs to happen. Get a few more eyeballs on it and take suggestions. Maybe even having students write comments to this author would help with their peer editing. I’ll keep alert for a first-draft video that appeals to the non-computer constituency. But this video could work well in explaining why ideas, organization, conventions, and [fill in with areas of your writing rubric] matter.Similar Posts:

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1. “How Will I Know” – Whitney Houston
2. “Lights” – Journey
3. “Come To My Window” – Melissa Etheridge
4. “She’s Like The Wind” – Pat Swayze

There were a few others, but these are the four that stand out in my head. The others were just as bad.

Apart from a debate over whether the lyrics are “she’s out of my league” or “she’s out of my reach” on that last one, we decided that today must have been Horrible Music Day in the restaurant. It was at that point I decided that if I could make my very own Day, one that would actually go on the calendar, it would be Horrible Music Day. I would load up my iPod specifically for that purpose, deck out my site with links to awful bands, and generally live the day up to its intended, obvious purpose. I even started to think of the bands that would hold sway over my ears and broadcasting devices that day. And how Streetlight Records would surely thank me for emptying out their clearance bins the week before.

This could make for a good assignment. Given the level of detail I could go into about my Day, the references I’d bring in due to my absolute love of music, and the amount of humor I would at least attempt to insert, that energy would flow over to the students. I’d play samples of songs while giving my talk, even highlight the Horrible-ness of the lyrics through carefully selected pull quotes. And this isn’t a writing sample. This would be a presentation. Part research, too: you have to be sure that your day isn’t a day already somewhere and figure out what other holidays surround yours. Sure, a quick internet search yields good places to start looking (Obscure Holidays, Obscure Commercial Holidays, Bizarre American Holidays, and the like), but that’s just the beginning of the research.

You have to provide a rationale for why your day should exist, describe how to celebrate your day, and the reason for the celebration. The more detail the better (some kind of rubric would have to accompany this) and a poster for your holiday is a must, with all important information included in as few words as possible (set a limit on word count). I can map this to so many standards it isn’t even funny.

Mine

We spend too much time remembering the highlights of any particular decade or period of our lives. “Greatest Hits” line the shelves in record stores and iTunes. This holiday is a chance to bring some perspective to the situation and parade around the worst songs in your collection and your memory. Horrible Music Day is a chance to bring back some of the forgotten tunes of our past and reflect on why those melodies and lyrics failed while others were ushered into the future. Horrible Music Day is a time to have fun with those songs that you hate to hate, love to hate, or even sometimes hate to love. Pull up a boombox and blast some “Amanda” (Boston), “That Smell” (Lynard Skynard), or even “More Than Words” (Extreme) if you dare. Horrible Music Day is the day to bust out your record, tape, or CD collection of “Ashamed-to-have-it” artists like Deee-Lite, Garth Brooks, and Aqua.

Tired of only having silly Summer Bank Holidays in parts of the UK during August? Want to enjoy more than National Catfish, Golf, or Eye Exam month festivities during the eighth month of the year? Sure, Sea Serpent Day is cool, but what can you do with that? Horrible Music Day happens every year on August 7. Start your day off by listening to “How Will I Know” (Whitney Houston) in honor of the first song heard the day this holiday was created. You can also visit horriblemusicday.com, where “How Will I Know” will broadcast every hour, on the hour, all day long. Slyly share your misery with friends throughout the day: mixtapes waiting at the breakfast table, links to Muxtape pages full of Horrible-osity, emails with TinySong Horrible-ittude, memos with Horrible-aceous play lists, and the like. Soon enough, you’ll laugh as you figure out ways to get your friends to listen to worse songs than they are subjecting you to. Be sure to visit horriblemusicday.com in order to vote for the most Horrible song ever, submit your Horrible song lists, and share devious ways to infect Horrible Music on unwitting participants. Horrible Music Day, crank dat Celine Deon!

[image soon to come]

P.S. Looks like I missed the day where I would be able to create this holiday, but maybe that’s the perfect due date for this writing assignment.Similar Posts:

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