I gave the opening speech (wanna read it?) and it went better than I expected. Well, if you don’t count the fact that I brought but forgot to press “record” on a little digital recorder that would have allowed me to share the morning’s speech with you. I’m pissed about that, especially because it went so well.

But anyhow, I successfully walked the line between provocative and welcoming, something I was significantly stressed about this week. It was good and I think it really helped give a focus to the sessions.

A Short Task

As the Super Saturday sessions were going on, the project director and I wanted to get a little flier out to all the participants to have them partake in an online survey from the National Council of English Teachers (NCTE) about the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) provisions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Let me shorten that for you: it’s a survey from NCTE about the NCLB section of ESEA.

Well, maybe it isn’t always convenient to shorten things. But with Web addresses, it’s not only convenient, but sometimes necessary to shorten things.

Unfortunately, NCTE is using Zoomerang to run their survey, so they have an unwieldy, awkward, difficult to remember, and impossible to pass on URL. Our original version of the flier had the long address on it, full of capitalized letters, numbers, question marks, and the like. It’s ugly, so prepare yourself.

http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB2257BN7L3Y9

TinyURL.com, true to its name, provides a short version of long URLs. To our flier that we would pass out to teachers and hope they would take a survey, we added the following URL:

http://www.tinyurl.com/ok77z

Much shorter, easier to remember, and likely to get passed on because of those things. We got lucky in that it has “OK” in it, making it that much easier to remember. If you’re a teacher, take the survey. It should only cost you 2 minutes.

I can easily see TinyURL entering the classroom, offering students a much shorter way of getting to important sites for class. A Blogger site is often a hassle to type into the computer. A TinyURL version may stick in their heads better. My classroom Web site is a long sprawling thing. I should get a TinyURL to pass on to the kids instead of torturing them with “slash” this and “slash” that.

So, use TinyURL whenever you have a long Web address you want other people to remember or if you just want to impress the project director of a program for which you are the tech liaison.Similar Posts:

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Notice how that states my opinion about district offices? That sentence, dubbed “Behold! The Smack Talker!,” is an example of just one of the many sentence formulas shown to us in Marty Brandt’s “Indeed: How To Write ‘Nerd’” workshop, one of the three offerings at today’s SJAWP Super Saturday.

Now Break It Down

The workshop is a good idea: take academic sentences, words, and phrases that typically would not occur to a high schooler to use and break them down into constituent parts. That Smack Talker sentence at the top is Name + Title + Description + Action + What/Who. The nerd aspect of that is the use of an appositive phrase, the phrase where you rename the noun in order to give more information about it. The ending phrase in that last sentence is an example of an appositive phrase, as is “financial black holes of education systems” in my sentence up top.

Other nerd vocabulary presented in Marty’s packet, along with the titles he’s given each sentence type, include:

1. in stark contrast to (“Over-easy”: for establishing contrasts)
2. similarly, mirrors/reflects/mimics/resembles (“Mirror, Mirror”: for establishing similarities)
3. whereas, in contrast to, while (“Establishing Contrast”: for… uh… you guess)
4. unlike (“Bizarro World”: for establishing opposites)
5. like, as, just as, too, likewise, also (“The Biter”: for relationships that express imitation)
6. suggests that, but in fact (“What It Is!”: for first showing what something is not and then showing what it is)
7. although, while it may be true that, just because, this doesn’t necessarily mean that, don’t think for a moment that (“The U-turn Sentence”: again, showing what something isn’t, then showing what it is)

Nerd Bingo!

This is all presented in charts that are easily filled in (I’ll make this a link once Marty sends me the files). The other necessary components of the sentence are listed across the top as a formula so students have something that looks like a Bingo chart that they fill in with the appropriate word or words. One sentence pattern he calls “The North Face,” modeled after Krakauer’s opening line from Into Thin Air, a sentence that I imitated each day for a week back in January, has a pretty complex construction. Doing what? + Description + Who + Action + Action + Action + What. Yikes! But filling in a bunch of boxes makes coming up with that sentence fairly easy.

Bring The Language Into The Classroom

Marty always does well to integrate vocabulary of students into his discussions, creating connections with students and showing the relevance of the lingo they use. “Nerd Life” is his incarnation of “Thug Life.” He reports that they’ve got a sign (left hand holding a two-fingered “peace” sign, but tilted so it’s a greater-than sign, indicating that Nerd Life is greater than Thug Life) and students pass him in the halls calling out “Nerd Life!” This is something I stole from Marty almost as soon as I met him. The adoption of the lingo to describe things in the classroom, not the Nerd Life sign. I just found out about that today. Give me some time and I’ll take on his task of recreating the term “nerd” into something more hip. Or at least something more ironic.

Add Inductive Reasoning

Something he mentioned is that some of these constructions make rather effective thesis statements. To add to that idea, what if students wrote a brief summary of the text under study? Just list the facts, no opinion, no interpretation, no reflection. Then, with that summary in hand, complete one of these charts, thereby stating a conclusion reached about the literature.

“According to,” “in general,” and something like the construction of Writer, + author of + Text, + clearly indicates/makes known/presents the idea that + Main or Secondary Character + is/discovers + What? pop into my head as what I can add to the good list Marty has started. What other nerdy phrases are there? What are some other sentence constructions to show students? Once shown, how do we encourage integration of those new structures into writing in any authentic way, so that the new construction doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb in otherwise uninspired writing?Similar Posts:

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