Beyond School

lUploaded by sleepcirque
on 6 Oct ‘06, 10.24pm PDT.

One more thing: Chris Watson and Bruce Schauble in Hawaii and I (in Korea) have been talking on Skype conference calls for the past couple weekends about all the things we’re exploring.

One big topic is, of course, student blogging. Our “framing questions,” as the Hawaiians might put it, are:

1. How do we use blogs to develop student enjoyment of writing at the same time we develop writing skills? (In other words, how can it be “real” and “rigorous” at the same time? The perils of “MySpace” drivel-cum-English “homework.”)
2. How do we manage the wider communal perceptions of student blogging, creating buy-in from parents, teachers, and administrators in the current (and, I swear, uniquely American) atmosphere of DOPA-inspired hysteria and paranoia?

I’ll only address the first question here, and give my latest attempt.

Simply: I started my English students blogging two or three months ago. I did not prescribe topics for their posts because I want them to experience being writers, not students. Writers write about what writers want to write about.

I did, however, tell them that each month, they would choose the best five blog posts from their monthly output of 12 for a “test” grade. Otherwise, if they were blogging three times a week for what looked like a respectably engaged 20 minutes (or 200 words) or so, they got full credit for their weekly journaling “homework” grade.

It’s early, so the results are not surprising: much of what these 15-year-olds are writing displays the regrettable (but again, predictable) lack of substance, style, maturity, and the whole shebang that “homework writers”–students who have never written in school for anything but extrinsic reasons–produce in more traditional classrooms.

But it’s embarrassing–for me and, if only they would realize it, them.

Swooning puppy-love poems with nary a hint of figurative language, poetic devices, or rhythm–spilt amour; nihilistic rock lyrics that would never fit into a song because employing the meter of, say, the ballad form I taught them never entered the writers’ minds (all of that being, after all, “school stuff”)–spilt teen angst; trembling pronouncements that yes, our team won the basketball tournament and we are, indeed, true champions; homilies to money, celebrities, the latest “American Idol” star–couch-potato yearnings.

Is that all there is?

Actually, no: there are some stars in this dark sky. A few. (But isn’t that the norm for an English teacher?)

Anyway, I told the students to choose their best posts based on these criteria:

* quality of ideas
* quality of writing
* maturity (which doesn’t mean “seriousness,” necessarily, at all)
* quality of titles
* quality of engagement (we can all tell, can’t we?)
* quality of presentation

I think that’s all (I’m going from memory).

But my hope is this: the grades they get for this “test”–my Korean students seem to care more for grades and less for learning, generally (maybe it’s just a global teen thing?)–will motivate them to think about the above bullets more seriously as they go into their next month of blogging.

Because it’s all developmental–for them and me. We’re learning as we go.

P.S. For another time, maybe: I’m also trying to get these Yale wannabees to think of their blogs as their “online portfolios” for college interviews. I can’t tell if they get it yet.