Blog #10

Priebe: Although two or three of the most important ideas of the course are embedded in Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (namely that learning is anxiety producing but that anxiety is also excitement and that learning is social), the three texts which I think will be the most useful in my own teaching are Bean’s Engaging Ideas, Young’s Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum, and Scorcenelli & Elbow’s Writing to Learn; Strategies for Assigning and Responding to Writing Across the Disciplines. These three are the most useful to me as a teacher because they are the most practical. Of the three, the runaway favorite for me is Bean’s Engaging Ideas. This book is filled with excellent advice and guidance on how to come up with exciting assignments that will get the students writing and thinking, which is, of course, as Bean notes, the same thing.

Already this past week, I have assigned my students some reflection paragraphs (93-94), and I graded them using the minus/check/plus system (116). In fact, reading all the different ways there are to keep journals was very enlightening for me. Next semester, I will be undergoing one independent study in which I will be reading and keeping a journal, and reading about all the different methods for keeping a journal led me to the belief that I probably know more about journaling now, then the professor who will be asking me to keep a journal (just a guess). In any event, Bean is exhaustive with his ideas for journals.

Another idea that I used today and will use tomorrow in my Social Studies class is that of frame assignments (126). Bean writes, “Frame assignments are analogous to those old dance lessons for which the instructor pasted footsteps on the floor” (126). As instructed, I will provide my students with a short simple thesis in which they will write two paragraphs giving two different arguments in each. In one, they will pretend to be a entrepreneur who argues in favor of laissez-faire economics (no governmental interference in business) and in the other, they will pretend to be a blue collar worker arguing in favor of the old mercantile system (governments restricting trade to protect their own industries). Now when we studied these last week, I realized that they were diametrically opposed ideas, but Bean gave me the idea of setting up the scenarios and supplying the students with ideas with which to argue each particular case, in effect, pasting the dance steps on the floor for the students to follow.

I, also, found very useful the idea of low stakes and high stakes writing that I read about in Elbow and Scorcinelli, and I have been using this, too. For example, I used it in my Proof and Practice assignment, and I use it in their personal response and exploratory writing. It only makes sense; why grade hard when the students are exploring new ideas and finding their way? Later, after they have worked on two drafts and have gone through the process, then, bring out the big guns and grade with stricter criteria.

Finally, I found Young very pragmatic also. I enjoyed his take on writing to learn and writing to communicate. I particularly enjoyed his example of Thomas Edison’s notebooks or journals. This great inventor thought things out in his diary entries. He used writing to help himself sort out his thoughts. That “writing is thinking” is perhaps the greatest WAC principle there is, and this conviction, the greatest gift of these three books and of the course itself.