Hello class! Spring Break is on the horizon. My biggest hope for all you is that you can take a spring break from your screens, or unpleasant information funnels as I've started to think of them. Sunshine, greenery, fresh air, schedule-less days... that's what I see on our horizons. In this blog post, probably the last before spring break, I want to take a step back and share with you the cognitive theory and reasoning for your revision projects. We'll do a little bit of metacognitive work by looking at and reflecting on four anonymous student summative responses on the rewriting experience. Here's the first one: Student Response #1Looking over not only my own work, but also my group’s work, I was able to find missing holes and inconsistences my essay had. I realized throughout to add more details and information to my essay to provide better clarity. I learned to push myself in the realm of understanding a bit further rather than skimming the surface. This student's experience reveals something foundational to the science behind writing instruction: we learn how to write, and how to write better, by reading. Just like we learned how to speak by listening. First, our brains absorb, then our brains can create. Maybe I've already talked about mirror neurons, but I'll mention them again: when we see something doing a task, there are neurons in our brains that fire as though we ourselves are performing the task. All this to say, we learn by reading from the exemplary student examples provided by the College Board. But we also learn from reading each other's work. At my MFA program, my mentors repeatedly said this before workshops, during workshops: writers get a large benefit from looking critically at the work of others, possibly as much benefit as they reap from having their own work looked at. Neurologically, I think this has to do with the way our brains process and apply information, specifically how our brains transfer information and apply it to new contexts. So, there's a selfish reason for workshopping your peers: it makes you a better writer. Student Response #2Woah! I initially thought that writing this second draft would be relatively simple. I had the impression that I would just make the edits and call it a day. I did not foresee that as I wrote, my ideas about the narrator changed. Something I thought a lot about during the workshop was the narrator’s purpose for criticising the gentlefolk. I asked, “why would the narrator go out of their way to criticise people they don’t even like, and who is the narrator’s intended audience?” That opened up the idea of the narrator being jealous of the gentlefolk’s carefree life, and then that idea seemed to take off for me. I didn’t know where I would incorporate the idea because it felt like everything I previously said built up to this idea, that’s why I talked about jealousy in the conclusion. Student Response #3I had no idea how much my thinking could change over the course of writing a second draft. This taught me when writing this essay to dig deeper and ask questions about the characters’ motivations and intended audiences in the context of the story. Students two and three stumbled upon a truth that all writers know: writing isn't just a pathway to a product (like an essay, a book, whatever). Writing is also a tool for thinking. When you revise a piece of writing, you are rethinking it. But this time you are starting from a deeper vantage point than you did before. As I've said in the past, I think of it as excavating meaning. In the first draft, you dig into some kind of meaning or other. If you keep digging in the second draft, you have the opportunity to unearth the really good stuff, the Indiana Jones type artifacts. The gems. I know this from experience. By the time my essay "Oranges" was published by the Sierra Nevada Review, I had revised it at least 5 times, deep excavation type revisions. Student Response #4In the process of revision I realized I made a major mistake. I kept implying Collin’s was the speaker, which he is not. I fixed that mistake, and revised my sentences for grammar and clarity. YES!! No matter how many times I say in class, "the narrator and the author are different," these words are floating around in the ether, completely separated from concrete examples. This "speaker's perspective" objective is a big one on the AP Lit exam, and now is the best time in the world to make this mistake. I don't think of it as a mistake, I think of it as a learning opportunity. Because me saying "the narrator and author are different" doesn't necessarily mean learning is happening. This student experienced the difference between the narrator and author in her own writing. Learning is for sure happening here.
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AuthorI'm a Houston high school teacher. Welcome to my adapted, socially-distanced, quarantined AP English Literature and Composition classroom. Archives
May 2021
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