Writing instruction for your students and teachers.Give me a week. Let me work with 5 teachers an hour a day and watch the magic happen.
Hello!
I taught 13 sections of creative writing to 360 lively inner-city 6-8th graders of a wide range of abilities and interests. I loved it.
I became able to find the interests of the kids pretty quickly and to get them on topic and writing about whatever thing it was that interested them, within certain guidelines. EVERYBODY WROTE FOR ME. It was a matter of persistence. Even the kid who just liked to draw eventually started making captions for me and then began to develop some very interesting comic books. If he is still producing them he is surely a millionaire right now, he was that talented.
The thing of it is that you must have a workable framework. You MUST TRAIN the kids and the teachers how to work a system. A system that eventually sustains itself with minimal input of teacher energy and maximizes the children's work rate.
I think it was energy dynamo and teacher Harry Wong who said that the students should be the hardest workers in the room. It's about working SMARTER, not HARDER.
That's why I need a week, to show five teachers how to maximize their writing time with their students. In five days I can give them the bare bones of the writing workshop approach and they will have been able to practice it with their kids for a full week.
Give me a week and I will show you something amazing.
Here are a few examples of how I might approach a class on the first day.....
"Your principal has informed me that you are one of the most energetic and creative classes in the building. We have a week together to see what he meant by energetic, so hit me with your energy...Why do you think the principal chose your class for this project? ......Those are some great answers, why don't we start writing down some ideas together about ways we can prove this hypothesis, this treatise, this mutual conjecture of ours in some tangible way...Whoops, I thought I was teaching in college again, my bad, ...Basically talk is cheap. We have to show what we know. How are we going to do this, jot down some ideas, call it a brainstorm and we are ion our way..."
"You and your teacher have won the "make a cool website in a week" contest. Now all we have to do is design it, create the content and start getting it up there. Who has an idea for something that every kid your age needs that is hard to find on the web. If we do it right we will never have to work again and become internet gazillionaires so lets get to it"
I enter wearing a "Hello Kitty" Tee-shirt. "Ok everybody IM sorta guest hosting your class this week with your teacher here and I know what kids your age really love and that's "Hello Kitty" Hello kitty is cool, right? Why do you think it is for babies? Haven't you kids gotten to the age yet where something so uncool is really cool? Or it that what happens in college? Do you kids know how to take an ironic stance yet? It would be pretty ironic if hello kitty was cool because after all it is designed for little girls....So irony would be a little boy wearing hello kitty and a girl dressed up like GI JOE or the power rangers or something like that??? SO how would we make hello kitty cool to kids your age. This company makes billions a year just selling tee shirts like this and all sortsa other junk to parents mostly who bother their mom and dad for hello kitty stuff because they saw it on tv.....What would we have to do to hello kitty to make it cool for kids your age???
what would happen if hello kitty came to your neighborhood? Design a group of hello kiity themed rap songs and names and albums...Make a new hello kitty posse' ala bugs bunny and friends which appeal to kids your age..
we will submit these ideas to hello kitty corporation when we are done and maybe they will send us a million dollars if we are creative enough...."
this would work nice in a room where the teacher/kids are interested in real cultural discussions about media and how it shapes your life and maybe with an art or music teacher as this seems to lend itself to song parodies and comic books. I have done this before and its a lot of fun. We never mailed the results to the hello Kitty people though.
This is off the top of my head. But my best moments of teaching also were. I believe you have too feed off the kids energy or else they will feed off of yours. Improvisation on their answers and energy and that of the teacher actually makes projects like thiese seem to fly by. Bury them in work, if its fun, they will do it. Use the classroom as the jumping off point, the teacher in the room and his/her energy to craft something together that is meaningful. As experienced teachers, me and your staff will guide the kids into doing something that is both educational and fun for a week.
They will also be learning how to organize their time, workshop their pieces as a committee, present things to the whole group and work under a deadline. All of these are components to the writing workshop approach which works so effectively when it is done correctly.
I taught 13 sections of creative writing to 360 lively inner-city 6-8th graders of a wide range of abilities and interests. I loved it.
I became able to find the interests of the kids pretty quickly and to get them on topic and writing about whatever thing it was that interested them, within certain guidelines. EVERYBODY WROTE FOR ME. It was a matter of persistence. Even the kid who just liked to draw eventually started making captions for me and then began to develop some very interesting comic books. If he is still producing them he is surely a millionaire right now, he was that talented.
The thing of it is that you must have a workable framework. You MUST TRAIN the kids and the teachers how to work a system. A system that eventually sustains itself with minimal input of teacher energy and maximizes the children's work rate.
I think it was energy dynamo and teacher Harry Wong who said that the students should be the hardest workers in the room. It's about working SMARTER, not HARDER.
That's why I need a week, to show five teachers how to maximize their writing time with their students. In five days I can give them the bare bones of the writing workshop approach and they will have been able to practice it with their kids for a full week.
Give me a week and I will show you something amazing.
Here are a few examples of how I might approach a class on the first day.....
"Your principal has informed me that you are one of the most energetic and creative classes in the building. We have a week together to see what he meant by energetic, so hit me with your energy...Why do you think the principal chose your class for this project? ......Those are some great answers, why don't we start writing down some ideas together about ways we can prove this hypothesis, this treatise, this mutual conjecture of ours in some tangible way...Whoops, I thought I was teaching in college again, my bad, ...Basically talk is cheap. We have to show what we know. How are we going to do this, jot down some ideas, call it a brainstorm and we are ion our way..."
"You and your teacher have won the "make a cool website in a week" contest. Now all we have to do is design it, create the content and start getting it up there. Who has an idea for something that every kid your age needs that is hard to find on the web. If we do it right we will never have to work again and become internet gazillionaires so lets get to it"
I enter wearing a "Hello Kitty" Tee-shirt. "Ok everybody IM sorta guest hosting your class this week with your teacher here and I know what kids your age really love and that's "Hello Kitty" Hello kitty is cool, right? Why do you think it is for babies? Haven't you kids gotten to the age yet where something so uncool is really cool? Or it that what happens in college? Do you kids know how to take an ironic stance yet? It would be pretty ironic if hello kitty was cool because after all it is designed for little girls....So irony would be a little boy wearing hello kitty and a girl dressed up like GI JOE or the power rangers or something like that??? SO how would we make hello kitty cool to kids your age. This company makes billions a year just selling tee shirts like this and all sortsa other junk to parents mostly who bother their mom and dad for hello kitty stuff because they saw it on tv.....What would we have to do to hello kitty to make it cool for kids your age???
what would happen if hello kitty came to your neighborhood? Design a group of hello kiity themed rap songs and names and albums...Make a new hello kitty posse' ala bugs bunny and friends which appeal to kids your age..
we will submit these ideas to hello kitty corporation when we are done and maybe they will send us a million dollars if we are creative enough...."
this would work nice in a room where the teacher/kids are interested in real cultural discussions about media and how it shapes your life and maybe with an art or music teacher as this seems to lend itself to song parodies and comic books. I have done this before and its a lot of fun. We never mailed the results to the hello Kitty people though.
This is off the top of my head. But my best moments of teaching also were. I believe you have too feed off the kids energy or else they will feed off of yours. Improvisation on their answers and energy and that of the teacher actually makes projects like thiese seem to fly by. Bury them in work, if its fun, they will do it. Use the classroom as the jumping off point, the teacher in the room and his/her energy to craft something together that is meaningful. As experienced teachers, me and your staff will guide the kids into doing something that is both educational and fun for a week.
They will also be learning how to organize their time, workshop their pieces as a committee, present things to the whole group and work under a deadline. All of these are components to the writing workshop approach which works so effectively when it is done correctly.
