I’ve always been interested in writing, and I’ve always known that it was going to be important for me, when I became a teacher, to incorporate as much writing as possible into my classroom. My first year, I had quite a bit. Last year was significantly less. This year, I had to ask myself “if you’re taking two grad school classes a semester and doing part-time tutoring on the side, when are you going to have time to grade 177 papers?”

Yes. I teach 177 ninth graders.
I have these great ideas for writing activities, but they never come into fruition. I’m so overloaded in my schedule that I never have time to grade outside of school. The thought of the final research paper coming up is causing me to lose sleep already. Ninth grade writing is bad by nature, and I know that I’ve done very little to help it out this year. I wish that weren’t the case.
That being said, I do have my students keep journals. More specifically, I have them participate in blogging exercises on our class website. Real notebooks got to be too much to grade, taking me days at a time to get through them, but online makes it so much easier. I can grade their writing as soon as its posted. When I read the Lovitt article, what resonated the most with me was having the students make cultural connections in their journals. This is something that I would love for my students to be able to do in their writing. Usually my final research paper assignment requires the students to take some pop cultural icon and relate it to Jung and Campbell’s traits of an archetypal hero. This means that I generally get about fifty papers telling me why Simba from The Lion King is a hero. But occasionally I’ll get a kid who wants to take chances in his or her writing, and I’ll get someone who proves how John Lennon or Darth Vader can classify as an archetypal hero. I need to move more students into that zone of thinking beyond the obvious. The benefit of the cultural reference is that it helps retain their interest because it’s something they know about and want to know about, in most cases. They have some degree of freedom where their topic is concerned. Yet many of them just need too much guidance, and with so many students, it’s hard for me to give too much individual attention to any one student at a time. There are always five other kids calling my name impatiently.
This leads me to my other point of interest, which was the Glenn article. I have tried writing groups before, and they didn’t work well because many students wouldn’t come prepared to work. She gave me so many good ideas of what to do with students like that. I never used a response-writing assignment in the writing groups before, but I feel that it would be beneficial. At least then the kids who slacked off would have to explain themselves. Often times those kids have the best and most creative ideas, they’re just too lazy to do anything about it. The idea that is currently taking shape in my head based on these two articles is one that involves journaling about the writing process, responding to the writing groups, and only grading the very very very final draft. The only problem left is how to deal with the students who won’t do a draft if they know it isn’t going to be graded……

Hmmm. I’ll continue to think on that one.