My Little Experiment

I was having a hard time getting my students to speak up in class. You all know what I mean. You review a text. You ask questions.

Silence.

No matter how long you wait them out...silence. So, I figured that if they didn't want to communicate verbally, I would have them communicate in writing. So I gave them five prompts, and asked them to write as much as they could within the prescribed amount of time (6-7 minutes). Here are the prompts: (1) Write about a time when you were lost and you could not find help. How did you feel? (2) Write about a time when you were lost and you find help. Were you relieved? Were you annoyed? (3) Write about your expectations before you came into class today. And what are you thinking right now? (4) Write about what you think my expectations were before coming into class today. What am I thinking about right now? (5) If you were the boss, the one in control, let's say...me, how would you handle things? What would you do with the class?

Of course, you can change these prompts to fit your taste. But what I wanted them to do was to simply write as much as they could. Tell stories, recount their past, whatever. I just wanted them to give themselves some material to work with. Then I asked them to remove all personal account from each piece of writing and rewrite them as if they happened to someone else. I gave them the latitude to determine how they would do this. Finally, I asked them to read everything they had wrote, from beginning to end, as if they were all part of the same narrative. I told them to try to find a theme or underlying story that related all of these pieces of writing. They were to give each story a name. I asked them to write about that theme and use each individual piece that they had written about as evidence to support their writing/argument, citing each story by title.

The point was for them to learn to look outside of themselves, to develop the ability to conceptualize each piece of writing as something written by someone else. Too often have I found that they have a hard time getting away from what they think or how they feel. My students simply can not remove themselves from a situation and look at it objectively. They are too focused on their personal "opinion." This word get thrown around as if it holds some sort of substantive meaning. Most still don't know how to distinguish opinion from analysis.

My hope was that they would learn to think objectively through this exercise. They should learn to look at their writing objectively and compile the content (what each story/writing sample is about) of each writing prompt, not their individual opinions, into a single piece of writing that is driven by a theme and supported with evidence. At least, that is my intention. I'll keep you all posted when I get the results. Keep your fingers crossed for me, please.