As I did last summer, I spent twelve days this month with my sister on a road trip from Virginia to Utah, with a stay in Salt Lake City for the Stampin’ Up convention in the middle. I learned a number of interesting ideas at the convention, both for my hobby of scrapbooking and cardmaking and for teaching and creativity in general. The most interesting thing that I came upon, however, was the garbage and recycling bins (shown right) in the Salt Palace Convention Center where the event was held.
I wasn’t blown away by the Super Bowl commercials this year. There were a couple that seemed cute to me. The GoDaddy commercials, as usual, annoyed me. WWE fan that I am, I enjoyed The Rock’s Milk commercial, and like several of my friends, I teared up over the Clydesdale commercial.
Play this commercial in the classroom and talk about writing extended definitions. It’s a wonderful example and can inspire students to create their own video definitions.
No matter what holiday you are celebrating this month, nothing is quite as precious as a handmade card—especially when it comes from a family member or friend.
We’ve collected some easy ways that you can help the students you teach make cards in class as well as instructions that you can send home for families to use together during the Winter holidays.
The resources do not refer to any particular holiday, so they work whether students and their families want to make cards for Hanukkah, Yule, Christmas, or Kwanzaa. The materials can even be used to celebrate the first snowfall or wish someone a Happy New Year. And, of course, the same instructions work for Thank You cards too. So read on, and get ready to make some fun greeting cards!
Draw a cartoon: Use the Comic Creator to make a one-of-a-kind greeting card. Kids and teens can illustrate scenes that show how they celebrate with family and friends or create scenes that show what would happen if a dinosaur showed up to celebrate at their home.
Create a folded card: Use the Stapleless Book to make an 8-page card for a special family member or friend—and it all fits on one sheet of paper!
Design a postcard: Write a postcard with the Postcard Creator then print it out and illustrate the front in a variety of ways, like drawing a picture, creating a collage of images, or printing and pasting clipart in place.
Publish a greeting: Make a nontraditional greeting card with the Book Cover Creator. Kids and teens can imagine what a book about a Winter day with their family would be like and create front and back cover as a greeting card.
Bedford/St. Martin’s Bits bloggers posted on topics ranging from our work as writing program administrators to how we teach digital natives. Be sure that you check out all the great ideas for talking about politics and how writing fits into general education requirements—and don’t miss Andrea Lunsford’s praise for short writing assignments in the Classroom Strategies and Resources section:
Writing Program Administration
Barclay Barrios contributes to Restructuring Gen Ed and how we teach with his Notes on a Train.
Doug Downs considers what we want to change, over their years in college, in the ways our students understand writing in Priorities.
Barclay Barrios takes a look at the implications of the legislated categories for Florida’s statewide Gen Ed core in The Buckets.
The last days of 2011 are counting down, and it’s likely that your days in the classroom for 2011 are even fewer! As you’re planning for the last days of the calendar year, consider using ReadWriteThink interactives for one of these fun, winter activities:
Use the Resume Generator to create a resume for a character from a favorite story or song. What would Scrooge list on his resume?
Compose Shape Poems with the bus for the last day of school. Students can talk about all the things they hope to do during the winter break—after they ride home on the school bus for the last time in 2011.
Have students map significant personal events they remember from previous winter holidays with the Graphic Map.
Write a class alphabet book of activities to try during the winter holidays with the Alphabet Organizer.
Ask students to think of a favorite event that happens during the winter break, and compose Acrostic Poems about it.
Create Character Trading Cards for characters from winter-themed or holiday-themed books or songs. Imagine a trading card for the Baby New Year!
Reflect on all that has happened since the start of the school year in a class newspaper, created with the ReadWriteThink Printing Press.
Explore school days and winter vacation in a Diamante Poem that unites the two opposing topics.
Use the Profile Publisher to mock up social networking profiles, yearbook profiles, or newspaper or magazine profiles for characters from winter-themed or holiday-themed books or songs. What would Frosty the Snowman list on his Facebook profile?
What do Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter have in common? How do they differ from Adolf Hitler, Ayn Rand, Michael Moore, Andrew Breitbart, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Michael Savage? A Rebel Pundit survey last month asked, “Which of these books would you be interested in having banned, if you could have books banned?”
The results were overwhelmingly in favor of banning the books of Palin, Beck and Coulter, though the math of the survey is a little confusing since the results don’t add up to 100%. That said, what’s going on here?
Rebel Pundit’s reporter set up on the street in Chicago, during the Printers Row Literary Festival. As these alleged book lovers passed by the reporter, he asked them which books they’d like banned, telling them they could ban up to three, and handing them a Sharpie so they could make tick marks under their choices. Before I go on, watch the Rebel Pundit video of folks participating in the survey:
Sadly, people take the marker and willingly step up to the poster. The editing of the video suggests the participants aren’t really thinking much. They don’t even interact much with the reporter, other than taking the Sharpie from his hand.
In fairness, Rebel Pundit does explain that there were naysayers:
Nine people explicitly stated to us they thought banning books was wrong, including two individuals who voted on the board but later approached us to say, (paraphrasing) “I think I made a mistake, and wanted to take my votes back if I could, because after further reflection, I think banning any book is wrong.”
Only nine people of 147 protested the idea of banning books. Of course, the point of the survey isn’t really book banning. It’s to demonstrate that people make choices without thinking.
My hunch is that the reporter expected people to vote unthinkingly. Rebel Pundit is a conservative blog. According to their About page, they are “a beacon of truth, showing the unholy alliance of the local mainstream media and the progressive Democratic Party.” Since Chicago is a traditionally liberal town, the video and related article depict the people of Chicago as foolish lemmings:
While there were in fact less than two handfuls of individuals who did tell us they don’t think any books should be banned, unfortunately there were a shocking amount of guests at this book fair who were quite open to the idea, and in fact lined up quite excited for the opportunity to voice their opinion.
Given the audience of the Rebel Pundit site, the site likely guessed that their readers would draw the connections that the liberal democrats at the book festival were actually interested in limiting individual freedoms by stepping up happily to ban books. You don’t need to read many of the comments to see that it worked.
How to Use the Video in the Classroom
Because of the way that people blindly choose to ban books, the video can be a useful part of class discussion of censorship and book banning. Though it’s a tempting idea, I would not set up a classroom or school survey to trap students into similar behavior. I want students to think critically about censorship, and I don’t think labeling them as unthinking is a good way to do that.
Instead, I want to play the video for students and ask them what they think is happening. Why are the participants so willing to participate in this book banning activity? I want them to identify how much thought is going into the participants’ decisions and how much peer pressure and the public nature of the survey contribute to participation. I’ll also ask students to look at the setup of the survey. It’s just a simple tick mark on a piece of poster paper. Does that simplicity or the presence of the reporter influence them to participate?
I don’t think the decision to add a vote to the poster is part of some great political agenda, so I will downplay those connections at the beginning of the discussion. When the political aspect of the survey does come up, and I’m sure it will, I’ll ask students to think about how the choice of books and the setting for the survey were part of the reason people were eager to ban the books on the poster. What would happen if the same survey were set up in a conservative town or event?
There are also questions of graphic design to consider: does the layout of book covers on the poster play a part in the response? What would happen if the books are arranged differently on the poster or if the choices were shared only with words (without those very identifiable faces on the book covers)? If the survey itself were presented some other way, would the decision to participate be different?
After all this discussion, I’m thinking of introducing a research project on book banning. Students can research censorship events, like Nazi book burning to more recent censorship of bloggers in countries like China and Egypt. The focus can be widened to include films, songs, and other texts as well. Research questions like these could inspire papers or presentations:
How does peer pressure contribute to participation in book burnings?
What other persuasive devices were involved?
Are there political agendas at play in the choice of what has been banned?
Does the fact that just one book is banned simplify participation?
Who decided what was banned? What motives were at play?
If I decide not to go with a research activity, I may stick with the survey itself and ask students to write short responses that they’d give if they were asked, “Which books would you ban?” Answers can be anything from a 140-character Twitter posts to a video response or PowerPoint presentation. The resulting pieces can be part of public service announcement campaign during Banned Books Week.
This week in Inside Higher Ed, Joshua Kim asserts, “The world is divided into two types of people: those who prefer Track Changes in Word and those who prefer to write collaboratively in Google Docs.” Kim’s explanation of the two ways of working with text sparked conversation on the TechRhet discussion list. Some spoke to Kim’s explicit question: “Which one are you?” while others extended the focus to consider different ways to write HTML texts.
Naturally, there’s no correct answer to Kim’s question, and the situation is not as binary as it is presented in his article. That ambiguous quality makes the article and its overarching question perfect for a class discussion of collaboration and teamwork. Students can share their own alignment, and then move on to talk about how Kim’s article is defining writing and collaboration. They can widen the discussion of writing and collaboration to include more tools and kinds of composing. With that groundwork in place, they can then talk about their own teamwork in class. Focus their conversation on how different kinds of collaboration suit different projects and ask them to brainstorm strategies for working together when you have different preferences.
Kim’s article is short, but it touches on how software, teamwork, and how people collaborate—all valuable topics for the classroom.
This post is the introduction from the Bits Flashback for July 3. Read the rest of the post on Facebook.
Alyssa Rosenberg wrote about Food in Fiction and How Cooking Brings You Closer to Characters this week in The Atlantic. The article asks readers to think about how cooking and eating the same foods as fictional characters strengthens the connection between reader and the text.
Rosenberg describes some lemon cakes she made as a connection to Sansa, a character the books by George R.R. Martin that are the basis of HBO’s Game of Throne:
The cakes weren’t anything like I’d imagined from reading about them in the book—they were spongier and less sweet, and hard to imagine as a dreamed-of delicacy. But they were delicious, a powerful visceral connection to the people on screen and the world in which they live.
Such connections between reader and text reminded me of the potential writing about food has in the composition classroom. Jay Dolmage has written two entries this year that include assignments and discussion ideas. Take a look back at Writing About Food and Food Rules for ways you can connect with students just as Rosenberg connects with those fictional characters.
This post is the introduction from the Bits Flashback for June 26. Read the rest of the post on Facebook.
On Saturday, Black College Wire posted an article on a composition assignment that had consequences the teacher never expected. The teacher, Lisa Carl, asked students to write “either a first-person autobiographical account of a significant event in their lives or an analysis of a graphic novel or anthropological classic.”
In response, student Jessica Martin wrote the essay “I had an affair with my high school teacher,” which was later published in the N.C. Central University’s newspaper, the Campus Echo, as part of an annual collection of first-person narratives. The student’s account has resulted in campus scrutiny of her decision to write the essay and the newspaper’s decision to publish it—as well as the arrest of the high school teacher she wrote about.
As I read about the aftermath of the essay’s publication, I thought immediately of Holly Pappas’s Trauma Narrative post last month and how pertinent all the questions she raises are in this situation. It’s worth rereading Holly’s piece and thinking about how it applies and the new questions that it raises.
While you’re looking at past entries, also check out these Bedford Bits posts from last week:
How do computers change composition instruction? Holly Pappas looks forward to a Change of Venue that means more time in the computer classroom.
Andrea Lunsford does some Thinking About Writing Assignments and shares the guidelines she uses as she designs writing activities for the students.
Jack Solomon extends the study of popular culture, especially with regard to what makes popular culture popular or entertaining, to the realm of high literary culture in Literature and Entertainment.
Barclay Barrios explains his shift from a policy of no-cell phone use to one of responsible use of portable technology in Cell Phones in the Classroom.
Steve Bernhardt discusses how important writing is to the kinds of learning we all value: higher-order, integrative, and reflective in Engaging Writing.
Have great assignments or student essays to share? Blogger Jay Dolmage is Looking for Essays and Assignments and paying up to $100 for works chosen for publication.
A Few Extra Links
The May Teaching Carnival has a collection of academic blog posts on subjects like on rhetoric, racism, Twitter, and student loans.
Let us know what you want to know about teaching writing or about using digital tools in the composition classroom by leaving a comment. Your response will help shape upcoming posts.
Script Frenzy is a free event that challenges writers to compose an entire script during the month of April. There are many more official details on the site’s About Page. All kinds of scripts are welcome: screenplays, stage plays, TV shows, short films, comics, and graphic novels.
Students from elementary, middle, and high schools can take part in the Young Writers Program. These writers set a personal page-count goal, begin writing on April 1, and upload evidence that they’ve met their goal by April 30. There’s a step-by-step page of instructions as well as information for teachers. You can even use the letter to families to keep everyone in the loop.
College students and the rest of us can take part in the adult program, which challenges writers to compose a 100-page script. All the details for adults are on the site.
The site includes how-to’s for all the genres, like this Intro to Graphic Novels, and there’s even a Plot Machine to check out on the homepage. Here’s the first plot I got:
In an attempt to evade taxes
a disgruntled child actor
must cross a ravine on a tightrope
Obviously, they may not all be classroom-friendly :-)
So are you interested? Will you tell students? Thinking of organizing class participation? I’d love to hear some stories from other teachers thinking about getting into a script frenzy.
Cross-posted to the NCTE Community Teaching Writing eGroup and Graphic Novels eGroup.