Conferences and Choice

Ahh, middle school. When I was in 8th grade, my English teacher assigned us a research project: pick a president. Any president. Research his life. I chose Richard Nixon because I had no idea what that whole scandal thing was about.

For some reason I cannot figure out to this day, my teacher denied my proposal. He was, as far as I could tell, a president of the United States. Why did it get knocked down? Was he too controversial? I have no clue; I settled for Jimmy Carter instead, which other than the history of peanut farming, was not very interesting. I had a prescribed way to organize this paper (early life, presidency, post-presidency) and do the research (notecards). I understand students need to learn how to write in certain genres, but is there a better way to do this?

Doing the reading this week brought me to this idea. Why can't we put more support into our students' choices for writing topics? I think we can scaffold this idea and then bring their ideas together through peer and teacher conferencing. Not only does this allow the student to own his or her writing more, but it gives students answers if their topic is "too controversial" or not well situated for the paper prompt. This also gives the students the opportunity to write about controversial issues in an objective and appropriate way. If you just tell them no, they will have that looming over their heads. Give students respect.

Finally, I wanted to post a question to my fellow English teachers. The issue about grading still doesn't sit well with me. Yes, the Dornan text talked about it, but it basically said "Grades shouldn't matter." That's nice, but that's not really the reality of our future teaching jobs, unless we are teaching a night class on creative writing. What are your opinions about grading? I have such difficulty applying an arbitrary grade to a piece of fluid work, but, in the end, I have to.

LINK OF THE WEEK: ProCon.org - If your students are writing a speech, argumentative paper, learning about multiple perspectives, or are just very opinionated students, here's a great website that has a variety of pro and con arguments for many controversial topics. This resource is also useful for creating a database of controversial topics to explore. The Teacher's Corner has ideas for lesson plans, lists for resources on critical thinking and examples of how other schools are using the website.