Facets
1 changes, most recent almost 10 years ago
0 General Document comments
0 Sentence and Paragraph comments
0 Image and Video comments
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
NowComment classifies a title as a paragraph, a subhead as a paragraph, a byline as a paragraph, and a conventional paragraph as a paragraph.
The Most Important Development in the Last Five Years for High School Teachers of Composition
Teachers are discovering that time and energy devoted to thinking up ‘'things to write about” could be better spent in considering with their students the kind of process composing is. This collaborative learning is also a model for the teacher-researcher so that when new ways of thinking about the composing process really catch on, a lot else is bound to change as well, including the way teachers think of themselves.
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
The movement Berthoff wrote of is the one characterized not by the question, “What topic shall we write about?” but to one that asks, “How shall we go about writing anything?” What—>How
Teachers gain confidence in their ability to think about thinking—which of course is what thinking about composing comes to—when they have the guidance of a method, a way of assuring that practice and theory can correct one another. In classrooms all over the country, teachers who have studied such research methods with Dixie Goswami at the Bread Loaf School of English are experimenting with ways of teaching their students to look at what they are writing, to reflect on meanings they are making, and to learn how meanings make further meanings possible. Students and teachers alike, by recording in a special way their responses to the natural world, to what they read, to themselves and one another, are discovering that journals need not be limited to personal or “expressive” writing but that they can be used to record that inner dialogue which is thought.
This connects with some movement to “reclaim notebooks” that the National Writing Project is pushing, particularly are engineering notes, and mathematical thinking journals, etc. The idea is to move beyond narrative creative writing in our journal writing with students.
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
Yes, writing is a way to learn. I am a big fan of Sunni Brown’s “The Doodle Revolution” and Dan Roam’s ‘back of the napkin’ series.
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
Reminds me of Ralph Fletcher’s A Writer’s Notebook. The notebook becomes a field of infinite play instead of a mountain to be strip mined.
On one side of an open notebook, writers take notes, copy texts, record observations; on the facing page, they respond to those responses, taking notes on their notes and commenting on their comments, observing their observations and thinking about their thinking. The dialogue journal— also called a dialectical or double-entry notebook— is familiar to artists and scientists: it encourages both accuracy and speculation; it helps develop the habits of reflection which constitute critical inquiry and creative thinking. It is a way of writing which can start in kindergarten with the teacher as scribe and continue through graduate school into the professions and the workplace.
Here’s a link with an example: http://imssbiology.weebly.com/uploads/6/5/9/0/6590
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
Isn’t Berthoff arguing for what she argued against in her opening sentence? Instead of thinking of things to write about she is thinking of things to write with? If only we started with double-entry journals when they were in kindergarten. Isn’t this the lording of the what over the how that she is against?
The composing process is not like sorting the laundry or plowing a field; it cannot be represented by a step or stage model, such as prewriting, writing, rewriting, because it is not linear. In composing we are always returning to GO and starting out again to face old dilemmas and new hazards, as well as opportunities. I have suggested the sheep dog as a model of this recursive character of composing; the notebook I’ve described helps students put the sheep dog to work. And this double-entry notebook is helping teachers become reflective writers and thereby more imaginative, freed at last from the compulsion to find an assignment to follow the one on how to tie-dye tee-shirts or on what to do about skunks under the porch.
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
The fact is that most transactive writing is like sorting laundry of plowing a field. What is wrong with that? Craft is all about work. A lawyer always has his boilerplate, a letter to the editor has its set play, a summary needs to make nice with the reader in the first paragraph in very conventional ways. The problem arises when the crutch is not cast aside as needed.
Nicely put here, and a nice reminder that writing is rarely very linear in nature, flowing from point A to point B. And I wonder if writing in digital spaces shuffles that up even further. How do hyperlinks and media impact the way we might write, if our journal is online? Where is GO then?
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
Composition is le plus ca change? Of course, and the sea of change that twitter represents has been dealt with of old—telegrams. Yet it is not the same.
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
As someone who has lived with and worked beside working sheep dogs, I fear that the domain of knowing interferes with my understanding here. Sheep dogs are hardwired to bring sheep to the alpha dog of the pack—you. Some are hardwired way better than others. I suppose she is referring to the ‘to and fro’ of a sheep dog’s herding instinct. So, what is the equivalent hardwired behavior in a writer. I feel more like a crow in my writer’s notebook, gathering shiny shit for no other reason than I like shiny shit. Is that what she means? Or is she saying that sheep dogs are like the writing process that looks, reflects, makes meaning in a kind of weird, non-linear, loom of back and forth, weave and weft. Sort of like this comment? Suffice to say in my most literal minded way: she don’t know squat about sheep dogs. There acts are about as habitual as you can get—coded in the DNA.
Double-entry notebooks can teach everybody the value and usefulness of looking—and looking again.
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
No. I can say unequivocally that she is wrong. At least in my case she is. This is the big problem I see right now with Core Content and close reading and annotation. I can absolutely predict that within two years I will begin to see freshmen in my intro comp class who, when I suggest that we are going to annotate, will groan openly, will roll their eyes, and otherwise shut down. This happened when portfolios rolled through in ed circles a few years ago. Everybody did not find them valuable and useful. Hilarity did not ensue.
Ann E. Berthoff teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.
20 English Journal
Copyright © 1984 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
|
National Council of Teachers of English |
gl |
|
|
is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to |
||
|
The English Journal |
STOR |
® |
|
| www.jstor.org| |
||
General Document Comments 0
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
Bouncy and blinky. The features might seem distractive to some until routinized. For example, the highlightification of all on the page. Or the plethora of ‘bubbles of conversation. Kinda ugly. I do like what the program enables. I like highlighting down to the sentence level, but one thing it doesn’t do is go down to the phrase or word level
icons on the left to see existing comments.
0 archived comments