Sharing Interests to Prompt Self-directed Writing

The idea of genuine communication and showing students teachers as people rather than representatives of the education system has appeared several times on the PLN lately.  Consequently, transitioning from summer to the school year has me overlapping my writing subjects.  This was originally published on Tim's Motorcycle Diaries...


I'm back in the classroom again and teaching English for the first time in more than a year.  I took a senior essentials English class mainly because few people want to teach it (teachers like to teach people like themselves - in this case academically focused English students), and it fit my schedule.  Essentials English is just as it sounds.  These are weak English students who are getting what they need to graduate and get out into the workplace, they aren't post-secondary bound and tend to find school pointless.

The trick with students this bullied and indifferent to the school system is getting them to read and write at all.  Rather than drag them into a text book or make them watch the department copy of Dead Poets Society in order to prompt some writing, I thought I'd introduce them to my insanity.  In a week where we're all getting to know each other it helps if students see what you're into.  Showing your hobbies and interests is a good way to have them become familiar with you and relax a bit.  If they get excited about the idea of planning a trip and it prompts them to write, it's a many birds with one stone situation.

With some support, students quickly
got into planning a trip.  28 days,
unlimited budget!

The plan was pretty straightforward: you've got four weeks (28 days) starting next Monday.  Assume you've got an unlimited budget for a road trip (gotta travel on the ground).  Where would you go?  What would you do?  On the second day I gave them some pointers on Google Maps and some planning tools like a calendar and how to make notes online and they were off.  At the moment it looks like I've got pages of writing from students who generally don't.  The research they've been doing also lets me diagnose their reading level.

Needless to say, I bravely volunteered to present first.  It doesn't feel like homework when you enjoy doing it, and mine was obviously going to be a motorcycle trip.  I probably could have gone more bonkers on bike choice, but I have a sentimental attachment and some practical necessities that prompted my choice (all explained in the presentation).  Rather than go for the South American adventure, I decided to focus on The States, which has tons to offer, especially if you aren't sweating the budget.

Norman Reedus' RIDE gave me an idea of where I'd like to go, the question was, could I get to the locations in the show and back home in 28 days?

Here's what I'm presenting:

I presented this to the class two days before it was due.  Seeing an example helps and gave me a chance to explain my own process in putting together the trip (deciding on a vehicle, breaking the trip into sections, etc).  Many of them had collected data but were having trouble formulating it into a written project or verbal presentation (their choice).

That photo I doctored of a VFR800 a
couple of years ago came in handy!

Another side benefit of something like this rather than a boiler plate reading and writing diagnostic is that is gives students a lot of control over the direction of their writing, which means I get to learn what they're into, which helps me remember who each person is as well as offering me relevant subjects I can insert into future projects.

I'm hoping they surprise themselves with the results.  If I catch some of them in the future staring wistfully at Google Maps instead of playing pointless FLASH games I'll know that they've been bitten by the travel bug too!

It's a lot to try and pull off in 28 days, but when the budget is unlimited, I want more miles!
Literacy weak students often have trouble with basic digital tools - they were all screen grabbing
Google Map images by the end of the first day though.  This'll help in all sorts of classes.

Into the Rockies ASAP, then down the coast, across the mountains again, and then up the Appalachians home.

Multiple destinations on Google Maps is a simple enough process if you know how.  Everyone does now.

Yellowstone!  Riding over a mega-volcano. No one in the class realized we lived so close to this
impending disaster.  It led to an impromptu Geography lesson.

Death Valley and across the South West to the Twisted Sisters on the way to the Big Easy.

Back north in the Smokey Mountains and Appalachians.

I was thinking maybe an H2R or RC213 in a trailer, but then that meant driving a truck and trailer all over the place.
Better to be on two wheels all the time, and on the descendant of my first bike crush.
Students were very curious about my choices.  How you travel says a lot about you.

The Tyranny of Collaboration

I was talking to a digital native the other day in English class about Shakespeare.  This particular Millennial is a top 5%er who will go on to do great things.  She was wondering who the people who wrote Shakespeare were.  I was surprised at the question as I've always thought one person wrote Shakespeare.  I even have trouble with the classist conspiracy types who think an actor couldn't be that smart so a noble must have done it.  Having read a lot of Shakespeare (all of it actually) over decades, I know his voice, and it isn't a voice by committee; that kind of brilliance doesn't happen around a meeting table.

I thought it interesting that the Millennial mind assumes collaboration, infecting her own generation's constant interaction across history.  The internet has turned the digital natives who live in it into a hive mind.  They can't form an opinion without socializing or turning to the internet for information. Their waking lives are awash in constant communication.  They describe moments 'trapped' in their own mind when they are unplugged as boring.

The modern mind is open in a way that someone from 20 years ago, let alone 400 years ago, would find alarming. Our marvellous information revolution has not only made our data public, it is also changing what we think we are individually capable of.  Needless to say, if we start thinking that individual genius can't happen in the quiet of our own minds, it won't.

A smart, capable digital native can't conceive of a single mind being capable of producing great works, they must be the result of never ending communication and collaboration.  A couple of centuries from now people who have been immersed in digital communications for generations will wander around The Van Gogh Museum or read Macbeth and think that people from back then must have been mental giants to do these things alone, that or they'll reinvent history as each age does, in its own image, seeing collaboration and minds peeled open under a barrage of constant communication where none were.

Education hops on the back of this communication revolution (flood?) and has integrated collaboration into just about every aspect of learning.  Leveraging technology to find new and exciting ways of collaborating is one of the pillars of early Twenty-First Century education.  Students have lost the idea of personal mind-space thanks to current communications habits.  The classroom, one of the last places where a student might find privacy in their own heads has been crushed under the weight of expectations from this social shift.  Much of this is shrouded in talk of engagement and preparing students for the modern world.  I just hope that preparation has real advantages for the student in terms of personal development.  I'm starting to doubt that.

Brainstorming about the advantages of deep thinking in your own head - from an ENG3u class two years ago...

Poetry

We're moving into poetry in the senior academic English class I'm teaching.  Poetry is one of those things that can seem a bit pretentious, especially to high school students.  We looked at contemporary lyric poems to begin with.  After some Practical Magic and other free verse I thought it might be time to take a swing at it ourselves.  I'm curious to see what students bring to class today.  Hopefully writing about something that interests them will remove that pretension and let them get some ideas on paper in the relatively unencumbered contemporary lyric format.

In My Pocket

あ and ん

alpha and omega

binary beginnings and silent ends.

ones and zeroes?

no,
math is an abstraction
but
certainty is in the machine.

waves relentlessly pound our shores,

pass through us

quantify us

connect us

ensnare us

constant attention demanded

by

this raging sea of yes and no,

profound and banal

personal collective

private crowd.

information constellations

in magnetic grips

lighter than a glance,

more certain than a second thought.

frozen moments of certainty

tumble to an event horizon

making sense of the senseless

at a ferocious rate.

I have a text!

Big Digital Magic

I'm really enjoying teaching English again, especially the university bound group I've got.  I don't have to worry about explaining why they are there as I do in many computer-tech classes.  The students come complete with their own resilience and competitive nature.  When you're not reduced to hand holding all the time you can get into concepts deeply and quickly.

An opening unit from the text is "Fire of the Human Spirit".  In it we look over Mandela's inauguration Speech, a Susan Aglukark song and a June Callwood essay amongst other media, all of it pointing at the concept of FotHS.

After a few examples and some discussion we set up a wikispace where students each found a song that they believe described FotHS.  They each made a wikipage on which they provided a link to the song, the lyrics, and a personal analysis of why this song exemplifies FotHS.

Because this class comes ready to play I tend to approach it as though I'm a participant in a hot group; I like to bring gifts to the group.  In this case I knew that I could export the content out of the wikispace relatively easily.  Since that text consisted only of the lyrics and student written analysis I thought it might be interesting to look at what we'd created from a group vocabulary usage point of view.  What words found in the lyrics of 28 songs and accompanying student analysis point to our concept of Fire of the Human Spirit?

Exporting the wiki is a one click process.  Once I had the text I had to do some magic to combine all the HTML pages into a single document.  Wikispaces also exports to text but it takes the html coding with it, which made a mess.  Google-docs didn't seem to have the mojo I needed to combine multiple documents into a single one, but the Phantom Foxit PDF creator I had did.  Once I had a pdf with all the text from twenty eight wikipages imported together I dumped it into the text window in Wordle and voila:

Katy Perry single-handedly got 'oh' in there!  Looking at verb usage is interesting.  Fire of the Human Spirit seems to demand action!  The nouns are also enlightening when creating constellations of meaning around this concept.  We're going to use this class produced conglomeration of ideas to develop thesis around the concept next week.

As an aside, several English teachers turned their noses up at what we were doing.  Apparently it's widely believed that you can't learn English in a digital context.  I beg to differ.  If we're going to turn to media to teach English, I'd much rather it be personalized, self created media like this.  The students themselves were surprised at how much depth something this simple offered.  That they created it as a class seemed to produce a sense of satisfaction.

Here is a FotHS 2.0 with some common words removed to emphasize specific vocabulary:

Behold! The Essay-inator!

In this corner, weighing in as the inevitable future, I give you: the writing algorithm!
... and in this corner, weighing in as a lazy, nineteenth century habit that no one can shake: tedious, overly structured High School English writing!


The trick is going to be creating an algorithm that plagiarism checkers won't catch.  That shouldn't be too hard as they tend to look for matching text, and any good algorithm would put the pieces together in varying ways depending on the variables given.


With a proscribed structure similar to sports stories or financial reports, it should be fairly easy to get Narrative Science to modify their writing engine to accept key points and put together a five paragraph essay that perfectly follows the tediously exact, point-proof-explanation requirements of high school essay writing.


The process should go something like this:

• student logs in to the website and enters brainstorming ideas based on a cursory reading on the subject matter (Macbeth should be covered in 20 minutes, tops)

• thesis (an arguable statement) is generated based on ideas given (or offered, depending on how much you want to put into this)

• supporting points are suggested.  The algorithm places them in order of importance based on the number of hits and positive previous reviews, student picks the ones that grab them

• the algorithm finds quotes from the play and lit crit that relate to each supporting point

• body paragraphs are constructed following point/proof/explanation around chosen quotes

• introduction and conclusion are generated based on body paragraphs

• student reviews the paper for vocabulary or wording that doesn't suit their style

• if too complicated a word is used, the student can right click and get a list of synonyms

• the completed paper, using variable data, is unique, and presented in the vicinity of the student's knowledge of the subject matter, working vocabulary and writing style

Behold my essay-inator!

The point and click essay is finally here!

The efficiencies here should be obvious.  A typical paper requires hours of reading, then re-reading looking for quotes, then formulation of ideas, then organization... hours and hours!  This process could have a student sit down with a Shakespearean play they've never seen before, and have a finished essay completed in under an hour, on their smartphone!

They are still the authors, we've just taken the tedium and soulless nature of high school writing and given it to a machine, which only seems fair.

***

This is written facetiously, but it does raise a couple of interesting questions.  If high school writing requires such heavy duty plagiarism checking and tends to be about the same subjects using the same formats, and marked with the same rubrics year after year, what is the point?

If these guys have come up with an algorithm that can write data driven, structurally sound pieces this well, how long will it be before someone has put together a five paragraph essay-inator?  The only thing more soulless and formulaic than financial writing or sports reporting is high school English writing.  Time to let the computers do what they do best and take this repetitive, tedious work and do it more efficiently!

Up next, mechanized marking of essays: time to take the tedium out of being an English teacher!

If this works out well, we'll be able to have students 'write' essays, and have them 'marked' in a matter of seconds!

Now that's progress!