Candid Beauty

This set of chapters was full of very diverse ideas and topics. I actually started with nine, although I think we were supposed to end with nine last week. Chapter nine did two things for me. Jeff’s multigenre piece was fun, and the back story on it and Stephanie’s student teaching experience was inspiring. But an unexpected side effect of reading about the Allosauras reinforced my desire to teach highschoolers, specifically upperclassmen. Perhaps it’s the quality of writing, the ability to look inward a bit more or in this case the maturity of the voice. I’ve always known I wanted to teach high school English, but never really knew why. It sounds really odd, but his chapter set off a sequence of thoughts that gave me a pretty good explanation. My junior and senior years in high school are when I really started to see literature and writing the way I do now. I’m sure that’s not the case for everyone, which makes me question whether it’s a good reason. Well good reason or not, I still have the strong feeling that’s where I belong. How’s that for nonsensical gibberish?
Chapter 10 addresses an extremely important topic. Secondary English teachers are not going to be teaching a classroom full of themselves. Not everyone’s going to major in English, or even cares for the subject. I would guess this a major problem within the profession: Many high school English teachers should be teaching creative writing in college. Although there will be those extraordinary “tie-dyed future artist” students whom we want to cradle and nurture, our responsibility lie in developing the skills and abilities of every student. I agree with Romano in that multigenre assignments may be difficult for students who like a lot of structure, but on the other hand I think “uptight future engineer” students may also have an easier time with multigenre writing. For example a math equation or blue prints could be possible pieces within multigenre writing, could they not? Once the open endedness of the assignment could be shown to be an asset to their personality type, I think any student could run with it.
Chapter 16 was another that jumped out at me. In fact it gave me the idea in the previous paragraph for more left brain students to “branch off” into subjects that better fit their interests and way of thinking. The possibilities really are endless. An idea that came to me while reading about the pianist who assembled her writing as a program, was that audio and video could be brought in. Many student’s thrive on different types of technology. A recorded conversation, song, or just sounds may be a powerful addition to multigenre project.
Below I’ve included a link to page that some students at MSU made. It walks students through the multigenre process. It has links to examples of different types of genres and a bunch of other stuff. Pretty cool, you should check it out.


The link I was talking about in the last paragraph