The Sea of Literacy

Monday, January 21, 2008

Windham Syllabus
Spring 2007
Learning Through Teaching
Tomasen M. Carey
UNH English Department

“Great things happen when the initiative is in the hands of the individual”
~Donald Graves

Class Dates and Required Assigned Reading for the next class:
Jan16th Read Chapter 6 and 7
Feb 6th Read Chapters 8 and 9Feb 20th Read Chapters 10 and 11March 12th Read Chapters 12 and 13(In Residence days....April 1st, 2nd and 3rd)
April 16th Read Chapters 14 and 15
First set of presentations
May 14th Second set of presentations

Course Requirements:
These requirements will be evaluated to determine final grades.
Regular Attendance and participation at group meetings, having all of the assigned reading completed and ready to discuss it in detail. (20%)
Weekly blog entries. (20%)
One visitation in your school of a colleague. I will ask that you post your observation on our blog. There will be a special section on the blog specifically for visitations. (10%)
One visitation out of the school in an area of interest (optional but highly recommended!) Perhaps we could make some connections to Golden Brook.
Integration Experimentation Presentation
Take your learning and use a mentor text or parts of several mentor texts to model your presentation after…using the work of Katie Wood Ray to guide you. Take time to reflect. We will share our processes on the last day of class as you guide us through your experimentation and what you learned about yourself and your new found knowledge. Each presentation needs to be limited to 10 minutes of fame! Thanks ahead of time for adhering to this! I will be bringing a timer!

Classroom Visits and Consultations:
If you ever have any questions and or concerns do not hesitate to contact me at home or via e-mail. My phone number is 772-4351 and my e-mail is tomasen@comcast.net.
Here is to a great semester together.
Tomasen M. Carey

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More Quotes from Wondrous Words

Page 214- “…a child who write every day can’t help but develop some sense of himself as a writer. If he is allowed to talk to others about his writing or their writing, he will develop more of his sense of self and also develop as a member of a responsive, literate community. If that student gets to read aloud something he has written, he comes to understand something of audience.”
Page 242 "One thing that I often do in ways-with-words lessons which I don't usually do in structure lessons is that I use actual texts to show how a crafting technique would look if we tried it."
Pg. 208 " 'He's messing with what I thought I knew.' Really good learning does that for us-it messes with what we think we know, creating a tension in our lives that can be uncomfortable. When we begin to feel this discomfort our only choice seems to be to quit learning and wait for the "pain" to go away, or to rethink what we know and muck around a bit in stuff that's really hard for us. I'm partial to mucking around a bit myself, and I have in fact made peace with the idea that there will always be some new hard thing for me to think about in my teaching. There will always be some part of my teaching that, when I think about it, causes me discomfort because I don't feel as sure about it."
Page 248 “Writing conferences are the backbone of the writing workshop. Good conferences move the teaching of writing from the whole-class carpet gathering to the individual writer’s desk. And what a big move it is. Conferencing is probably the hardest part of the workshop teaching. We have all spent years learning to do it better and in more and more theoretical ways, and adding this new knowledge base about the craft of writing into teaching; has only made it more challenging.”
"students are doing as writers, what they know about what they are doing, and what they need to know to do it even better" (p. 250)
p.243 "You'll want your students to have drafts and dreams of drafts floating around in their consciousness all the time, and their ability to envision craft in texts is what will make writing these drafts more and more automatic for them as they write throughout their lives."
Page 229, "Teach your students to learn to write from writers."
Pg. 235 “Formula writing has gotten a new head of steam because of testing, as many students are forced to write again and again in an artificial formula designed to help them do well on the “The Test.”
..."I thought immediately of a good writing technique I could teach him because I had that technique in my repertoire." (p. 248)

Some Favorite Quotes from Wondrous Words

Pg. 95. "Experienced writers begin moving toward writing projects not because they have great ideas, but because they have good reasons to write. With good reasons to write behind them, experienced writers know that any idea can become a good idea. It is the good reason to write that will propel the experienced writer forward through all the processes necessary to move an idea to publication."
(p.80) that, "I'm not reading to them because it's good for them; I'm reading to them because it's good for me."
page 103 and continues onto 104. She writes "When our students envision writers at work, then need to be able to see them doing lots more than just sitting at desks. Active development possibilities like those in the lists above need to be a big part of what our students can envision themselves doing as writers."
page 126 "It is important to me that students are able to envision using various crafting techniques in their own writing. If they can envision them, then they can have more power as writers because they have more choices about how they will write something."
page 106 "One of the simplest guiding questions for hypothetical inquiry is, I wonder where the author got the idea for this piece of writing?"

Integration Experimentations