One look at an Analysis of Writing

          This writing analysis has been the hardest project for me so far.  Not just in this class but it ranks right up there with any assignment that I have done.  I haven't put much thought into the fact that when I am done with this journey I will be required to teach a multitude of subjects.  This blogging has been good for me, because I don't write traditionally.  I have no idea how to give an assignment let alone how to grade an assignment for writing.  So this is my fumbling attempt at what I was able to accomplish with just a little thought.  I'm only hopeful that years from now I will look on this and laugh.
          The students in class are reading To Kill a Mockingbird.  This book holds a lot of in depth material that we are asking the students to grasp.  There are 8 students in this behavior focus classroom, high school level, grades 9 and 10 for this sample.  I devised my own lesson plan and then adapted based on their needs in this class.  I will go more in depth at the end of this but there are definitely changes that should be made moving forward in this process.  For this post I am not including the lesson plan but we asked the students to write a personal opinion paper on what their thoughts and feelings were about using the "N" word in schools.  As a student did they feel it was appropriate to use the word in the book.  Could another word have been used and still portrayed the same meaning.  We suggested a couple of paragraphs and gave them the grading rubric we had devised for the assignment. 
          One of the things that I enjoyed the most about the assignment for the students was that it gave them a voice.  They were able to butt the system a bit by using a word that they have been told isn't appropriate in school.  Not that any of these students don't use it but it came at it from a different angle.  Each student got the chance to voice if they felt that the school should then teach them that in a required text.  This group of students is typically stifled in what they can and cannot say and they usually have been directed to be specific about their answers.  This was personal opinion, would we be able to hear what they had to say.  I strongly feel that they were able to do that in these writings.  One student chose to use it multiple times as the ending of his paper.  This response was a quick generated piece but it would be fun to use this as a jumping off point.  Could they use this in a poem?  Maybe more in depth would help them open up even more.  I was however still able to grasp who the students were in their writings.
          It would have been easier for me to just have them give their opinion to a passage in the book, it meant more to choose a word that they had already grumbled about in the beginning readings.  I would challenge the students to push themselves a bit and yet we didn't have many errors in terms of what they were doing.  Anderson says in his book, "If we see students' errors as something bad, we overlook what some of those errors are telling us about the ways that students are growing as writers."  I would agree and press the students that we didn't have a problem with grammar, punctuation, etc but would like to look more in depth from them their response and where it came at in relation to the reading.  As writers we write most things to be read and while they knew a teacher would be reading these it would be interesting to get different responses if they knew for example that these would be opinion papers to go in the school newspaper for example.  Many of these students often refuse to write anything. One student stuck to that but we were able to get the voices of many our students on this writing.
          I can't wait to do another writing analysis.  This helped me to grow as an educator and I am going to be looking for ways to improve before I have to "judge" students again in the future.