Workshops+Week+1+(Sept+10)+Note

code September 10, 2010 1:00 - 3:00 pm Writing Tutorial Sessions

In attendance for the first group were Mariana Gonzales, Aaron Goode, Omar Rivera-Gonzales and Nelson Vera, for the second group Bryndon Cheng, Breanna George, Shankae McLean, and John Nguyen, and for the third group Shannon Ferguson, Shapreace Fullwood, Isaiah Jacobs, Anthony Reid and Isaac White.

My goal today was to introduce, exercise and ingrain both the methods of freewriting and cover letter-writing into the students' approach to assignments of this nature, as well as pragmatically to have them leave ready to type up their cover letters and submit.

My plan, after calling attendance, was first to see if students had heard of freewriting by putting it up on the whiteboard. Some had and some hadn't; those who had, namely Aaron and Isaiah, offered their own experiences with the method from high school. "It's about writing whatever you want for a certain amount of time," one of them told me. I asked the group how that might be useful in writing a paper for class, giving them time to consider it before delving a bit into the process of dividing one's labor into getting ideas out, developing, and revising. They liked the idea of consciously preventing writer's block and listened in.

Next, I told them that now they were to apply it: two handwritten pages in twenty minutes of freewriting about their writing process, both in general and within the particular context of the past assignment. (This challenge gave them an opportunity to prove themselves wrong.) They could approach this chronologically or by priority, I said, and I began to write the fill-in-the-blank statements from the "Skeleton of a Cover Letter - Draft" handout up on the board in the form of jump-off questions.

As time went on, some students stopped for a moment, one showed skepticism (but was later converted), most turned to the questions on the board, and all worked diligently in quasi-competition with one another to finish the two pages in time. Some went on to a third page, and nearly all reported a feeling of exhilaration (academically speaking) from getting all of their ideas out and down. John asserted that it was much more useful to him than other forms of brainstorming that neglect to allow students to develop their ideas through the physical writing process. Isaiah and Shapreace considered the difference between freewriting and more focused later-stage writing. Open discussion was held with nearly all members contributing.

At the 30 minute mark, I wiped "freewriting" off the board and replaced it with "cover letter," asking the same sorts of questions to the students as I had earlier: what is it, have you used it, what's its purpose, etc. A few students had written cover letters for jobs, so we investigated the psychological stature of someone writing a personal statement to someone of authority. At this point, I handed out the draft-half of the cover sheet template in a nerdy "ta-da" moment and had the students number each statement 1-7 (the third line broke into two). Then I instructed the students to reread their freewrites closely, breaking their writing off into the seven categories as well as they could. Some writing overlapped and other parts didn't fit in any categories, so I encouraged the students to add categories to the list. This took five to ten minutes, and, again, the students were very focused on their work. After they had broken up their papers, I encouraged them to reorganize their ideas, revealing to them that they were deep in the process of a method called reverse outlining. (I didn't plan on introducing this technique, but informally presented it regardless.) Some students decided that it would be easier for them to reorganize their writing on the computer, and so for those groups we had a Q and A for a few minutes.

These were all successful sessions, and I respect the students for putting in the good effort to reach a common goal. Group discussion was thoughtful and ambitious. Next week, we will flip our setup around to approach a new subject at a different stage of writing, and keep it playful and grounded. code