Revision and Personal Connections

Tonya's revision activity made me feel like a detective editor, sifting through the paragraph pieces to find the flow and the main ideas of each. Both Tiffany and I had narrative pieces and I found it so interesting how we both arranged our cut-up paragraphs into a more chronological order. But as writers, we had crafted our pieces by dropping the reader into the middle and then used flashback and dialogue. It would be interesting to point out to students how writing can be crafted and approached from different perspectives depending on what effects the writer wants or if the reader is reading for just comprehension. I think this activity would improve my students' skills as actual editors. In the past, when they do peer editing, the changes they suggest are usually mechanically based and do not revolve around the deep structural analysis we did today.

Robin's demo made me reflect on what background, what characteristics, what assumptions I bring to my classroom and what my students bring as well. Working to understand the culture and background they come from will help me understand the individual. It's so necessary to remember that learning is personal and about how we connect to our students as people and sometimes I think that school as an institution makes us forget about the humanness of who we teach and who they are. I was loving the extensive amount of resources Robin collected and gave to us.