Shiny Syllabus! And a snazzy link!

First of all, allow me to geek out pedagogically a little bit and say that this is an absolutely fantastic example of an English teacher's website. I wish more of my college professors had been half so organized.

Secondly, my spring syllabus, behold!  More details will be forthcoming, but I'm super-excited about all of it and hope my students will be as well.  Spring 2011

Finishing up the semester at NWCS!

Today was our third to last class at Northwest Chinese School, so I'm doing the end-of-semester clean-up of missing assignments, so here I'm reposting a few papers:

Dialogue Gloss or Character Paragraphs

Prewriting Exercises

Today we did a revision exercise working through five main skills:
1. Pronoun Usage
2.  Sentence Fragments & Run-Ons
3. Weak or Passive Sentences
4. Simple, Complex & Compound Sentences
5. Paragraph Organization

The details and explanations of the activity are here.

Verdict from the Jury

Students' responses to the questions:

What did you like about the novel project?	What did you not like about the novel project?
It is interesting I like the old times in Europe, I put them in my story.	It takes days to finish it.
It made me feel more confident about my writing. Helped me shorten my time in ESL class in my school.	Going too fast. It is hard for me.
Practicing writing Know how hard it is to write a novel.
I liked how it was really fun we had dare machines to make our stories funny and goofy. I liked how our story could be as random as we wanted to.	I didn’t like how i had way too much homework from school to make my novel better. I didn’t like how I didn’t use my time wisely si could improve my story and I couldn’t make it as long as I could.
How it was really sad but good and how my characters came out to be.
I could use my imagination to create a story. I learned that a story can come with many lessons if it’s not meant to be	It took a lot of my time.. sometimes I got stuck on wha to write.
It was fun writing a story. I liked using the dare machine.	There was a lot to write. I don’t have a 2nd one.
One is the gut and another one is the theme.	Too long, no special stuff.
Writing the story.  It was very fun and interesting.	You had to write a novel in a certain time. It was a bit tiring, because sometimes I would stay up late writing it.
I liked doing the preplanning, and actually typing it down.	I didn’t like figuring out what my characters should say, and I didn’t like figuring out the enxt scene.
I liked it when we can create our own things, also getting tickets.	I didn’t like it when we had to write, and I didn’t like to write paragraphs.
I liked it because it was fun and a good experience.	I didn’t like it because I didn’t have much time to do other things.
I liked creating my characters and my world. I liked making my characters do what they did.	I didn’t like it when I got stumped.  Also, I hated not knowing how to spell a word when needed.
I always had something to do when I was bored. I had fun making up stuff.	Too much typing. Hard to think sometimes.
the two things I liked about the novel project is you get to experience writing your own story without having to follow rules also it lets you create your own story.	There was a time limit which made it o hard to manage writing the entire novel while writing other things.
I liked getting to create and write my own story without my mom yelling at me to do my homework. I also liked the prizes.	I really wish we had more time to finish and the pace was tiring.
Well, you had an extra challenge in doing wriitng.	Writer’s block and staying on topic.

At the end of the month...

My word count: 51,788

My Bellevue class's total word count (23 students): 102,557

My Seattle class's total word count (8 students): 29,102 

Total Northwest-Chinese School Related Noveling In November of 2010: 183,447 words of novel rough drafts. 

WHEE!!!

My favorite dare

I've been signing into and off of the Young Writers' Program website the last few days as only a expert procrastinator can do (and this despite the fact that I have the kind of schedule this week that, for example, just now I got out of bed and will not have an opportunity to get back INTO bed or indeed enter my house at all until 33 hours from now), and so every time I see the welcome page the Dare Machine challenges me to new heights of absurdity.

Many of the dares are random and relatively silly, though definitely a good trick to get you jumpstarted if you're stuck.  One of them, however, has come up a few times and I really like it:

"We dare you to devote a chapter to your villain's morning routine."

Unless you're writing a first-person narration where this kind of information would be EXTREMELY tricky to wedge in, I think this is an awesome idea. (And even in a first-person narration, I imagine you could have someone give them the information for some plausible reason.)   I've been doing it for my villain as a prewriting exercise.  If you're writing a modern-day story with an antagonist in the form of a sibling, classmate or mean adult, this exercise will help you keep them human in your mind's eye.  How much can you REALLY hate someone who's still using Winnie the Pooh toothpaste, after all?

And if you're writing a sweeping fantasy epic, the morning routine can be either a great chance for lightness and humor (Xokor, Lord of a Thousand Hells, squinted into the obsidian mirror and frowned.  There was no doubt about it.  His hairline was definitely receding.  He'd need to order AT LEAST four executions before he'd feel better about this.)  or a chance to infuse more horror and terror into the situation by showing that the villain is even more powerful, evil, or heartless than your heroes thought.  Maybe his morning routine involves killing the servant who brought him his breakfast, just because.  Maybe his morning routine involves looking in his crystal ball -- where he can see and hear EXACTLY what the heroes are up to.  

Happy writing!

Just to say...

....so many of my students have great friend groups in their stories with tight relationships and sudden betrayals, at least according to their plot outlines.   This makes me happy for two reasons:

1. It confirms my sense that young adult literature in general is becoming more and more peer-group focused, or perhaps this is something that's always been great about YA lit, come to think of it, as things like 'The Book of Three" and "The White Mountains" and even "Redwall," come to mind. I haven't read "The Hunger Games" yet, but the summary of that one as given me by one of my tutees was that, while there's a principal romance at work in the stories, the book itself is at least as concerned with the main character and her friends, not just the boy she loves.  And since I think solid friend groups and "fellowships" are both more interesting to read and harder to write well than straight romance, I like this trend.

2. *I* get to read all these stories! And I LOVE friendships, fellowships and and gasp-oh-no-what-now?! betrayals!  Whee!

On Variety

One of my classes is already noveling.  The next class starts next weekend.  The rest of the insane noveling world starts in two weeks, on November 1st. I'm doing my own novel in pace with my second class, which means my 50,000 words need to happen between Saturday, October 23rd and Saturday, November 20th. (Not even a full month!)  And, just like (I hope) my students, I am filled with equal parts excitement and terror.  This is my third year doing NaNoWriMo, and while I've always "won" by hitting my required word count, I've never come CLOSE to the end of the story.  This year, with a tighter plot than usual and a modern-day setting so I won't need to spend so much time world-building, I'm hoping it actually happens.

In what is perhaps slightly inimical to the  spirit of NaNoWriMo, I'm doing some prewriting today, as my students did last week. I appreciate the thrill of setting forth on November 1st, or whenever you start, without so much as a chart, a compass, or even a back-up keg of drinking water on your metaphorical novelling boat. But for me, at least, it's never worked.  I posted a list of prewriting exercises in the previous post on NaNoWriMo lesson plans, and I'm sitting and grading my way now through a big pile of them.  And it's absolutely thrilling, the fantasies and the mysteries and the slice-of-life novels and the romances and all the rest of it that my students are hopefully writing right now.

The really interesting thing is the combination of similarity and variety.  I've come across three or four "young teenager goes to a fantasy world and has a quest" plots, for example.  Hey, it's a tried-and-true formula for everyone from C.S. Lewis to Neil Gaiman.  And yet, even just in utero, I can see differences in character, in tone, and certainly in events that are going to make each of these novels completely its own.  Last NaNo, one of my close friends and I retold the same fairy tale.  We've known each other over ten years, lived together for four years before her marriage, read, watch and listen to much of the same media, and even got our English degrees at the same college, so it'd be hard to find two people more likely to write similar stories.  There is NOTHING beyond the bare bones of the story similar between her book and mine. (Hers is closer to finished, for one thing.)

It's such a cliche, but everyone really does have their own story to write, and that book will never exist if they don't write it.

And now I'm off to finish grading and then do MY homework -- namely, my plot rollercoaster and my annotated NaNo playlist!