1. I cut out words and phrases from the pages of magazines. There are always plenty of magazines lying about, so we might as well put them to good use: giving people a chance to work through the thought process*** necessary to develop an idea into an essay.
2. I put the now-separated-from-their-original-context words and phrases into a small white envelope.
3. Each student blindly chose a word or phrase from said small white envelope.
4. Each student set to work thinking of what they could**** write about based on this word or phrase. They brainstormed in whatever way worked for them. I walked around and gave feedback, mainly trying to get students to think sharply and specifically*****.
5. After each student had their list, which they posted on our class message board, they formed groups of three to choose one topic from their combined lists and then set to work outlining the main ideas for an essay on this topic.
They never actually turned these outlines into essays. That was not the point. The point was to help them develop as thinkers--which has to happen before they turn into writers. So much focus is placed on the final product in many classes that student writers don't concern themselves with learning to grow a small, simple idea into the complex, intricate thing that we call an essay. Thus, many students don't get their reps as Idea Developers. They rush through to finish because finishing a paper is finishing one more step along the way in finishing the class, which is one more step along the way to finishing their degree and getting a job.
I see that all the time in the Writing Lab. Honestly, it's one of my favorite things to work on with people. That's why I love having a whiteboard in the lab. We work out their essay together, and I show them what you can do with a blank page. But I wish I could do more of that. That's why I did that exercise with the random phrases. I wanted to give them reps. I would love to develop that exercise into a full-blown essay project that extends over weeks and allows us to examine stages of the thinking process that happen while writing. I just don't have a classroom environment to do that developing. I tossed the idea of a workshop around with Matt Matera, but we both know that workshops don't fly here because they are extra, and anything extra doesn't attract people who are learning+working+raising families, which many of our students are.
So the idea will be just that: an idea. Eventually, I hope to get a chance to see what could happen if I keep working on it. We'll see.
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*This title is a modified version of The White Stripes' "There's No Home For You Here." I merely switched "girl" in the lyrics to "idea."
**The last class I was allowed to teach at Pima due to some new (I'm assuming budgetary) constraints placed on full-time staff who also served as adjunct faculty. That made me very sad. Hopefully that changes in the future.
***ESPN.com's Bill Simmons (The Sports Guy) has a theory that "it's all about getting your reps." This applies to basketball players, Miley Cyrus, and, I believe, people learning to think like people who write well; hence this exercise.
****This is about "could" because this exercise is about possibility. Most of writing is about possibility. Like Anne Lamott said, "Very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it." We should focus on student writers' ability to work through the unknown and the possible toward a more finite product.
*****The best example of this, I think: a student plucked the phrase "Carve out some family time" (originally in an ad for Big Love). He wrote ideas about family. That is the obvious one. What he was neglecting was the idea of carving out time. We talked about what the word "carve" means, about what it implies when combined with the concept of time, and what those ideas meant for family. Often people ignore words that are right in front of their eyes.
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