Category Archives: teachers doing student assignments

Suppose a talented but easily bored third grader needs to stay focused on her writing lessons in order to improve her writing skills.  This student likes silliness, absurdity and humor in writing.  (Don’t we all?)  My solution:  Take short passages from books,  replace dull parts, and add humorous details.

My student and I began with a passage from the novel Wonder.  In the passage, a mother is in the hospital, about to give birth, when the nurse helping her farts — not not a sneaky fart, but a loud, explosive fart.  (Kids love to read about farts.)  Meanwhile the doctor faints and the angry father doesn’t know what to do.

I suggested to my student that she imagine what comes next in this situation and write about that.  I had to convince her that because this was writing practice, she could write whatever she wanted.  It didn’t have to agree with the book or even be true.  She was not convinced.  So I took the lead and wrote the next sentence.

“Hey!  I’m having a baby over here!” the mother said.  “Somebody help me.”

My student’s eyes lit.  She quickly wrote the next sentence:

“But I am tired.  Let’s wait for the doctor to wake up,” the farting nurse said. 

My turn.  I wrote:

“The baby’s coming NOW!” the mother cried. 

My student wrote next:

“What kind of hospital is this? Our baby needs to be born,” the father shouted.

And so we continued until the end of class, or should I say past the end of class because the student wanted to continue.

Is the writing outstanding?  Well, for a third grader, it’s pretty good.  Was the student engaged?  Definitely.  Will the student use dialog in the future?  Probably, especially if we practice it more.

Did it make a difference that the teacher was writing?  That might have been the most important factor of all.  It’s always more fun if you work with someone else.  In this case, the teacher was more of a fellow writer than an expert, so the student was not intimidated.  I deleted parts of what I wrote and rewrote them, modeling good writing practices.  I responded to my student’s ideas, letting her know her ideas were important.

Is this a practical writing exercise?  Yes, most teachers can do this with a class weekly or biweekly.  The problem is finding a writing passage to launch the student/teacher collaboration.  Some possibilities are

• Mark Twain’s work. It’s all in the public domain now, so you don’t have to worry about copyrights.  And it’s full of humorous scenes and dialog.  Tom Sawyer convincing his friends to paint the fence.  Tom falling in love with Becky.  Tom and Huck showing up for their own funerals.  Huck dressing like a girl to visit a river town.  If a passage is too long, it only takes a few minutes to paraphrase it and send it to students’ networked computers.

• Scenes from Judy Bloom’s Fudge.   You’d have to summarize a scene like the father pouring the meal over Fudge’s head in the bathtub, but most kids are familiar with Fudge’s antics anyway.  The idea is to write them in your own style, with your own imaginary details.  Two or three kids could collaborate and later share their passages after the teacher patterns how to work together.

• Wimpy Kid Greg finds himself in dozens of silly predicaments. Look at the pictures and write what you see, forgetting Jeff Kinny’s words on the page.  Elaborate on what students know by adding new details.

• For older students, take Romeo’s words about Juliet being the sun to a jealous moon.  What would Juliet say if she were a female Young Sheldon who didn’t get poetry or metaphors?  Or rewrite Mercutio’s double entendres as a conversation with his friends.

Teachers might say, I don’t have time for this.  But do you have an hour once a month to create or find a passage to use with your class?  Could other teachers do the same and share their work?  Students need imaginative writing lessons to improve their writing skills.

Many times when I ask students to respond to short answer questions, to write summaries or even to write essays, I write too.  This “me too” approach has advantages.

I can test whether the assignment is doable. Recently I gave my fifth grade students a reading passage with a follow-up question requiring that the students supply two details from the passage to answer the question.  I could easily find one detail, but two?  The students had problems too.  Together we discussed this problem and figured out how to write an answer.  I recognized that their frustration was genuine, acknowledged that, and worked as a partner to solve the writing problem.  Sometimes I chuck the assignment altogether and give a different one.

If I suspect students might be struggling with a particular aspect of the writing—how to start, for example—I can offer several possibilities, and I can read my possibilities aloud, asking for students for advice as to which one I should choose. We can discuss the merits of each.  Or a student could say, “Here’s how I did it,” and read her solution aloud.  I am seen as more of a collaborator than a know-it-all teacher.  For some students, this can make me more approachable when they struggle with writing problems.  When I was in high school, I was assigned homework which would take two hours nightly in just one subject. By my doing the writing assignment with my students, I can judge how much time the assignment takes, and break the assignment into parts.

Students can listen to my vocabulary and sentence openings. They can listen for sentences of various lengths.  They can decide whether my “hook” hooks and whether my conclusion picks up on the introduction.  They can see how I use transitions, dialog, details and examples.  They can see how I incorporate the writing concepts which we talk about all the time.  And all this I do on a piece of writing which they are working on.  I give them a model which they can aspire to.

Of course, with some students my time is better spent discussing each sentence as they write it, making reminders as they go along, and praising attempts which flop.

But sometimes my example speaks louder than words.