Blogging Catcher in the Rye

Jackie ♦ March 15, 2010 ♦ 1 Comment

For the fall semester, my ninth graders began every class with a freewrite. They would go to my website’s calendar and view the page for that day, which would have a question for them to answer, or would give them a poem or quote to respond to and connect to our reading. I tried to develop these freewrites as ways for them to connect their personal experiences to the text– questions about siblings before we discussed Cain and Abel, for example–and then we would read some aloud and move into discussion for that day, or use the freewrites to transition into whatever activity I had planned for them.

I like beginning the class with a writing exercise, and the resulting pieces of writing were often interesting and useful as far as discussion. But the students had gotten a little complacent, and I didn’t collect them every day, so I had no way of knowing exactly what they were writing unless they volunteered, which I didn’t want to make mandatory if they had chosen to write about something more personal. So I started thinking about ways to try and keep the same utility, but adapt the assignment itself, make it more assessable and more challenging.

I used the idea of the transactional reading journal to create an assignment (document linked here) where my ninth graders would begin each class by writing a transactional response as a blog post, which they would then publish. I decided to give over 20-25 minutes (from a 70 minute period), depending on the day, to this activity, which is twice as long as I used to dedicate to freewrites, and I asked the students who finished early to comment on any published blog posts made by their classmates. I also comment on their entries regularly, and required them to choose a different type of entry each day, so that they would have to stretch themselves. As with my Hamlet blogs, I created student blogs that are hosted on my teacher website and set to only be viewable by the members of each class.

I’m in the midst of this unit now, and I have been really pleased with the results so far. Sometimes they have trouble settling down to quiet work at the beginning of the class, and sometimes there is some chatter amongst them as they decide which prompt they are going to respond to that day. But I think they really enjoyed the novelty and the break from the familiar, and once again, the act of commenting on each other’s writing has knit them a little closer together as learners, which is great to see. Their blogs have also functioned as portfolios, as they have posted writing tasks and assignments there which I have graded instead of quizzes.

They’ve written advertisements for hunting hats and nun-staffed hotlines, poems about ducks in the park, a letter from Holden to Mark David Chapman, predictions about the novel, movie casting reports, found poems from different chapters and testimony for a mock school board meeting on censorship, which we held in class. They explained their reactions to certain scenes, examined “five-star quotes,” and written letters from one character to another, created comic strips and Facebook profiles and soundtracks. I love getting to see everything they’ve created, and I love that they get to see how creative their fellow students can be.