And these days, when my students’ physical proximity to each other and their teachers is more tightly controlled, I can still provide a space for physical proximity to their ideas: the ink and paper and smeary graphite, the texture of it all.
Author: Brett Vogelsinger
On the Lookout For Happy Accidents
My greatest hope is that amid this newness, the “I-feel-like-a-first-year-teacher-again” of it all, we can all learn some things about teaching writing that we may never have otherwise explored.
Surprise and Emergence
In our writing classrooms, 2020 has been a year full of surprise. In Pennsylvania, we had a warm, nearly snowless winter and sudden, snappy late frosts in in the spring, so it’s been a year of surprises in the garden just outside my back door as well. Recently, I started taking some photos of striking […]
Poetry as An Act of Revision
One key idea threads through my series this year about poetry as part of the writing process for other genres: poetry sharpens our diction. Frequent practice in reading and writing poetry tunes our eyes and ears to what works and does not work in our choice of words, the same way practicing guitar helps train […]
A Collaborative Poem for An Isolating Pause
The good news is that words bind us together and can help us to create collaboratively with our students even as we all adjust to our new, socially distant ways.
Extended Poetry to Develop Drafting Stamina
Writing poetry is a rite of passage for many teens. Some discover it on their own, crafting lyrics or daily musings in dog-eared notebooks. Some discover it in English class when a teacher invites them to write beside the beautiful words of published poets. This year, when we returned from winter break to start 2020 […]
Poetry as Prewrite (Part 2)
In last month’s post on Moving Writers, I shared how some simple poetry writing helped students tease out a theme in their reading. Crafting poetry can also help students dig deeper into details they later incorporate in the heart of their writing. Prewriting with poetry can give literary analysis essays a pulse. While waiting in line […]
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