Mentor Text: Wheat Kings by The Tragically Hip

Strategies Used:

• Poetic Narrative
• Symbolism

Background:

Waiting for the last day on Friday means I’m in my classroom, wrapping up this year, cleaning up, prepping for next year… that kind of thing.

It means a pretty much constant stream of music is playing. I’ve been testing out the albums that I feel are going to be the albums of the summer for me, diving deep into a couple of new gems, and just letting shuffle bring me what it will.

Via The CBC

A couple of artists loomed large in my classroom this year. One of these artists was The Tragically Hip, fronted by Gord Downie. One of my first Mentor Text Wednesdays of the year was about one of his poems, and he was the catalyst for what we called The Chanie Project, as Secret Path, his album, and the accompanying graphic novel, were core texts as we talked about the legacy of residential schools in Canada.

As I was pondering a text for this final MTW of the school year, I felt compelled to pull a good Canadian text in. It is Canada’s 150th year as a country this year, which is being celebrated with great fanfare. There’s a sticky note protruding from my copy of The Handmaid’s Tale marking a passage that I will feature at some point, but The Hip came on. Continue reading →

Mentor Text: Ted Wilson Reviews The World  by Ted Wilson (posted and collected at Electric Literature, The Rumpus.net and I Am Ted Wilson

Writing Techniques:

• Writing Reviews
• Humour
• Satire

Background:
Perhaps the thing I love most about the Internet is the delightfully random nature of what it manages to put in front of me. This weeks mentor text set is an example of that.

Electric Literature has been a Twitter fave of mine for a while. It’s a great lit journal that regularly posts great pieces, from poetry to criticism, I’ve had a lot of wonderful reading roll across my feed. I’m not sure how I’ve only just now noticed “Ted Wilson Reviews The World.”

Via I Am Ted Wilson

“In 2009 I began reviewing the world, one item per week. So far I’ve reviewed hundreds of things!” is what I saw when I first clicked the link in the tweet. And I began reading the review posted on June 9th, for Windex.

And I laughed. Continue reading →

Mentor Text: Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo

Writing Techniques:

• Writing biography
• Focusing presentation of research

Background:

It’s almost June! That means the last couple weeks of school for me, and in Grade 10, it means we’re launching into the Rebel Project. It’s one of my favorite projects to do, so much learning and creation happening.

I’ve written here about using mentor texts for students as they write the profiles of their chosen rebels. Every year, I check to see if there are any fresh mentor texts to add to the pile.

This year, the delightfully random things that happen when I get to Googling brought me to some of the images that have made their way online from Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, a book that has been wonderfully overfunded on Kickstarter. The Rebel Project features both a visual aspect and a written aspect, both of which are highlighted in this project.

from Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls

This book will be a collection of profiles of 100 powerful women. It appeals to me for many reasons. As a father of two daughters, I love the idea of sharing the stories of powerful women with my daughters. As a teacher, I want the young women I teach to see this too. The young men as well.

I also adore the “gimmick” here. The profiles are written like stories for kids. Once I order a copy, and it shows up in November, I’ll be reading these with my girls. I love the idea of this as a mentor text for my students for our Rebel Projects as well, giving us a fresh way to write about the subjects of our research.

How We Might Use These Texts:

Writing Biography – My students will be looking at these texts after we’ve researched. They’ll be using a research scaffold to focus their research.My goal is that these pieces are well written, and are more than information dumps.

With these mentor texts being written in the form they are, as stories for children, I feel like my writers will be inspired to really consider how they want to present the story. These pieces have a narrative flow. Look at this one about Serena Williams.

from Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls

Perhaps my favorite thing about this one is that it’s not directly about Serena Williams. It uses Raul, the taco stand owner, as the observer, the person who sees the Williams sisters grow and learn, work to excel at tennis. For the project my students are doing, this could be an important mentor text, as it highlights the impact on the community, which is one of the criteria for their subject selection.

Because they are writing a more narrative piece in nature, one that is intended for a younger audience, I feel like our writers would be inspired to focus on the story of their subject as opposed to the facts. These pieces are lean and focused, they aren’t embellished with words that the writer doesn’t really know.

Simple writing, focusing on story, with a clear audience. A powerful mentor text.

Focusing Presentation of Research – Somewhere along the line, educators have allowed students to develop an unshakeable belief that informational research based writing should be be long, drawn out boring pieces that are a soul crushing burden to write, and a momentous exercise in monotony for us to mark.

So, isn’t this structure a breath of fresh air. Let other courses have biographic profile pieces that nobody likes. Let’s do stuff like this. In my context, this mentor text will be used in a project that focuses their research. I give them a research scaffold that guides their research. These mentor texts, and their structure, focuses how that research is presented.

They are relatively brief. There isn’t room for the page or so where our writers try to compress every single event in the person’s life into the essay, no matter how mundane or irrelevant. The piece is about what makes them special. Those are the pertinent facts which must be shared.

Also, as I’ve already alluded, the narrative format of the piece should serve as a guide to help them choose the material from their research that contributed to a narrative. That may mean a specific planning step, and a good discussion about what that narrative is, but it certainly saves us all from the creation and assessing of the paragraphs about the subject’s elementary school days, which, as remarkable as the person grew up to be, were quite unremarkable, all things considered.

My team and I got really excited about these mentor texts as we were meeting and discussing the things we’re planning to run out the year. They’re doing the Rebel Project for the first time, and will be putting their spins on it. These texts will help them do that. They’ll allow me to inject some new life into a project I love. They connect to other work we’re doing in other courses, which is exciting.

What mentor texts do you use for biographical writing? What other applications for these texts do you see? Do you actively look for ways to inject new life into old standbys in your classroom?

As always, connect with me on Twitter, @doodlinmunkyboy, or feel free to comment below to connect.

-Jay