Ugh, I am sorry all. I must have moved on from this page before my browser had saved all of my response because when I came back to review, it was gone :-( frustrating. Anyway, I will do my best to recall most of what I commented on.
First, I totally agree with both Tara and Rebecca about how much I enjoyed both the Atwell article and the Within and Beyond the Writing Process in the Secondary English Classroom. I particularly enjoyed reading Writing Process, first because chapter one has all of those amazing examples about students digging deep within themselves to produce astounding work. I started getting weepy when reading about Michael and his many writing assignments resulting in him making peace with his father abandoning him as a baby and then returning during his high school years. That is such a powerful story, and it brought up so many questions and conversations from last semester that we spoke about with regards to student sharing and how to deal with students who pour their heart out like that. It is definitely uncomfortable at first, but as we are being constantly reminded: Discomfort is good in education.
Secondly, I really enjoyed the Write/Think breaks that the book places throughout the reading. I admit, that sometimes when I read huge amounts of texts in the evening, my brain is not its sharpest, and sometimes it starts to skim. But, the Write/Thinks served as a mental stretch. It focused me on key points that had just been discussed and asked me to be reflective about my own experiences with a given topic. This is something I would very much like to steal for difficult or lengthy novels.
And of course, it was really great having chapter three give us a crash course in teaching writing as a process. I realized how long it had been since an instructor really laid out how to construct a paper in this kind of detail for me. It probably has not been done since high school, actually. So it was nice to be reminded of successful ways to frame what I (hopefully) do naturally at this point.
Lastly, I am enjoying the Romano text a great deal and really appreciate his humor and humility as a writer. Multigenre papers are extremely intriguing to me and I am excited at the prospect of assigning one to a class, but Jack's comment about state tests and the value of focusing on "traditional" papers has been nagging me the whole time I read Romano. I feel as though we may be in a time of flux on this issue and am interested in how this format develops over the next few years. My one issue with multigenre papers that I feel Romano is addressing to a certain extent is teaching students how to order the flow of items in a paper and creating successful transitions from piece to piece, otherwise the paper could seem like a disorganized portfolio.
