II. Peers, Knipper, and Duggan

When reviewing some of my peer's blogs, a couple that I read were Mary Catherine's and Isha Toney's.

I love how Mary Catherine plans to teach at a hospital to sick kids to help them keep up with schoolwork. This sounds like an uber-interesting job. I can't really say it's surprising though, because while I did NOT know this, from what I know of Mary Catherine she is a very sweet and caring person. I wish her all the best in this endeavor.

I noticed that Isha comes from a family of educators. Which is really interesting to me, because I've met several fellow students whose parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles are educators. My mother runs a home daycare, which for the toddlers is like a pre-preschool, because she does a lot of discipline that preschoolers practice. She does calender and seasons, circle times, apologies and time outs (but only when necessary). Grandma (maternal) and Papaw actually taught at USM, in the department of Psychology and Mathematics, respectively. I would be interested in knowing the statistics in this regard, how many teachers have family who are also in education, like Isha and me?

~ * ~ * ~

With this week's reading of the Knipper and Duggan article, I at first thought it was going to be about some obscure idea about using Content Area Writing. However, as I read through the article, it was not as complicated as I originally thought. The authors were not talking just about big reading projects, but little strategic uses of writing, or way to outline writing.

The most important things that I will take from this article are each of the strategies described. I liked how the authors made lists according to their subcategories (preparation, summarizing, critical thinking). I noticed that a few of these strategies were familiar to me, such as the Paragraph Frames, Word Maps, Structured Note-Taking, and Quick Writes. I even think I may have done an ABC list in high school for some class or another.

The only concept I struggled with was the Micro-theme. From what I understand, it's a summary, but if we're calling a spade a spade, why isn't it just a Summary and not a Micro-theme? I'm just not quite sure of the difference and didn't fully understand Knipper and Duggan's explanation of the strategy.

My main concerns in doing writing exercises with students in a future classroom is the time it takes to do them and the student's ability to complete them at the level expected of them. Writing takes time, which is not much of a commodity teachers can afford to spare. And then there's the possibility that the students a teacher gets may not be as developed with their writing skills as their grade level demands. Alterations can be made in that eventually, of course, but of course the struggle the students face to keep that expectation they are faced with still takes more time from the lesson.