I had the privilege of developing an Honors Creative Writing class this year. Whenever you write curriculum for a new class, you guess a lot about what will work and what won't work.
The one piece of the creative writing puzzle I knew had to be in place was a journal. This being the year 2011 (well, it WAS 2010 and then it turned into 2011 in the middle of the academic year), I gave students the option of having a blog instead of a paper journal. 13/14 opted for the blog during first semester. By second semester 14/14 were blogging.
When I asked them to write course evaluations on the last day of class, blogs were hands-down the favorite routine writing exercise.
A writer's blog is a place where a student can plant ideas that may or may not germinate into publishable works. Some posts are angsty. Some are sweet. Some made my brain hurt. Some made me laugh until tears ran down my cheeks. Some broke my heart.They were great because, for the most part, they were honest. If you ever want to peek into the window of a teenager's heart, check out his/her blog.
(Hint: Blogger is for old people--high school graduates and older, and WordPress is for professional pursuits. Teens are on tumblr. tumblr is a hipster place. True hipsters never mention the venue on other websites like Facebook or Twitter. Oh, and more kids are abandoning Facebook for Twitter since FB took the status off the top of the profile page.)
I want to share some of the posts that made me smile, so over the next few days, I'll be posting one a day. All rights are reserved by the owner of each blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment