"A good example is far better than a good precept." - Dwight L. Moody

Week Nine.

 Challenge Writing Tasks.




Some drafty drafts above, and some less drafty drafts below.


I.
Using Mari Andrew's Grief Club Membership Card as a mentor text, my Catholic Club Membership Card is above.



II. 
With Michael Salinger's Well Defined: Vocabulary in Rhyme as a mentor text, here are two of my own creative vocabulary poems.


Jejune doesn't catch your interest
slides right by you.
Say it: disinterest.
Say it until your face is blue.
If the ball is significance
or your attention,
it's a swing and a miss.
Jejune remains in a state of insignificance
not to mention,
to ignore jejune is easy- bliss.


Hyperbole is a mountain
when it should be a molehill.
If it was just a fountain,
expect a geyser, anything but still.
Hyperbole is the expansion
of a shack to a mansion.



III.
A reflection on my own mentor text pedagogy.

Mentor texts support students in a way that fills the gaps of my teaching and supports them at each step/phase/place in the spectrum of writing in ways that practicality/reality prohibit me from doing myself. It is an extension of my teaching that moves ownership to the students, encouraging their independence and therefore engagement. Marchetti's and O'Dell's Writing with Mentors supports the success of mentor texts in the classroom with case examples. My own case example, the classroom at the placement middle school, also supports this, although very differently: the lack of independence makes for a disengaged and even lethargic classroom.

Mentor texts give students the "curiosity... [and] confidence to start something new (Marchetti and O'Dell 90), lessening the terror and inhibition of a blank page because the mentor texts have, in a way, already started the writing. Mentor texts "take the scary and overwhelming work of getting started and provide something tangible" (Marchetti and O'Dell 111). The assistance offered by mentor texts is not magical, however- it is a resource that can only be accessed intentionally, with direction and practice. As teachers, we must encourage students to "write their observations [of mentor texts], questions [about mentor texts], and [mentor text] inspired prose" (Marchetti and O'Dell 93). We must "show students how" (Marchetti and O'Dell 99) to use mentor texts as "sources of inspiration" (Marchetti and O'Dell 111) and guides to genres. 

Nor can a mentor text exist in a vacuum. Clusters of mentor texts, sometimes centered on the student-chosen touchstone text, give students examples to draw from without confining them to the replication of a single guiding text (Marchetti and O'Dell 112, 129). Clustering mentor texts "open[s] their eyes to all the ways great writers communicate their texts" (Marchetti and O'Dell 139). There are "endless 'right' ways" (Marchetti and O'Dell 112) to write, but we have to show this to students. Clusters of mentor texts are a means of showing the possibilities in writing. 

Mentor texts can empower students to experiment in their writing (Marchetti and O'Dell 143), their creativity fostering ownership and independence in their writing- and isn't that our goal? 

Works Cited

Marchetti, Allison, and Rebekah O'Dell. Writing with Mentors: How to Reach Every Writer in the Room Using Current, Engaging Mentor Texts. Heinemann, 2015.



(IV.)
And a bonus page from my notebook: 





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