Assignment 3- "Christina's Creative Writing Cookbook"

The Challenge: I want you to reflect on some possible ideas that you would like to pursue for the remainder of the course. Hopefully, you will find a topic driven by your passion. Write a blog post of at least 200 words reflecting on some possible topics and any questions you might have around the topic.

 My Response: I have done a bit of a 180 in my area of interest. Previously I had mentioned iPads in the classroom as a possible topic. In truth, my motivation for choosing this topic had more to do with the fact that it linked to current research I am doing for a merit scholarship research obligation than it did with following a true “passion”. While I am enthusiastic about any kind of technology in the classroom, I couldn’t honesty say that iPads in the classroom could be considered a “passion” of mine. What I was finding that this lack of intrinsic motivation was leading to some lagging on my part in compiling resources. And ok, I’ll admit it…I don’t even own an iPad!

 What I did find was that I was spending the majority of my free time (and I have precious little of it thanks to being a teacher, a student and mother of 2 children under the age of 2!) searching for information and resources that could help me build my Reading and Writing classes syllabi. This is my first semester teaching at the English Language Academy at the University of San Diego and it is a bit of a dream come true. I actually entered the MEd TESOL program in hopes of landing a job like this after graduation and now here I am doing what I’ve always wanted to do before I’ve even graduated. So my “aha!” moment was more of a “Duh!” moment, I realized I should be tapping into this passion for our assignment.

Of the 3 classes I am teaching this semester, I would say that the writing course is my baby. I came up with an idea of including a “Weekly Writing Warm-up” (www for short) which focuses on writing fluency over accuracy. So much of these academic ESL writing courses are focused entirely on teaching writing for academia and in my opinion, this is at the sacrifice of teaching the act of writing for the pure enjoyment of it. I told my students that one of my goals for the semester is for them to become comfortable with writing in English, which I would give myself a grade of a ‘C’ for accomplishing but if they love writing, then I’ll give myself an ‘A’. I also let them know that I’ve never received anything lower than an ‘A’ in my academic history so the pressure is on ;)

 So my new idea is to possibly build a new blog linking any awesome creative writing activities I find, as well as a log of The Weekly Writing Warm-ups I’m creating for others to use. I am really trying to live by the quote I mentioned in my 9/24/11 post, “In today’s world, your value comes not from the ideas you own but the ideas you share.” Starting a ‘Creative Writing for ESL students’ blog to share what I create and compile seems like it could be a step in the right direction. Maybe I’d call it “Christina’s Creative Writing Cookbook’…

My question is then, is this idea “techy” enough? Does it satisfy the requirement of the assignment?