Nikki began Monday's English 1539 class by identifying and explaining some problems she came across while reviewing/offering feedback on student narratives. Two major problems were tense shifting (especially between past and present) and a lack of descriptive writing. She explained tense shifting first. Although it would have been easy to slip into very technical language to explain this concept, Nikki's approach was quite straightforward and easy to understand. She started with a sentence: I waited at the end of the driveway, then I start punching them. As a class, her students identified what was wrong with the sample sentence and fixed it (first in past tense, then in present tense). To further involve students, Nikki then made them look over their narratives and write either "past" or "present" at the top of their papers (and, of course, make any necessary tense changes).
Next, she reviewed the idea of descriptive writing, again using a sample sentence (I stood on the gravel drive.) to further explain the concept. Emphasizing the idea of "showing, not telling," Nikki revised the sentence with her students' help. She also asked her students to look through their narratives for any two sentences that required more descriptive language and to rewrite them.
In the last 20 or so minutes of class, Nikki and I informally "conferenced" with students, primarily helping them with these two problems. Our approach was to help them find sentences that needed revision and to work with them on a sentence-by-sentence basis (which was time-consuming but helpful). The students will then (we hope) revise the rest of the narrative in the same way. The students' final version of their narrative will be due Monday.
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