Misadventures of a Writing Teacher

Authored by Susan Pace

Recently, students in seventh-grade English were tasked essentially with writing a fan fiction of The Outsiders, a beloved novel for most middle schoolers and their parents.

Briefly, fan fiction is a piece of writing written either in the style of a favorite author or using the lore of a favorite book. The aim of the project was to get students to choose one of three ideas: extend the story, rewrite a scene from a female perspective, or create a modern-day take of a favorite scene. Most students combined multiple prompts to create their stories because – of course they did.

Students submit a rough draft of 800-1200 words, receive feedback, revise and edit to resubmit a “final draft” (I hate the term final draft as it implies the writing is complete, but it is what it is), and receive a second layer of feedback. The writing is then graded for a final grade (major, not minor…150 points…eek!)

As you know, the window between Thanksgiving and Christmas was a wee bit smaller than usual, so students were anxious about completing their stories on time. No one struggled to meet the minimum requirement.

Herein lies the misadventures of the writing teacher.

Number 1: Reading 73 stories and providing informative feedback time during the holiday season x 2.

Number 2: Receiving an email that says“Student Name rejected your suggestion” after reading and responding to writing for six hours straight and immediately forwarding the email to the student politely suggesting the student accept my suggestions. Poor kiddo! He was manually changing each suggestion, clicking the X, and moving on to the next.

Number 3: Students reading my suggestion of “Add Paragraph” with negative connotation such as “You did not write enough paragraphs: add one more here” instead of “Hey there, look at how you could break up this section by adding a paragraph break. I’ve already added said paragraph break. Please click the green checkmark to accept the edit I already made. Go you!”

Number 4: Setting the word limit and then negotiating with wordsmiths (also known as tyrants) about the length of a story was a massive teacher fail. Children emailed repeatedly to check and double check if it would be okay to go over the word limit and many came in a THOUSAND words over the limit. And, I may or may not have responded to one very anxious student late into the night saying, “If you feel this way, I trust your writing instincts. I can’t wait to read your saga. No more than 3000 words, ok?” Plot twist: the writer did, in fact, blow right past 3000 words.

Next year we’ll write flash fiction, I think.

And now, the fun part…

The Secret Lives of Students

Part of the editing process was encouraging students to elicit feedback from their peers. I encouraged my grammar pros to sign up to help their peers on the board…

Note: Students indicated their preferred method of contact! (Their teacher realized in writing the post that many students added their phone numbers!)

Another “fun” thing about seventh grade is that this year will be the first year the students get to take exams. Here are just a few tips they shared to help each other find success.