Insert Witty Title Here:

This week, after reading the rest of Romano's Blending Genre text, I have definitely decided that at some point in my teacher career (hopefully earlier than later) I have to try assigning a multigenre paper to my class. Ideally, I would be able to try a couple different multigenre assignments ranging from a creative writing piece to a sort of research paper. I have also been thinking about trying to write my own multigenre paper for the end of the semester assignment for this class, but we'll see how it goes and how much time I have between all of the readings we have assigned for each class.

One part that really stuck out to me while reading Romano was when he was explaining poetry for two voices. It made me think back to last semester in Beth (Brendler)'s class when we read Joyful Noise and how originally I thought that the some students might find the difficulty level (or lack there of) almost insulting to their intelligence. After seeing in what other ways this type of poetry can be used to express in ways that do not relate to bugs and their human-like lives. I think that the examples in the book could definitely be used to show students how the poems for two voices can be used to enhance a historical project, just as Mary Millard's poem on pages 105-106 showed the similar experiences of two different holocaust survivors. I will be assisting with a poetry unit during my student teaching, and I think that this would be a great concept to bring up to my 9th grade honors class and let them try to create their own two voice poems based on either personal or historical experiences and then have those who want to perform it for the class with the help of one of their peers.

Another thing that got me thinking while reading this text was the idea of risk taking. I guess I didn't really know what risk taking meant in terms of writing papers until recently as I have never taken creative writing past the required introductory class that I took during freshman year. After reading the several multigenre paper examples Romano provides in Blending Genres, I have a better understanding of what it means to take risks when writing, and how difficult it can be to write on such personal topics knowing that someone is going to be reading it and possibly even grading you on it. Seeing it from this point of view may help me in the long run, and will advise my students to not be afraid of taking those risks that might turn a good paper into a great paper.

RESOURCE LINK:

I had planned on trying to find some more helpful resources for using multigenre papers in the classroom, and while I was searching on google, I came across Candance Doerr's (she came in to talk to us about the writing project that some of our classmates are participating in at the Weisman) blog! She has some great resources for writing multigenre papers (including a research paper assignment). I would definitely check it out. If you click on the links, you can download the files into Microsoft word.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/doer0026/cyborgs/2007/01/multigenre_writing.html