Writing the Biography: Your Comments Invited
This was my first attempt at teaching the writing of a biography. My intent was to provide students with a clear motivation for doing their best, in interview, in getting the details right, and in completing a final draft that each student is proud to submit.
What did you like? And, more importantly, what would you change and why? Your comments are invited and, especially, your concrete suggestions for things like pacing (how long to allocate to a lesson), order (what to do first, second, third) and any other suggestion you may have.
5 comments:
I liked the assignment. It was a great way to get to know everyone in the class and an exelent way to start off the class!
I really liked the assignment. I felt very motived to interview my classmates because all of them have interesting lives and most of us came from deferent cultures. Was very helpful to have the questions which guided our interviews; however, for next time would be important to have some biographies as examples before starting the exercise. In addition, it would be better to work in couples for at about an hour during the class in order to get enough information.
Thanks Andrea and Spencer! I agree with Andrea about more time for the interview. As for examples, I tried hard to find some that length and failed. Longer examples would have been different from the 500-word limit I'd set.
I could, now that one set of classes has gone through this exercise, use some of your work as examples, especially as I expect the final versions to be very good indeed.
I like movie "Forrest Gump".
I think it is a good biography and an interesting story.When I was in the military, I might have a chance to fight in the Vietnam too.
Life is like a box of chocolate."you never knows what are you going to get"
So... I hate to break the nice comments, well not really. Brad. I understand what you were trying to do here, create a community within the classroom and get a sample of our writing. I do not feel this was appropriate as a starting assignment for the following reasons. Our information base was based solely on one person, we couldn't say go home and add more bits of information of our own accord, we had to contact people. Our information was restricted to that given by the person. It really isn't easy to pull details out of people especially the sensory details you were asking for. I also find Biography's to be really dry, I would have much preferred a first assignment we could play around a bit with and have more fun doing. Also whenever questions arise about yourself such as the situations you find yourself in now, sometimes information you'd rather not discuss comes up. I found this to be the case. Other than the above mentioned, I feel this assignment would have been really great later on in the course maybe a tad less detail oriented. I did learn some things about my classmates that sparked my interest. Anyhow, thats my two cents.
Toodles, Sean.
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