Foot: Make-up Assignment

As a teacher, I think the multigenre autobiography would be a fun way to learn more about your students. The multigenre autobiography offers teachers a way to find out what types of topics your students are interested in. Knowing what your students are interested in would be very beneficial when trying to decide how to organize students for group projects. The multigenre autobiography lets teachers to have a better sense of who their students are and what type of background the students comes from. It also lets students learn more about each other. They may find that they have similar interests to one another. One of the lessons that I learned from completing my own multigenre autobiography was that even though I recognized that a text was too difficult for me, I returned to that text a few years later. That lesson impacts the way I plan on teaching because it showed me that it’s important not to get discouraged just because you struggle with something. I also learned just how important books were in my life. I read young adult literature because I could relate to that characters and what they were feeling. That reminded me how important it was to remember what types of situations my students will be going through and the emotions that are associated with them. One of the challenges with the multigenre autobiography is that it requires a lot of knowledge about computers in order to incorporate media in the presentation.

Another activity I would use in my own classroom would be to have students analyze a short piece of film after already viewing it once. I think this activity would be great in a creative writing classroom because it makes the students focus on their senses and specific details in the movie. I especially liked when students had to close their eyes and write down all the sounds that they heard in the film clip. It would make students realize how important specific details are when a writer is trying to capture a specific moment. I think this activity would also work in a general English class. This activity helps students realize how details impact a piece of writing. One of the challenges with this assignment is that it requires some knowledge of films terminology. It also requires students to be completely focused on the film clip in order to fully grasp the exercise.