New teaching strategy: Slightly wacky handouts.

I’ve gone back and forth about what type of text examples to use in teaching handouts to illustrate principles of writing.

Initially, I leaned away from wacky examples like some people use, since I think some people just note the humor or the whimsicality and don’t actually go on to engage and absorb the material underlying them.

So, for a while, I used serious text examples, but from texts unknown to the students, since the way I figured, I was teaching about generalizable principles, and they should be able to see the underlying structures and apply them with what they know.

That didn’t work out so well, so I switched to examples from texts they had worked with and achieved some degree of understanding on, and those handouts worked *much* better; I've heard in fact that college freshmen work like that a lot, esp. at first, and you have to meet them where they are.

Lately, now, esp. since I’ve been working with the same students mostly and we’re almost halfway through the year and they’ve been good at identifying structures in writing, I decided to start using wacky examples again.

This time, I illustrated a brainstorming method by using lyrics from the Katy Perry song “The One that Got Away" (249 million YouTube views!!!).

Some students got hyped – a handful of the female ones did, at least, perhaps because they sang along to the lyrics in high school? – but more rolled their eyes at Top 40, or laughed with me (I hope) at the seriousness with which I parsed the lyrics.

Some students also claimed that they didn’t know the song, though 2 of the Chinese students did.

In any case, I guess we’ll see how the material sticks…  I may ask the students too how they felt that they absorbed the material, with the Katy Perry lyrics illustration.