Friday, June 18, 2010

Mr. Roberts says FOCUS!


"Focus!" is something I say to my freshmen English students ALL the time, but Michael Roberts' session yesterday really drove home a distinct process of how to get Journalism students to do that, and do it well. His break down, examples, and explanation(s) of how to achieve focus in the idea, reporting and writing phases helped draw together my mish-mash of ideas--perhaps even enough to write a more useful and cohesive Journalism curriculum, leaving some institutional wisdom for the next sucker--er, I mean teacher, who might fill my shoes if I get too burned out.
In the short term, I believe his materials will help me FOCUS my teaching, and get better results from my students. I will also apologize for the soft and fuzzy focus of my photo here, and disclose that I did digitally mess with it to make the Planes, Trains, and Automobiles screen more easily visible.
For you youngsters that have never seen THAT classic, it's worth a Netflix for sure. "Those aren't pillows!!!" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093748 The late comedic genius John Hughes directed.
On a side note, when I first tried to include the link to IMDB.com for a preview (to my epic, Steve Martin-esque frustration), Blogger initially (and several times after) refused my attempts to simply copy and paste that link, nor even to paste simple text from either a Word or Notepad document, leaving me no choice but to type it in character by character. It also rejected my multiple attempts to include reader-friendly spaces between paragraphs today, which I guess means that I will have to learn why, and therefore maybe the basics of HTML (something I hoped to avoid or put off). I do have a 21Publish blog at school, the user-interface of which is MUCH more friendly and intuitive, especially for students: http://andersonenglish.21classes.com
Zach Anderson
Indian River HS - Philadelphia, NY

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