After reading more of Barry Lane’s After the End, I realized it was time to work more explicitly on question formation with my students, especially as a writing revision strategy.
Boy, was it fun. I brought in a big cowgirl hat I had bought in Mexico a few years ago and asked students to make up questions to find out about it. Rapid-fire, they asked, “Where’d you get it? What size is it? Who is it for? Does it fit your dog? Why were you trying to hide your dog?” etc. They smiled and laughed as their questions led them into the story about how I hid my dog from the hotel staff where I was staying one weekend in a sleepy beach town in Mexico. I borrowed the hat idea directly from Lane, who has his own funny hat he uses for a similar activity.
Next, I shared a short poem I wrote in honor of the student I have who asks the most quetions this year, Akram. Sometimes (and he admits this), he asks questions just to make the time pass by. We’re working on that, but, other times he asks questions that make me and the rest of the class think. What more could I want? The poem addresses those qualities, and I let the students know I want them to always question–that questioning is what intelligent people do. And that they can become more intelligent via the questions they ask. Later they asked me lots of questions about the poem as an exercise in revision.
We also reviewed the genres we’ve been writing in class, and–you guessed–they had to come up with questions about the genres. We talked about why epitaphs are important (based on their questions), how poetry helps people express themselves, and how monologues and biographies are different. That was all based on their questions–not my ideas for class discussion.
Finally, the students did a freewrite of questions. They spent the last seven minutes of class listing all the questions they could think of. As a quick concluding activity, I asked for a show of hands about if the students felt they were using their brains more. It’s no surprise they agreed (though they were surprised) that they felt they were using their brains more in that class than most.
We’ll go back to questions. They’re waiting to see my revision of my poem based on their questions, and then they’ll practice some questioning on their own pieces of writing.
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