To review and practice expository writing with my students, I created a special unit called “Not My Job: An essay about something you know nothing about.” We’ve only begun brainstorming and planning, so I have yet to see if any of the essays are actually as funny as the students think they are, but more than one looks promising.
I spent a good amount of time cultivating student buy-in. First, we looked at this photo, from a “nature walk” at a cabin where I stayed recently:
Then we remembered (I drew and narrated; they copied and laughed at my artwork) a Peanuts comic from You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in which Lucy teaches Linus about trees: “This is an elm tree. Someday it will be a mighty oak. You can tell how old it is by counting its leaves.”
Finally, we listened to this Not My Job segment from the NPR show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me.
My demo frame (that’s the tool we use to organize essays) featured my long-lost childhood belief that bands traveled to radio stations to perform their songs, and then had to travel to the next station to again play their song, and so on. (That misunderstanding was put to rest, finally, when I flipped from one radio station to another, only to hear the same song. “Dad!” I asked. “How do they do that?”)
So most of my students got the idea pretty quickly: they were to write about something they know nothing about, and the number one rule was, “No research.”
Completed frames started pouring in: stoplights operated by dimwitted mice who have no other career options, hay harvested by cows pushing it into piles out in the field, alpacas’ cotton-candy wool.
My favorite so far is from an especially annoying boy who likes to talk across the room, refuses to work quietly when appropriate, intentionally disturbs the students around him during the daily “moment of silence,” always, always–even when he’s in trouble–greets me cheerfully, wants to be called “Bubba” (in the name of classroom management and with my principal’s support, I refuse to do so in spite of the fact that his dad, at a conference about the boy’s disruptive classroom behavior, was primarily upset about him not being able to go by that name), and gets A’s in my class. He decided to write his paper about the lives of teachers, and I helped him think of a paragraph topic: Books teachers read for fun.
A bit later I saw him in the office, awaiting a conference with the principal about the referral I’d written for his disruptiveness.
“Nice book titles,” I told him. He’d written I Hate Children and The Devil Would Be Proud.
