Project Abstract
The personal essay project asks you to mine your personal history to learn more about yourself, your place in the world, and the direction you hope your life will take. As a class, we’ll read several personal essays by writers who explore the depth and complexity of their own histories and skillfully represent themselves in writing. These readings will help generate ideas for our own written products.
As part of the project, you’ll also interview an adult about their experiences at your age and present your personal essay to them as a gift.
What did you teach and how did you teach it?
Content
This project will focus primarily on reading difficult texts and the steps in the writing process. The readings are personal essays or memoirs related to identity, education, family, and language. For reading, we’ll cover: responding to texts, reading critically, examining difficult passages. In the writing process, we’ll cover: generative writing, drafting, revision, peer reviewing, editing.
The project asks students to employ narrative techniques, most notably scene writing (show vs. tell), and reflective writing.
Differentiation
Honors students wrote an essay of 1250 words and included references to at least two readings. They also completed a more challenging personal essay reading and wrote an additional reading response.
Non-honors students wrote an essay of at least 500 words.
What concepts and skills did the students gain in this class through this project?
Concepts:
The writing process
Narrative and reflective writing
Skills:
Drafting, revising, and editing
Peer reviewing
Critical reading
Responding to difficult texts in writing
Interviewing
How is the curriculum for this project academically rich and grade-level challenging?
Challenging Texts:
Richard Rodriquez, "The Achievement of Desire"
Judith Ortiz Cofer, "The Story of My Body"
Maysan Haydar, "Veiled Intentions: Don't Judge a Muslim Girl By Her Covering"
Gerald Graff, "Hidden Intellectualism"
Gloria Anzaldua, "How to Tame a Wild Tongue"
Langston Hughes, "Salvation"
David Foster Wallace, "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley"
Writing:
Additionally, students were expected to develop more in-depth essays that:
Demonstrate a willingness to engage challenging, conflicting, or paradoxical ideas
Demonstrate the ability to situate experience in a larger context
Develop ideas in-depth and sustain the reader’s interest with effective organization and transitional phrases
To what extent was there integration across disciplines in your class through this project?
Several students chose to write, in their personal essays, about their interests and/or achievements in other academic subjects (i.e. calculus, physics). In these cases, faculty from those disciplines helped students revise their essays.
Which Habits of Heart and Mind (HoHM) and Design Principles were utilized in this project?
Evidence - in telling their stories, students used specific examples from their personal histories to support their assertions about what kind of person they are. Students were required to marshal as much compelling evidence as possible to make their points.
Refinement (please see below)
How did you incorporate refinement through this project?
Students wrote at least 3 drafts of this essay and received feedback from at least 2 peers and from their teacher.
Students grades were determined as follows: 1/3 of grade was based on the 3rd draft, which the teacher commented on. 2/3 of grade was based on the 4th draft.
Students wrote a response to the teacher's comments, in which they: summarized the comments to demonstrate that they understood them and explained their plan for revising the essay.
We also covered paragraph-level revision strategies related to topic sentences and topic chains.