Katherine Parrish

This week, my Gr. 10 students were more engaged, more personally interested in, and committed to an assignment than they have been since the beginning of term.

It’s based on an exercise I have called “Clock Connotations,” where I give students a paragraph that contains three neutral (as far as possible) statements about the clock in the classroom. They are then to revise (but I ask them to “transform”) the statements so that they mean the same, but connotatively clearly convey dread and hatred of the clock. (This is never a far stretch!)

This time, I gave them a second pass at the short paragraph, after our exercises in euphony and cacophony, and asked them to also revise (transform) the paragraph so that it contained harsh consonants and low vowels.

On a Friday morning, they were waving me over for feedback, at once proud of what they’d done, and sincerely wanting to know how to do better. And they were getting it! And even the cockiest of my students came to understand why his verbs weren’t doing all that they could.

I’m not sure why they got fired up for this exercise where they’re describing a clock, but it really excites me that they did, and of course, I’m going to create more opportunities for this kind of writing for them, as I can.

The “clock connotations” exercise/assignment will be available soon on my teachers pay teachers store.