Paragraph blogging.

Welcome to a new type of blogging Kate aka @springcait (see picture below) and I propose to those in ELT community – paragraph blogging. If you…

– are sick of mulling over your Seriously Great Idea in an attempt to shape it coherently and beautifully into a decent (read: perfect) 1K+ words blog post;

– think your Seriously Great Idea will not significantly lose in its greatness if you manage to tell it in one paragraph;

– are lazy;

– promote clarity in expressing thoughts.. or lack of clarity within a one-paragraph writing;

– don’t think you have a Seriously Great Idea, but you do think you have something to say;

– want to experiment with your writing style;

– desperately want to blog but have just your cell phone with you…

…then paragraph blogging is for you.
Let’s see if one paragraph could be a good amount, readable, doable, enjoyable, ideally informative.

Here’s my Paragraph 1.

*****

Today I was in class with university students (acting as their actual teacher) for the first time since June 2014. I met 13 young adults, some of whom looked tired, sleepy, well-rested, cross, skeptical, blank, interested, curious, shy, markedly laid-back, and some didn’t even look up from their desks to meet my eye. Interestingly (for me), many of those young adults didn’t know much about each other, even though they spent a whole term studying side by side. (That makes me think now whether “studying side by side” necessarily equals “knowing your partners” or “caring to know your partners” in a language class.) Naturally, they were given time to mingle and find things out, which they, naturally, did. The two main take-aways from this non-groundbreaking getting-to-know activity for me personally were the following phrases I overheard: “It turns out my groupmates are interesting guys” and “I write short stories”. While the first line invites no further commentary from me, the latter one might. So it turns out Student I. is an interesting person and writes short stories about the things/ events/ life she observes around her. And since her teacher easily gets excited about what she believes to be students’ talents or creative expressions, and especially all things writing, we all agreed to exploit this. It’s a tentative plan now, of course, but one class Student I. is going to attend my class without actually participating in it, solely for the sake of making the best use of her time observing our lesson. She will then write a short story about it, which she will bring to class for us to translate into English. At least translate, that is! I can’t even start to imagine what it could hold for us all and me as a teacher in particular. It will also be interesting to see how honest the writer will get in her observations))

Thank you for reading.

P.S. This post belongs to a #livebloggingparty series, back in Russia, hiding from the wet grey Moscow February in a cafe with Kate. Fun as ever 🙂