This assignment is adapted from a longer version that Lisa Hansen, a teacher at Dakota Valley High School, uses at the beginning of the school year.

Assignment: A pre-teaching autobiography of about 8-10 pages (about 2000-2500 words) written in a word processing program. Two copies are due on Monday, Sept 21, at the beginning of class. Include your reflections and drafts.

• Audience: Our entire class: all students and professor

• Purposes:
  To reflect with some depth on your choice of English teaching and on your experiences with language, reading, and writing
  To show yourself as a writer
  To introduce yourself to us as a person and as a future teacher
  To provide a written record of where you began English 408

• Content: Autobiographical material that you choose for the above purpose and audience. You may find some ideas on the attached list helpful; they are suggestions, not prescriptions! Besides, there are way too many to include all of them. You may be able to think of some better ideas, and you may also get some ideas from in-class activities on the first three days.

• Form/genre: The decision is up to you. Choose a form/genre you are comfortable with--paper, booklet, newsletter, journal, letters, blank book with your text pasted in (as Lisa Hansen's students do)--or something else). Choose one that shows you best and one that is appropriate for and interesting to your audience. Whatever your choice, your autobiography must be typed or computer generated. You may include up to 5 photos and/or graphics. Captions should connect them clearly to your text. Your autobiography should also have an engaging title.

• Organization: The decision is up to you. Make your organization clear to readers, though.

Some Ideas to Start Your Reflections:

You as a human being: personality traits, your place in the family (first, last, middle, only child), home town, work experience, special interests, school experience with language arts (pre-school through high school)

Your language acquisition: languages spoken in your home, racial/ethnic background, influence of your immediate family on your language, differences in language spoken in the home and school and/or community, influence of peers on your language (are there some expressions you use with them that you don't use in school?) influence of a workplace on your language

Why and how you decided to become a secondary English teacher

Best teacher you ever had/worst teacher you ever had

Some things you plan to do in your own classroom/Some things you'll never do in your classroom (and why)

Academic interests--the parts of teaching English that most interest you, courses you most enjoyed and learned from and why, courses you did not enjoy or learn from and why, how important grade point average is to you?

Your experience with writing (your comfort level--how you feel about writing, what you've written, how you use writing, how you write, what classes you've taken, your best and worst writing experiences and what you learned from them. What makes writing hard; what makes writing easy for you. Where you write best, what you need to write (food, atmosphere, music, quiet, etc .)

Yourself as a reader: favorite books, what you're currently reading, what you love, what you hate, how you learned to read, what encourages you, discourages you, best book you've ever read and why, worst book you've ever read and why.

Literature: Consider classics, contemporary works, works by women and men, Asian-Americans, Hispanic Americans, Black Americans, Native Americans, regional writers, world writers. What works do you recommend to others and why? What works do you recommend avoiding and why?

As a learner: How you learn? What makes learning go well for you, and what makes it hard? What you need to learn, and what you don't need to learn about teaching English. Your best and worst learning experiences--in and out of school--could there be connections?

Yourself as a thinker: Do you prefer questions or answers? Do you like to make meaning or receive meaning from others? If you say, "Depends," on what does your response depend? Should tests do more than ask for memorized information--what, for example? How do you know a good question?

Try to remember who you were during adolescence. Questions to consider: What is one thing you loved? hated? Who were your best friends? What was the major challenge you had during this time? What do you recall about your relationship with your parents? with your teachers? If you worked during the year or during the summer, what did you do? What did you read? (Questions in this group came from Leila Christenbury's Making the Journey.)

Checklist/Rubric for Pre-Teaching Autobiography

Ideally, you'll have all checks in the left column.

___ Autobiography met the deadline	___Did not meet the deadline

___ Computer-generated or typed text	___Handwritten

___ Reflections and drafts included	___No reflections or drafts

___ About 2000-2500 words		___Under or over 2000-2500 words

___Overall, a neat appearance		___Sloppy and careless appearance

___Engaging title			___No title or just 
						"Autobiography" or
						"Preteaching Autobiography"

___Focus on pre-teaching autobiography	___Generic autobiography
	
___Content interests audience		___Content is boring

___Clear organization			___Unclear organization

___Readable content that flows		___Difficult to read; may
						be choppy

___Carefully proofread			___Many mechanical and
						grammatical errors

___Optional:  1-5 photos/graphics 	___More than 5

___Clear connections to	text		___ Reader has to make the  
						connections

Comments:

Go to 408 Activities Page

Revised 9/27/98