Author: Emily Greenberg
Personal Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/emilyrose126
Emily’s #teachread work can be found on Twitter.
Categories: YA Literature, Web 2.0, Twitter, Teaching Adolescents
Tags: Twitter, Perks of Being a Wallflower, Digital Age, 140 Characters

Teaching to Tweet and Tweeting to Teach

The Form: Twitter (Web 2.0)
The Content: Young Adult Literature, specifically The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Result: New ideas about teaching in the digital age. What belongs in our classrooms?

I’ll try to keep my response(s) to 140 characters:

Teachers can feel just as pressured as adolescents. Fitting the mold vs. “new ideas” #blendinginandstandingout #havingcakeandeatingtoo

Web 2.0 may be just innovative enough to engage students, and challenge them to read and write within a certain discourse.

Who uses Twitter? Why might they join? What sort of identity does it define for them? What words/text traits are “so Twitter”? (retweet, #)

One of Charlie’s Perks is that he has no word limit. He doesn’t have to confine his “character” to 140. What if he did? #charliesinfinite

Charlie is so relatable to me, because he speaks the way I often think. Twitter’s about condensing. The opposite of stream of consciousness.

In every Tweet so far, I’ve had to contract words, delete, edit. The beauty of Charlie’s thoughts are that they’re organic. #foodforthought

Here’s a quote from Perks. Then, I’ll “Tweet-a-fy” it. Let’s see if the meaning changes:

“It seems like every morning since that first night, I wake up dull, and my head hurts, and I can’t breathe. Patrick and I have been spending a lot of time together. We drink a lot. Actually, it’s more like Patrick drinks, and I sip.” (234 characters)

Seems like every morning since then, I wake up dull, w/ a headache, hard to breathe. Pat and I are together a lot drinking. He drinks I sip. (140 characters)

I wonder if teachers could ask students to write a letter to “Friend” in “Charlie” and then convert it to “Twitter”. #Intertextualitymuch?

Are students now used to compacting their language for social networking? Is this reflected in their writing for class? What about grammar?

Must we adjust our expectations? Standards? Is language changing faster than we can? Should we try to stop this? #whatswithallthequestions

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PHEW! That was harder than I thought! Throughout this course in Teaching Reading I have considered many things. How can I teach my students according to what they need to learn? How can I engage my students according to what they want to learn? How can I understand my students according to what they are experiencing every day? How can I incorporate this into learning? It seems as though students in their every day lives are moving away from writing and even speaking in long form. By long form I mean lengthy conversations (even phone calls are now upstaged by TXTNG), face to face interactions (why meet when we can Skype?), even emailing is though to be rare (instead, Facebook, Twitter, texting). Yet we as teachers, continue to ask our students to read and write within “our” language. This of course is not to say that I suggest teaching students via FaceTime or asking that they text each other for homework, but I think that understanding the reality of their lives is actually a responsibility. If we want to understand our students, we must.

Young adult literature such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower engages our students’ interests and introduces them to a world of characters they may very well be able to identify with. Even as an adult, reading this book brought me back mentally and emotionally to the world of “Teenage.” This content is perfect for a group of high schoolers. It not only engages them, but it can challenge them when taught in a way that moves beyond Read, Respond, Read, Respond. Why not introduce Web 2.0 when teaching young adult literature (or even classic literature for that matter)? Why not make this content even more relevant to students through the form it is taught in? Doing this will immediately modernize the material and will link “English class” to real life.