Pedagogy Forum, Week 5

After helping mentor a genre poetry class with editing and finding their signs, I found that adjusting to different people and different writing styles becomes an important aspect to teaching a writing intensive course. What helped the most with working each student, I believe, was opening the dialogue with the poem they are working on to find a specific element in the poem through such dialogue. Helping the students was quite similar to how we have discussed sign inventories in class, yet at, perhaps, a different level and perspective as many of the students were new to studying and understanding poetry. The signs I discussed with the students varied as some often jumped to interpretation while others named more than one sign to work with so I was then able to focus on several ways of approaching the mentoring process.