Boring Letters or Passionate Emails

"Students still need to learn to express themselves clearly, cogently and artfully, but the forms are now different. Texts are shorter, for one thing, and there is much more use of multimedia."                  - Teaching the Right Stuff

 

Passion is the students’ true motivator. Once a student has a passion to know or do something—anything—the chances are excellent that he or she will do much, on their own, to follow it. It’s actually hard to stop them—the best role for teachers in these cases is to get out of their students’ way and subtly guide the students in directions where their passion can have the greatest positive effect on their lives. - What Technology ISN’T Good At, Part II: Passion

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I agree with a lot of Marc Prensky's ideas. Allowing students to follow their passions is a great thing. In English, right now, I am allowing students to do an assignment where they pick a type of style of writing (narrative, dialogue, poetry, newspaper, song, etc.) that they are passionate about. Through this style, we still discover the grammatics and mechanics of the English language. However, some of the monotonousness is lost, since the students are engaged by a style of writing that they have a passion for. Once a student has passion, the rest is easy.