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Unfortunately, the way our nation’s schoolchildren are taught—and, more importantly, the way their learning is assessed—gives them little experience with making choices in the context of writing. These distortions of what it means to write offer students even less opportunity to write about things that matter to them or to engage with their own passions.
Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write, Helen Sword
Seeing those stories was like being confronted with the worst picture of your pubescent years, when you look more like something out of Picasso’s cubist period than an actual human person.
We hold students to wrong/unreasonable standards. Student writing tends to be judged against a standard of “correctness” and resemblance to a kind of “standard” academic writing that doesn’t actually exist in nature, the making of which bears little resemblance to the process writers employ when confronted with genuine writing tasks.
Writing is a process that allows us to think and respond to the world at large.
They know many things I don’t even know they know because I’m not a doctor and most of what I know about medicine is gleaned from watching ER and House.
For example, researchers from the University of South Carolina found that performance on a standardized math exam was correlated with the arrival of students’ families receiving their SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits. Being tested around the time of receiving the aid resulted in higher scores. If students were three or more weeks removed from their family’s receiving benefits, they scored lower. This held true even when testing the same child. In other words, those tests were really measuring student hunger.6
The belief that responses to writing can or should be standardized is, and I say this with all due respect, silly.
five-paragraph structure and signal the conclusion with “In conclusion” because it will pass surface-level muster. But the resulting writing does not exist outside of the demands of standardized assessment. This creates a terrible feedback loop where students are conditioned to perform writing without any real-world occasion or audience, leaving them ill prepared for the kind of writing they will do in college and beyond.
As Snyder observes, Bernie Madoff, one of the great crooks of all time, would score well on the KIPP measurements of being zestful and optimistic with extremely high social intelligence. These traits are what allowed him to maintain his con for so long.
For children who must display grit in their day-to-day lives, Socol believes schools should be places of “abundance” where they can experience the kind of freedom and opportunity people from more privileged backgrounds take for granted.
“Rather than trying to ‘teach’ skills like grit and self-control, [Tough] argues, we should focus instead on creating the kinds of environments, both at home and at school, in which those qualities are most likely to flourish.”
The most likely completers of MOOC courses are those who already have post-secondary degrees,12 because MOOCs are suited to what sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom calls “roaming autodidacts … a self-motivated, able learner that is simultaneously embedded in technocratic futures and disembedded from place, cultur[e], history, and markets.”13
Students must opt in to the experience, which requires more than a handsome face and a smooth presentation.
As Bernard Fryshman, a professor of physics with fifty years of experience, says, one of faculties’ most important roles is to “jostle students into active learning.”15
We should not ask students to write anything that will not be read.
“The teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually replaces some instruction and practice in composition, even a harmful effect on the improvement of writing.”1
was a contingent instructor, a member of the “precariat,” a group that labors without sufficient pay or security.
Sound writing instruction emphasizes the rhetorical nature of writing. Sound writing instruction considers the needs of real audiences. Sound writing instruction recognizes writing as a social act. Sound writing instruction enables students to analyze and practice with a variety of genres. Sound writing instruction recognizes writing processes as iterative and complex. Sound writing instruction depends upon frequent, timely, and context-specific feedback to students from an experienced postsecondary instructor. Sound writing instruction emphasizes relationships between writing and
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It has been estimated an average writing instructor takes about forty minutes per paper to do this work.
Teaching, like writing, is an extended exercise in failure. You make a plan, do your best to execute, have some portion of your ass handed to you by circumstances and events you could not foresee, and try to do better next time around.
The ability to critically consume and produce text will be a near-universal need in the United States going forward. One could argue we’ve already reached a crisis point on this front. To do better means introducing lessons in Internet literacy that extend well beyond traditional approaches to teaching and learning in academic contexts. Writing instruction will need to be the front line in helping students figure out what is shit and what is shinola.
We seek to increase educational challenges while simultaneously decreasing student stress and anxiety related to writing. We seek to change the orientation of school from only preparing students (poorly, as it turns out) for the indefinite future to also living and learning in the present. We seek to provide experiences designed around learning and growth, rather than giving assignments and testing for competencies. We will end the tyranny of grades and replace them with self-assessment and reflection. We will give teachers sufficient time, freedom, and resources to teach effectively. In
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But when students say a class was “hard,” they often mean “confusing” or “arbitrary,” rather than stimulating and challenging.
As I consider the attitudes students bring to the college writing classroom, I realize that in a school context, no matter how many words they may have generated prior to college, very few of them have been asked to write. They have been trained to pass those writing-related assessments.
Thoreau could go to Walden and hang out in a cabin and think big thoughts. Not me. Without at least a virtual connection to the world you’d find me in that cabin making motorboat sounds with my lips.
Fortunately, researchers Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner interviewed more than seven hundred students at three different four-year universities, and they compiled their findings in The Meaningful Writing Project: Learning, Teaching, and Writing in Higher Education.1
Rather than thinking of writing through the lens of “assignments” or “proficiencies,” I believe we should be providing students with writing “experiences” that give them room to exercise choice and engage their intrinsic motivation.
Each writing experience contains the following dimensions: A question the writing seeks to answer The problem that will be solved by answering the question The audience for whom the writing is meant A process that will lead toward an answer A reflection that will help reinforce the metacognitive dimensions of learning and lead toward transfer of writing knowledge from occasion to occasion
But when I instead provide an experience such as writing instructions for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and they see how lack of planning and process leads to problems, they learn more about the writing process than I could ever hope to convey by merely telling them stuff, no matter how true that stuff may be.
The style could be as informal as I wished, and most importantly, I recognized that blog posts could go live to an audience with a considerably lower level of polish than something you might find in a professionally published book.
Self-assessment is a key to self-regulation: it should be built into every writing experience, and it shouldn’t end even with an instructor grade. As part of the reflection, one of the final things I do with each experience is to ask students a series of simple questions that yield complex answers: What do you know now that you didn’t know before? What can you do now that you couldn’t do before? How did you learn these things?
Fortunately, because I teach writing, I can wash away student anxieties about being “objective” pretty quickly by reassuring them that it’s impossible to achieve in their work, and they don’t want to anyway because no one actually likes to read “objective” writers or writing.
The review is a good warm-up for other more academically minded writing-related problems, as students practice employing the ethos, pathos, and logos—the ethical, emotional, and rational dimensions of discourse—that we will use in more formal argument.
We discuss how their goal is to express things they believe to be true while recognizing that if they want others to agree with these truths they must practice the values (openness, transparency, accuracy, empathy) that undergird writing that connects with an audience.
1982, Richard L. Larson of CUNY, writing in the journal College English, declared, “I believe that the generic ‘research paper’ as a concept, and as a form of writing taught in a department of English, is not defensible.”1
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
A mechanically confusing sentence isn’t marked as “incorrect” and then corrected by me. I may say it’s “awkward,” or I may say something like “cloudy,” if the issues obscure meaning. A correct sentence that has too many almost-right words and not enough right ones might be “flat.”
“There it is. Do you feel it? How do we get everything so it feels like that?”
For the sentences that get hooked into the woods, rather than remarking about how very wayward that shot went, I ask the student, “What were you thinking with this? What are you trying to do?,” redirecting the student back toward a reflective process under their own control.
We cannot grammar-drill our way to getting students to produce good sentences. Students must be motivated and empowered to pursue those goals on their own initiatives, with instructors on hand for encouragement or adjustment or the occasional stern warning as necessary.
I have taught exactly the same course material to nearly identical sets of students in back-to-back class periods and have had remarkably different experiences.
enjoyed extraordinary freedom because the system generally doesn’t care enough about people in my position to spend time monitoring what we’re up to.
