9/21/01 Classwork

Instructors have abandoned many of the practices that used to be common in classrooms. The five paragraph model, so emphasized at the junior high level, is criticized by many educators at the secondary level. Instructors want more sophisticated work than the five paragraph method seems to allow. Instead, they are teaching various templates: narrative, compare and contrast, ect. Worse yet, secondary education teachers assume their students are familiar with these models and briefly skim the template before assigning a particular writing project. In many schools, students are segregated in regards to writing. General education courses in English remain a requirement but at one particular high school I am thinking of, students are assigned to a type of writing that they will be taught. College bound students are exposed to a wider variety of writing process theories. Such students study literature and formulate writing projects based on the reading; others are limited to the teaching of writing as it applies to business or technical writing.

Another way that I have noticed the instruction of writing shifting is that it is gearing away from the traditional emphasis on final product. In my daughter's second grade class, the students routinely write stories in a journal which is handed into the teacher at the end of every week. In part this process is meant to emphasize capitalization, grammar, and sentence structure as the teacher corrects mistakes in these areas accordingly. However, she does encourage the creative side of writing in this assignment by statements s such as, "How does this end?" or "Tell me more about this." This manner of teaching emphasizes the creative aspects of writing and simple topics such as grammar. Although this assignment takes places in a second grade classroom, I believe the teacher has the most effective approach in regards to writing.

A carefully crafted balance between structure and invention is a method that may be used by any instructor at any level. To further demonstrate how truly effective this process is, students edit and continue to add to the journals throughout the year. The project is never truly finished until the end of the year and even after it is finished, the students have a final product which to refer to. Since most believe that the reading process is part of writing, the usefulness of this assignment continues to influence the student.

Another way in which the conversation of how to teach writing has shifted is that many no longer consider one final product as an adequate means to judge a student's writing. Many instructors use a portfolio method, in which students gather several writing projects for the review of the instructor over a term of a semester. This prevents an overview of the students work. Problems within one genre may not present themselves in another. For instances, writers who are proficient in the creative aspects of writing may have trouble formulating a research paper. The variety of assignments helps the instructor assess student strengths and weaknesses which allows for more specific occasion for instruction regarding those strengths and weaknesses.