Writing as always been a one way
street with me. There are very few times that when I send something into the
world do I expect a response or a very lengthy one at that. For how much I write
the responses that are returned are drastically disproportionate. This feeling
was felt at a very early age I would write what I would think amazing paper
talking about things I really cared about and in return I would get an 86% and
a good job. Over time I realized not putting too much into my product in the
way of original thought didn't matter it was all about the structure and
repeating what was said by the teacher, resulting in very uninspired student.
Class discussion was the only real outlet for me to express what I was thinking
and even then it was target the teacher. All of these factors lead to me
viewing writing as a product and not a process.
We
spent a good portion of yesterday’s class talking about the text that Gallagher
wrote and the main point being that students are viewing writing as a product
instead of a process. I think this stems from us the teacher. Trust me when I tell
you I am not looking forward to grading a hundred plus lab reports and try and
have them back in a week. We know there are tricks to getting the papers back
and return the product to their owner. As the tone from the last few sentences
show we even view the process as inputs and outputs. We have a rubric and if
students don’t hit certain points they get a lower grade in theory a student
should get the same grade based off of one rubric if a hundred teachers were to
grade it. Yes this is a scientist and yes apparently a dead scientist that thinks
that writing needs to be more organic.
There is a need to make students
ready for college and life after high school but as we have mentioned that the
five paragraph essay is not what is expected from students in college level
classes or even what happens in the real world, an alternative is needed. We
talked about how a lot of our writing comes in the form of emails, applications
and reports. It would make sense then to gear the writing into these formats. To
me an easy one would be combining emails and lab reports. You have conducted an
experiment and you are sending it to different scientist buddies you have found
over the years and want them to review it. However this already seems to fall prey
to the ever classic problem of black board responses of after the first
response there rarely ever is a reply or a continuation of the thread. I don’t
know a way to get students except for already motivated and curious students to
continue the conversation.
Getting a conversation started is easy;
just threaten them with a grade. The trouble lies with getting the students to continue
the conversation after the grade is submitted. Getting the students to continue
this conversation you initiated might allow for the students to start caring
about their work and allow their work to grow with the feedback. If any of the English
teacher that have been in the class room have any experience with something
like this it would be interesting to hear.
My experiences as a writer in high school were similar. The other day we were supposed to think of a word to insert into a sentence along the lines of, "Writing in high school was _____ for me." The word that popped into my head was "trivial". I felt writing in high school was the mental equivalent of moving a pile of bricks from point A to point B. There was no purpose to the exercise, it was just doing for the sake of doing. Like you, I was disengaged and uninspired. It's a challenge to come up with writing tasks that feel meaningful for students, and hopefully expanding our idea of what writing exercises can encompass will help us to meet this challenge effectively.
ReplyDeleteI have a similar experience where I would tern in papers and simply get a grade with no explanation to why I got the grade that I did. This proved to be frustrating and caused me to see writing, similar to you, as a product rather than a process. Now, I understand, as you pointed out as well, that we as teachers do not want to be grading 100 plus papers and writing extensive notes on each and every one. To avoid having the grade so many papers that many of the students probably wrote the night before with little to no actual thought or understanding put in I suggest giving the students checkpoints when writing a paper. What I mean by this is have the students turn in different parts of their paper during the writing process. First have them submit their thesis or hypothesis and then grade that and return it, this will prevent the student from starting their paper with a poor main statement and wasting their time with the rest of the assignment. Then have them submit their outlines so that you can monitor their ideas and progress. Only after this will they submit rough and final drafts. This will allow you to have an understanding about their paper before you have to grade and note the entire product, so, hopefully you will be able to 'skim' their final paper because you already know that you approved their ideas during the process. This also teaches students to see writing as a process and giving them much more time to complete the paper instead of them all writing it the night before. This will also hopefully relieve some stress on the students and allow them to enjoy the writing process a little bit more.
ReplyDeleteI also never really thought of writing as a process and I wish I would have. If so, maybe I wouldn't be so afraid to write down something I thought would be wrong. Instead after many years, I've come to realize that in writing, you're never really "done" and you can always be improving, and that's ok! I always thought that being able to express yourself in writing was a gift rather than a skill that can be taught - something too far fetched for some people to reach, however, I've come to realize that it's a necessity and something that requires continual improvement. But with continual improvement means there needs to be some sort of feedback. I think this will be the most challenging portion of teaching - making sure to integrate the necessity to communicate through writing in the discipline of science.
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