When English Teachers Snap

The above image was my Facebook profile picture for a while…before I was a teacher. A classmate of mine at ISU showed this to me, and I thought it was hilarious, and pretty indicative of the struggles I would face as an instructor. I still do find it hilarious, but I realized after I actually began teaching that correcting student writing will never be that simple. For example, in this picture, we first have to look at the purpose of this poster. It is obviously a parody of a well-known advertisement. This advertisement was intended to reach a large amount of people, in the most clear and concise terms: "Got milk?" The implication being, of course, that if you don't "got milk," you should "get milk." Is it a great sentence? Arguably no. But do we, the audience, know what the author is talking about? Well, yes. So the question is: which is more important, the grammar or the message?

This is a daily struggle in teaching, and will be across disciplines. Students need to learn to speak and write formally to succeed later in life. One typo could cause a resume or college application essay to be tossed in the trash. However, if we constantly nit-pick at grammar and semantics, we risk offending a student's culture, as we talked about last night, or completely turning off a student from writing or public speaking, and probably by default, reading. 

One of the assigned readings this week, "Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents" stressed the importance of self efficacy, or how competent adolescents feel that they are in reading and writing in a particular subject matter. While we cannot just do away with formal conventions, the author, Donna E. Alvermann, points out that we can help struggling readers and writers by giving clear, concise expectations and rules. We can also stress that no language is wrong, but certain language doesn't work for certain papers. The second thing we can do, when possible, is have students guide what they read and write, so that they can use their own voice. Students may feel that they are struggling readers or writers, but really, they may just not connect with what they are assigned. I see this in my own life: I could read for fun all day long, but the minute I have to read a book because I will need to teach it, or read for class (sorry, Steve) I would pretty much rather be doing anything else. My roommate caught me staring at a wall while I was supposed to be reading for another class about an hour ago. Just imagine how a student, who didn't choose to go to school as we did, feels. 

While it is not realistic to allow students to choose what they read and write all the time, due to curriculum constraints, we can still make sure that students' unique voices are heard in the assignments we give. If it is possible to connect a lesson to a student's background and culture, we should do that.  Some writing is automatically enhanced by a student's unique voice: the college application essay, for instance, is a narrative that sounds weirdly formal if students don't tell a story and use at least some slang. The important thing to remember is that a student's voice and message should never be completely lost in a classroom.