Responding to Student Writing

In "Responding to Student Writing" and "Across the Drafts", Sommers offers some useful advice as to how writing instructors can provide better feedback to their students' papers. She notes that the best comments are those that are specific to the text, focus on concepts and meaning, and offer guidance for future papers. In a perfect world, all instructors would comment on students' papers according to Sommers's advice, but is this achievable in the real world? Taking into account time constraints and the scores of essays that teachers must grade each week, can we truly expect teachers to provide insightful, text-specific feedback on every student's paper?

I believe it's possible for all students to receive feedback that lives up to Sommers's standards, but it would take more than one person to do the job. The best way to achieve this would be to have the classroom participate in a multilevel revision process for their drafts. First, the students could revise each others' papers in small groups and focus solely on grammatical and organizational errors. This would reduce the need for the teacher to focus on grammatical errors while allowing more time for focusing on concepts and meaning. After students have commented on grammatical errors and teachers on conceptual errors, the students could post any questions that they may have on an online discussion board. This would provide the students with an opportunity to get clarification on any comments that they may be confused about. Furthermore, a discussion board in which students could discuss and share the comments they received on an essay may help reduce students' tendency to take their teacher's comments personally. The discussion board would allow all students to see that they are not the only one in the class who was told to "elaborate" on a concept or that a sentence was "awkward." It would help beginning writers realize that all students need improvement and that a teacher's comments are meant to instruct rather than scold.

Williams Ch. 7

In this chapter Williams describes the differences between those that want a bilingual America and those that want a monolingual America. Those that want multiple languages, a child's home language and English, to be taught in schools argue that bilingualism adds to the diversity and richness of life. On the other hand, some say that all students should be immersed in English so that they can have the socioeconomic opportunities that come along with English fluency. Do you think that multiple languages or just English should be taught to non-native English speakers who migrate to the U.S?

I think that both a student's home language as well as English should be taught to non-native English speakers in our schools. Although this may be impossible to do with all students and their foreign languages due to economic and teacher shortages, I think that learning one's home language and English has more benefits that just learning English. For one, studies show that the extent to which one masters a foreign language is based on the mastery of their native language. Therefore, immigrants will have an easier time mastering English if they continue to receive instruction in their home language. Furthermore, no matter how many languages one knows, they still think in their native language. Thus continuing to education immigrant children in their native tongue will further improve their thinking abilities.

Friendly City Reading Series

Last Thursday I went to a book reading by the authors Mary Beth Keane and Gina Welch. Keane's novel, The Walking People, is about Irish-American immigrants and the culture of Irish travelers. Welch's book is about her time spent in an evangelical Christian church in Lynchburg, Virginia. The book is a memoir of the deep understanding she gains while posing as fundamentalist Christian and hiding her atheism.

At the event, each author read an excerpt from their book and then answered questions from the audience. The questions where about everything from researching the book to the publishing process. Keane described how her parents provided her with a great source of knowledge for her novel. She also described the pain of having to throw away over 100 pages of work after deciding that she wanted her book to go in a different direction. Welch told the audience about the moral dilemmas she faced when lying to her newfound friends in the church. Fortunately, she eventually told the church that she was undercover. Some were angry, but she still keeps in touch with others. In the short exerpt that she read, we got glimpses into places that most secularists will never go, such as Jerry Falwell's office or mission trips to Alaska.

This was the first book reading if ever been to, and I found it to be quite educational. Hearing and seeing an author read their own work really helps to bring life to the novel or work of non-fiction. The question and answer session gives the audience a great insight into the years of work, research, and planning that it takes to create a single book.

I Am a Pencil Analysis

1. Analysis

“This was the moment I was waiting for, a realization from my own childhood that had been so thrilling and profound it had constituted a revelation. I don’t recall the circumstance, can’t remember which teacher taught me islands or how her lesson demonstrated that the sea is just the top of it, that islands go, as Okan said, the whole way down and are attached, connected, mute heralds of a vast and hidden underwater world. But to this day the thought of islands gives me goose bumps, and they are a central metaphor for how I think about the world: we cannot draw conclusions by appearances, there’s always more than meets the eye, whole worlds exist that are invisible. In this sense, islands also shaped the way I thought about this class, this archipelago of children, each one the visible face of the unseen, mysterious worlds I tried to fathom.” Pg. 151

In Swope’s fifth grade class, the major project for the year was to have the children create and draw an island and then write a story based on their island. When Swope asks his children, “What do you suppose keeps an island from floating away like a raft?” one child answers, “Maybe they go all the way down.” In other words, islands are simply the visible tips of large underwater land masses that stretch miles below the ocean’s surface. Similarly, Swope’s children are like islands. In class all Swope can see are their faces, but once he gets to know the children and their families, he finds out that there is much more than meets the eye.

The passage above represents one of the key factors in Swope’s teaching approach: never judge a child’s character solely on their behavior in class. As Swope befriends his students, he learns that their behavior, whether good or bad, is often influenced by issues at home of which he was previously unaware. For instance, one student, Miguel, gets in trouble for crawling on the lunch table and exposing his bare stomach to his classmates. The student’s teacher, Mrs. Melvern, dismisses the child’s actions as those of an incorrigible brat, but when Swope hears about the incident he reacts differently. Knowing that Miguel suffers from asthma and comes from a poor family, Swope asks him how things are going at home. He learns that Miguel’s father has lost his job and that his family is struggling to pay the bills. In turns out that Miguel’s bullying is a result of troubles at home.

Swope constantly makes an effort to get to know his students and their families. By doing so, he learns that no student’s life is a mass of land floating on the water’s surface. Instead, he realizes that economic issues, parental issues, and religion all constitute the parts of their lives that make these metaphorical islands “go all the way down.”

2. Discussion Questions

What significance did nature writing have in the student’s education?

Since they were used to writing fantastical stories, the children often had difficulty writing objectively. Nature writing forced the children to abandon their imaginations for a moment and write about their immediate surroundings. Nature writing also gave the children the opportunity to experience the outdoors, a joy that most of these inner city children never experienced.

Evaluate the pros and cons of Mr. Swope’s collaborations with his students?

The writing collaborations had several benefits. They gave the children an opportunity to work one-on-one with Mr. Swope. These writing collaborations allowed the children to express their most creative ideas while also learning from Swope’s advice and feedback. A negative aspect of these collaborations comes from the unintended influence of Swope’s advice. Often times, Swope’s suggestions would lead a student’s story in a completely opposite direction from what the child originally intended.

The material for this book was gathered in the 1990s. Do you think that Swope’s teaching style would be applicable in today’s classroom?

Unfortunately, I do not think that Swope’s teaching style would be accepted in today’s classrooms. Using free-writing, Swope’s teaching method focused on unleashing each child’s imagination and creativity. Today, in English classes, students are taught to learn the basics, and teachers must follow a rigid curriculum that does not allot much time to creative writing.

Calderonello Ch. 1 and 2

Although this is a teaching writing course, I sometimes can’t help but to view our readings through the lens of a social scientist. I am a Justice Studies major after all. Thus, it was no surprise to me that when I came to the section about Black English Vernacular (BEV), my ears pricked up. Calderonello describes BEV as a dialect spoken by African Americans that has several distinct language characteristics. For instance, BEV may use different verb tenses in the same sentence, or it may drop the s in third person verbs. But no matter how different BEV is from Standard English, the authors stressed, it must not be viewed as “bad English” or “wrong English.”

Yes, I agree with the authors that BEV is not bad or wrong English. What I don't agree with is the name that we have given the this dialect : Black English. Essentially, what we have done is racialized a language dialect that is not based on race. The term "Black English" makes it seem as though all African Americans, and only African Americans, speak this specific dialect. From my experiences growing up in a lower-class, predominantly white neighborhood, I know that people of all races can speak a form of English that this textbook would classify as BEV. It seems that the real determining factor of who speaks BEV is region and economic class rather than race or ethnicity.

Furthermore, the textbook refers to Standard American English as the form of English "used by the educated middle class in the United States and represented in the media and education." As far as i know, the majority of middle class Americans are white, and the vast majority of the media is owned by whites. So why isn't Standard English called "White English?" Just a little food for thought.

Paperless Writing Revisited

In Paperless Writing Revisited, Edward Jennings examines the ways in which writing and social relationships in the classroom are affected by computer networking programs. Jennings describes a classroom experiment in which all students used a computer network to submit texts to a professor. Once the texts were submitted, the professor and the class could read and comment on everybody's work.

Jennings noticed how teacher-student power relationships changed depending on the writing medium. In the classroom, the students wrote on paper, turned in their work at the same time, and got their work back in the next class with the teacher's comments. It was a hierarchical and synchronized process controlled by the teacher. On these assignments, students often saw the teacher's comments as scolding because they were written directly on the paper next to the error. The comments seemed to be pointing out how badly the student had performed.

On the computer, students turned in assignments at random times, commented on other students' work, and received the teacher's comments via email. This time, the students perceived the teacher's comments to be a benign summary of what he did and did not like about their work. This is because the comments were not written directly on text, and the emails were sent out hours after the text had been submitted. Furthermore, since the teacher's and students' comments were all written in the same font and submitted in the same fashion, the teacher appeared to be equal to his students.

Jennings, Edward M. (1990). Paperless writing revisited. Computers and the Humanities, 24, 43-48.

Cognitive Approach and Writing Strategy

On pages 53-58, Williams states that the cognitive approach, which focused on empiricism and the scientific method, was a failure because it focused on the science behind writing rather than the art of writing. After reading the articles by Flowers and Hayes and Sommers, how have your opinions about the cognitive approach been affected? Are there lessons we can learn from the cognitive approach that we can use to help others improve their writing?

I believe writing is an art form. No matter how hard we try, we will not be able to boil writing down to a set of instructions that, when properly followed, will produce a great piece of writing every time. Writing will always require creativity, ingenuity, and imagination- skills that can't be simply taught to students. That being said, I still think the cognitive approach provides us with great insights into what is going on in the heads of good and poor writers. For instance, Flower and Hayes showed us how good writers spend more time thinking about the goals of their writing as well as their audience. Sommers show us how, when revising, poor writers concentrate on word choice while experienced writers focuse on developing or modifying ideas.

After studying the work of cognitive psychologists, we can take their findings and apply them in the classroom. For example, when teaching novice writers about revision, we can stress the importance of ideas and formulate lesson plans that help students create a concept of revision that isn't solely characterized by rewording. Because cognitive psychology shows us some of the differences in the thinking patterns between good and poor writers, we can mold our teaching strategies to focus on improving the good thinking patterns while weeding out the thinking patterns that limit students' writing.