Teaching Adolsecent Writers: Chapter 7; Content Area Writing: Chapters 7 and 9

Teaching Adolescent Writers
(Page 142) “…the goal for each student is the same: everyone improves…it is unrealistic to think I am going to make every one of my 165 students a strong writer. It is realistic, however, to begin each year with the goal that every student of mine, regardless of ability, is going to get better.”
I love this thinking—it’s achievable for both the student and the teacher. (Claire, I know you love it because it reminds you of the movie Summer School…did I just reference that movie two blog posts in a row?!?) The thing I especially love is that as usual, Gallagher doesn’t just tell you this theory; he give you some strategies to use to put it into practice. Does it require some extra work? Certainly. To show that you’ve made improvement with each student means you have to know where the student was to begin with and what his weaknesses were. Otherwise, how will you know he improved and in what specific areas? Keeping this type of data on students can be powerful. While mid-to-late year a student may realize that he still isn’t a terrific writer, how great would it be to show him how far he has come?

I do want to mention one thing on Tenet #6 that Gallagher writes about on page 150-152 with the Independent Correction Sheet (Figure 7.5). When I heard Gallagher speak in December, he said he has slightly modified the form from the example in the book. If you look at the figure, you’ll notice that in the first column the student writes the sentence where the problem occurred. He no longer has students do that because it seems to just reinforce bad habits…they’re once again writing a sentence incorrectly. Instead, the student simply writes the sentence correctly and notes the problem he originally had.

Content Area Writing
Two of the writing projects I liked featured in these chapters are the newspaper front page and multi-genre project. I like the newspaper front page because I think students can get as creative with it as they would like and show clear understanding of text read. I like how Daniels et al provide an evaluation checklist on page 179, so the student can see if they have elements of a real newspaper. I must say that I’m not too impressed with the MS Publisher template and student sample shown on pages 180-181…I think it leaves a bit to be desired.

I’m also a fan of the multi-genre project. The only time I had my students do it was when I went out on maternity leave. They didn’t have any face-to-face instruction from me, so their final products weren’t exactly exemplary, but I could tell they put some work into them. While the book suggests having students complete the multi-genre unit on a topic, I had my student do it on a book they read for SSR. This allowed students to look at the book from a variety of perspectives. That was the last quarter I was in a classroom, so I didn't have a chance to try it out with another group of students where I was able to guide them through the process better.

I’m telling ya…if I had had a the internet, a computer, and an inkjet printer when I was in high school along with these types of projects, I would have been completely loving life. I love creating stuff like that!

Teaching Adolescent Writers: Chapter 6; Content Area Writing: Chapter 10

Teaching Adolescent Writers

(Page 122) “When students understand the real-world purposes for writing (instead of simply writing to meet the next school assignment) they begin to internalize the relevance of writing, and more important, they develop an understanding that writing is an important skill to carry into adulthood.”

There are tons of different types of writing people use in the real-world, and there are some things we’ve just got to teach students to do or else they’ll be at a huge disadvantage when the graduate, particularly since so many of our students go into the workforce directly after high school. What if all senior English teachers taught the art of writing a thank-you note? How relevant would that be for seniors as they are receiving graduation gifts at the end of the year? It’s also an opportunity to teach them some etiquette—believe it or not, some people don’t know that they’re supposed to send thank-you notes for baby or wedding gifts. How many of you have seen the movie Summer School with Mark Harmon? (Other than Claire—I know it’s one of her favorites.) The gist of the movie is that a PE teacher (Harmon) is required to teach remedial English in summer school. He doesn’t know how to teach them but does find that relevance makes a difference, so he has the students all write complaint letters to companies they’ve had problems with. He teaches them how to write that letter and the language they must use—including using their real names instead of nicknames. (One student was named Francis, but everyone called him Chainsaw.) In the end, Francis received free sunglasses for his letter in regards to his faulty ones. What a great lesson! How many of us have ever been dissatisfied with a product or service? Teaching students how to properly write a complaint letter (i.e. including telling them that using the word “sucks” is not a good idea!) could benefit students tremendously once they graduate. Goodness only knows how many free dinners and gift certificates my sister has received because she knows the art of complaining in writing!

Content Area Writing

(Page 253) “Some tests encourage teachers to race through content never slowing down to help students think deeply about the material, thus encouraging endless data bytes promptly forgotten once the test is over.”

Anyone else, besides me, cram for tests in high school the night before, make a good grade, and don’t remember a dang thing from it? I remember those wretched vocabulary workbooks all too well. Twenty new words on Monday, complete the “exercises,” during the week, and test on Friday. I think I remember two words (deluge and prelude) from my four years of completing those books. What’s the point??? On a side note, I heard that if a student is given 20 vocabulary words a week every week from 1st grade through 12th grade and actually learns every one of them, it only makes up for 6% of the student’s vocabulary…he gets 94% of his vocabulary from other means, i.e. everyday conversations. Paul Thomas from Furman is the one I heard that from, but he didn’t cite a source, so I’m not sure if he’s the originator.

Anyway, we’ve got to teach students to think. We don’t need teach them to think like us…we just need to teach them to think! Many years ago, Paulo Friere equated teaching to bank depositing. Teachers give students information (deposit it) and expect them to spit that information back. What good is it, really, if students just regurgitate everything we tell them? Wouldn’t it be better for them to be able to learn how to think about our class topics and apply that information to other situations? If we just teach them random facts and want them to tell us that information on the test, very little of that information will be retained. But if we teach them how to think and analyze and give them those sorts of questions on the test, then they’ll “get it” and be able to apply that understanding to other things.