One of the great benefits of making your way through the world with writing is the view it affords of a range of disciplines – I have often commented that writing, editing, and the teaching and mentoring of writing have provided me a rich life and no money! However, one of the dirty secrets of the professional world is the […]
“This is boring.” “This is stupid.” “I shouldn’t have to take this class. It’s pointless. I’m a good writer!” “I hate to write.” “I hate to read AND write.” Having been in first-year college composition classrooms for twenty years, I have heard students’ distancing comments in halls, coming into and leaving classrooms, and I have heard them in the classroom […]
You know those teacher conversations? The ones that begin with “Gosh, I don’t know what’s gotten into so-and-so,” or maybe “His grades have really dropped.” I listen to teachers in the lounge commiserate about how to motivate our students. As high school teachers, we fight a battle, or maybe more accurately, wage a war, against hormones and extracurricular sports; against […]
In answer to Bob’s initial questions (In our current models of writing assessment, both high school and postsecondary, do we measure achievement, or learning? Is there a way to measure both?), I’d say we primarily measure achievement in the form of a finished document. We break these down and assess them categorically, and assign a grade based on how well […]
I want to comment on something that used to obsess me when I was a younger teacher. I wanted to be a great teacher. Yep, nothing less. Now that I have almost 20 years behind me, I see that great teachers cannot exist in our time. My great teachers smoked in front of the class and talked in oblique […]