Response for Class on 1/24

My mother is a middle school English teacher, so you could say I grew up with a bit of an influence. I have always gulped books like they are coffee: addictive and possessing the power to keep your eyes open to the world.

In the same way, words have always been my best means of communication; I still have notebooks from when I was 6 or 7 years old with half-finished stories about Sprite bottles or rocks that were actually superheroes. It only made sense to pick a career in which I could do my favorite things all day.

I think I grew up having a preconceived idea of what being an English teacher means. As I read these texts, I realized that teaching in general is more complex than I originally thought. The situation that Christensen describes in Teaching for Joy and Justice about her student whose writing was not on grade level really struck me. Christensen speaks about Jerald, and how he "lacked the conventional skills" in his writing, "but he didn't lack intelligence." She attempted to teach him all the rules of punctuation in one go, marking his paper with flourishes of red pen.

Instead of helping Jerald, this discouraged him from his forward progress. Christensen says: "Instead of telling him how beautiful his writing was, instead of finding what worked in his piece, I found every single thing that was wrong." Going over Jerald's writing with a fine-tooth comb didn't cause him to achieve anything; he could only see the errors he had made and not the talent evident in his paper.

The message to take away from this is to "teach the writer, not the paper." I think this is a profound statement for English teachers and teachers of writing. Tearing down a student's confidence by covering their papers with red marks does little to teach them the mechanics of writing and nothing to show them that they possess the ability to write. Grammar and punctuation are important to a well-written piece of writing, but if a student does not see their talent in the act of writing, their desire to improve their skills will cease altogether. A class full of papers covered with red pen is not the mark of a competent teacher but one who does not understand that students need to know that they have potential in order to be successful. As the saying goes, Rome wasn't built in a day; in the same way, students won't learn how to write the perfect paper in one go. The writing process is a continual cycle of steady improvement rather than a list of facts to memorize.

This idea leads into one of the Top Ten Writing Wrongs listed in Gallagher's Teaching Adolescent Writers. The second "wrong" listed says, "writing is sometimes assigned rather than taught." I feel as though many teachers don't understand the difference; I have certainly had teachers in high school who would fall into that category. If students aren't taught how to write, they will never see writing as anything more than something they are forced to do. Teaching them involves more than ensuring they have a firm grasp on the structure of various papers and citation formats. Teaching students to write includes helping them to develop their voice, recognizing that pulling out what they have to say is more important than their incorrect use of the semicolon.

This same message is present in the article, "To High School English Teachers (and All Teachers)." One of the lessons the author writes about is "teach[ing] students—not programs, standards, test-prep, or your discipline." Here again, we see the same point being made. Learning should be student-focused, not subject-focused. It is a long process, but it is one that is well worth it.

As future teachers of writing, it will be our responsibility to make our classrooms a space for growth. To do this, we must shift our focus from the work to the student. The reality is that we will not encounter a class with students who are all on the same level; to expect such a scenario is absurd. If we are only looking at the logistics of a paper and ignoring the quality of the content within it, it will only result in raising a generation of students who resent writing because they believe that they do not have the ability to do it. I want to believe in my students and make them believe in themselves. If I change writing for them, perhaps their writing will change the world.