Blog #5- Response to Sara's Letter

Dear Sara,

How are you? Hope you are enjoying some of your time off? I do not know about you but I myself am having a difficult time keeping up with my job related work, school related work and life in general. Oh well, enough complaining, let's get down to my response to you.

I must agree with you that I was not too happy with the Mike Rose article either. Not sure I will attempt to read his book "Lives on the Boundary" as you recommended -this article turned me off to him. Just like you, I always believed that writing well was a skill one acquires with practice using the knowledge one learns. I am glad he renamed it to an "ability" because in order to be obtain a skill you have to be able to do it.

You are so right that I had a problem that Rose thinks "teaching writing is simply teaching how to refine what we should already know how to do". My freshmen are having an extremely difficult time writing anything. I had to start from scratch teaching them the basics such as what is a sentence, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, punction, etc. I even had to go over capitalization - like the first letter of a sentence should be capitalized. I used to believe that teaching was in a way refining what you should know. But, like Bean states "students have such a wide range of backgrounds, aptitudes and academic preparation" (38) that you, as a teacher, cannot assume that they know anything about writing. You have to go in there believing that they know nothing and go from there. In my case, my Freshmen know nothing and I am teaching what should have been taught in middle school or earlier.

I enjoyed Bean; for some reason, I can read it and understand it without any difficulty. However, I did not see any examples of how to effectively lead students out of their comfort zone. I know only too well that every assignment does not appeal to every student and not all students are capable of doing every assignment well. That is why I incorporate creative projects in my classes so that those who are not academically inclined can succeed and feel good about themselves.

Sara, I have been thinking about our TheoristCard - Williams says "don't be a wimp". We will have to remember that. Also, I have been looking for a symbol or picture to use on the front of the card. I will keep you posted.

Take care,

Ann