Today my learning support students write their first in-class essay, one of four such beasts they will write this semester (one other essay will be composed outside of class time). I expect to see the usual variety of skill levels; many coherent, a few perhaps brilliant in spots, but many many with serious and multiple problems: incomplete sentences, punctuation irregularities, confusing or awkward wording, subjects and verbs not talking to each other. And the list goes on.
The most frustrating thing about teaching, without a doubt, is somehow finding a way to address these multiple deficits while laboring under the knowledge that every one of us has a unique hang-up with writing and may or may not need what I'm offering at that moment. For example, I will, until the end of time, always do a unit on comma placement, because they're tricky and frequently intuitive. Until the end of time, I will always do a unit on verb tense shifts and verb forms, because I am seeing more and more of those irregularities, even (especially?) among native-born speakers. But things like spelling and word choice are hard for me to generalize and "present," because they're idiosyncratic and really hard to improve--sometimes I feel all I can say is for them to read more than they do. Conferences help, but they don't do enough.
So in answer to our title question, yes, progress is possible in 15 weeks, but I long ago abandoned the idea of consistent forward progress with remedial writers, because every assignment is different, and each one of us is a different person every time we sit down to write. If I can get a student (admittedly, a motivated and somewhat self-aware student) to see his major types of errors and become more aware when they happen, that's a kind of progress--I hope.
Can I make someone love (or like) to write in 15 weeks? It hasn't happened much in my teaching life.
2 comments:
Speaking for myself, I've had professors who have made me love to write. Or rather, they reaffirmed what I already knew. Then again, I've also had professors who have made me want to burn all of my journals and toss out my pens. The former were usually effective because they conveyed a love for writing themselves.
Good to see you blogging on here again, BTW. I know I don't always comment, but I do make an effort to read fairly regularly.
Well, as long as I get some (many) of them incrementally closer to competency--perhaps not fluency or even a certain minimum comfort--I like to think I've done something right.
Trouble is, how do you know in 15 weeks if a student has made measurable progress? Or a year?
I guess what I mean is that I can do some good for the motivated and self-aware ones in the bunch; I can give tools and tricks.
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