I have requested one-on-one conference time next week with, let's see, four students from one learning support section; another student requested one-on-one time herself without prompting. Interesting, in that this section is shaping up to be delightful to teach but chock-full of weak writers.
When I say "weak," you have no idea exactly what I mean. One student with whom I'm conferencing next week has so many problems we won't have time to cover them all in 20-30 minutes. Her first essay is a microcosm of the most common problems, but all lumped together: sentences that don't hold together, inexplicable punctuation, random capitalization, missing verb endings, wording that just doesn't make sense. Spelling, too, though that's hardly the worst sin.
We have a writing lab on campus, and I'm steering all these guys toward it. They have to pass an exit writing sample at the end of the semester, and writing like this ain't gonna cut it.
2 comments:
Oh boy. Where do you start, with a bunch like that? Sometimes I just want to sit down with students like these and start over from scratch. With the alphabet.
Best of luck, Southern Man.
Well, with one student I conferenced with today, we focused just on fragments. I left aside her issues with repetition, strange phrasing, and lack of details. Just fragments, because every other group of words was a fragment. She understands that she's doing a lot of them, I think; whether she'll be able to reduce them in future writing is another question.
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