Blog # 6

Hello Ann,

Firstly, yes McCarthy can go on, but I agree that she had many good points in her article. I also enjoyed the idea of being a stranger in a strange land as far as different writing assignments. I took a playwriting class my last semester in undergrad and it was miserable. I had no idea where to begin and the professor thought it was alright to never show up for his office hours. I had never taken a writing course, so I was definitely in a strange land where I didn’t speak the language. This was a metaphor that I could relate to.

As far as writing being social, I like what was said on page127. Herrington, as I saw it, was saying that when you teach writing, the learning needs to extend beyond the classroom. Students need to learn for “real life” situations. What good is what they are learning if they can’t take it out of the classroom? Ann, as far as texting, I honestly don’t know what to tell you. Texting was not an issue when I was in grammar school and as far as high school, everyone was afraid that the nuns would take their phones away, so I don’t think that there was an excess of texting there. But I can see where you are coming from as far as it being a form of writing. My sister is in 6th grade and she can’t spell ANYTHING (and I don’t think it’s from lack of proper teaching). When I text her I spell everything out so she won’t be what I like to call a “lazy speller.” When I text my friends though, I barely spell anything correctly, opting for the number equals a word and any abbreviation I can possibly think of. So while I can agree that texting is a form of writing, I don’t think that it is teaching anything the way that Herrington and McCarthy saw it.

On to Bean, I suppose. I thought of you and your freshman the whole time I was reading this. I too learned all my grammar in elementary school. It makes me cringe to think of my freshman year English teacher trying to teach grammar. She could barely teach the novels we were reading. (As an aside, my 7th grade teacher used Mad Libs to teach us nouns, verbs and all that jazz.) I can understand how teaching grammar can be tedious, especially if that is not what you are supposed to be teaching. I thought it was interesting when Bean said, “Weak writers seem to make more progress in generating ideas, improving fluency, and organizing and developing arguments than they do in sentence correctness,” (p 54). After I thought about it I could understand that it would be easier for someone to come up with new ideas than to fix something they have been doing their entire lives. The only thing I can imagine helping is skill and drill. This is why I think that having students fix their own mistakes is a double edged sword. While it will be good for them to be able to recognize the mistakes they are making, will they be able to? That seems to be the problem in the first place. This also seems to be why teaching for the test is so dangerous.

See you in class,

Sarah

REFLECTION

I agree with Ann. I liked to hear what she had to say and while I appreciated her posting her blogs early, I felt guilty that I could not do the same. Someone else’s grade was hanging over my head and it is stressful. I liked this assignment and enjoyed reading what Ann had to say. It was nice to see the text brought to life in her classrooms experience. I wish she wasn’t having such a hard time with her students, but they really helped me out here. But really, the stress of Ann’s grade hanging on my posting time really unnerved me and I can only imagine how it made her feel having to do it twice.