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In "The Writing Revolution," Peg Tyre traces the problems at one troubled New York high school to a simple fact: The students couldn't write coherent sentences. In 2009 New Dorp High made a radical change. Instead of trying to engage students through memoir exercises and creative assignments, the school required them to write expository essays and diagram sentences. Within two years, the school's pass rates for the English Regents test and the global-history exam were soaring. The school's drop-out rate — 40 percent in 2006 — has fallen to 20 percent. The experiment suggests that the trend toward teaching creative writing was hurting American students.
It's more important to write a "personal response" to literature than engage with the content. This is supposed to be "authentic" writing. There is nothing inherently inauthentic about research papers and English essays.
Earlier this year, David Coleman, the principal architect of the widely adopted Common Core Standards, infamously told a group of educators, "As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don't give a **** about what you feel or what you think." His bluntness made me wince, but his impulse is correct. We have overvalued personal expression
After several years of horrible "small moments" personal narrative assignments that did little to improve my youngest's writing skills and made everyone in our house crazy, he now has a teacher who integrates science and writing instruction. The majority of his essay assignments are expository, and his writing has improved dramatically. I am over the moon!
Oh, small moment essay, let me count the ways I hate you. It was truly shocking how quickly my youngest's writing improved when it ceased to revolve around how he felt. That personal narrative may work for girls, but it's a death sentence for boys' writing.
As an elementary school teacher I was forced - yes, absolutely forced - to teach creative writing, personal response, yada yada, no grammar whatsoever, no 5 paragraph essays, no paragraph writing, topic sentences, etc. All that was considered stifling and boring and the very reason our kids couldn't write. I can't count the number of times I had to sit through professional development where it was drilled into our heads that only bad teachers suck the life out of writing and kill students' desire to write by trying to teach them proper sentence formation, grammar, expository style, etc. It was utter BS, but we all had to pretend to go along with it and eventually I even convinced myself it was true, because if you say something enough times (because as a teacher, you either spout the jargon and hop on the bandwagon or you're out of a job), well then you start to believe it.
So now they've changed their minds. Why can't we stop with this stupid pendulum of reform and just do what makes sense?? If only teachers were allowed to use their brains to decide what their students need, then maybe we wouldn't have to go through this every 5 years.
What is annoying to me for my granddaughter is that her asperger's makes personal responses so difficult to write. She had to write one and chose what I thought would be a good topic for her, but because it had to be 200 or more words, it was like pulling teeth and the whole thing was not a coherent whole.
Her reader responses have a rubric they follow and that seems to work better for her, but she has to do books that are less fiction and more non-fiction. She did one tonight on Who was Jackie Robinson? and I thought that worked better than the one she did on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets because it is a more concrete subject.
If they asked her to write about a science lesson or even a geography lesson, I think she would do better.
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