I want to drop-kick a baby here...
Well, since our discussion in class, it has gotten me thinking about my teachers over the years and their approaches to this beautiful, intoxicating thing called writing. Back in elementary school, it was all about linking the visual with what we're writing. The teacher would show us a picture, and we would all write a story about what's going on in it. It was very creative, and I enjoyed it, but it stunted my growth in writing. It wasn't until junior high that grammar and structure came into play, and the teachers all of a sudden turned into writing nazis. My 8th grade teacher would go into hysterics if we didn't diagram a sentence properly. We spent hours per week poring over those grammar books and practicing sentence clauses and all for what? I don't think any of that reflected the quality of my papers at all. I was still at the drawing board.
High school was the breaking point of my writing career. This was the time when the teacher broke it down for us. The four essential qualities of a paper: tone, meaning, audience, and purpose. Thesis, body, conclusion. Make those opening sentences reflect the thesis. All of these things were essential to the teacher, but more often than not all she was worried about was our success in passing the AP test and writing an effective essay in an hour. That was it! My mind was too consumed with the AP test to care if my writing progressed. Which it did, but only to a certain extent.
Throughout this great process that I'm going through, I'm trying to keep up my creative energies as well as my practical, classroom work. I want the hippie as well as the nazi, and throughout tutoring I'm always torn over whether a student should stay within the confines of the assignment or create something unique that may or may not stay in his gold star folder. I know that those 1010 and 2010 kids just want an A paper, and we just want the grade and get it over with, but is that it? Should writing always be technical? Should writing always be unfinished? I just don't see the glass, man!
High school was the breaking point of my writing career. This was the time when the teacher broke it down for us. The four essential qualities of a paper: tone, meaning, audience, and purpose. Thesis, body, conclusion. Make those opening sentences reflect the thesis. All of these things were essential to the teacher, but more often than not all she was worried about was our success in passing the AP test and writing an effective essay in an hour. That was it! My mind was too consumed with the AP test to care if my writing progressed. Which it did, but only to a certain extent.
Throughout this great process that I'm going through, I'm trying to keep up my creative energies as well as my practical, classroom work. I want the hippie as well as the nazi, and throughout tutoring I'm always torn over whether a student should stay within the confines of the assignment or create something unique that may or may not stay in his gold star folder. I know that those 1010 and 2010 kids just want an A paper, and we just want the grade and get it over with, but is that it? Should writing always be technical? Should writing always be unfinished? I just don't see the glass, man!
posted by Anonymous at 6:51 PM
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