Writing Rant!

“I’ve seen their writing. I’m surprised they could read the test!”

The above quote was taken from a blog post from a fellow teacher-blogger, “The Science Penguin”.

In the post she was lamenting about test scores from this year and her significant other came into the room and made this observation.

Then it hit me, he’s right!

Recently, I subbed for a teacher and she gave her students an assignment. The assignment was to write a simple thank you letter. This letter was supposed to be addressed to their parents to thank them for all they have done for them through school up to this point.

When I gave the assignment, you would have thought I had asked them to write an essay on War and Peace complete with annotated bibliography and visual aids. Now, from 1^st or 2^nd graders I might expect that response because letter writing, while taught, is still unfamiliar task for this age group. But these were not the aforementioned age groups, these were 6^th graders!

I would think by this time in their school careers writing a simple thank you note would not be such a gripe fest. I heard every complaint from, “Do we have to do this?” to “My parents never did anything for me” (which is a sad commentary in itself, but I digress).

 I know kids don’t like to do work, especially if given from a guest teacher, who to them is nothing more than a glorified substitute for their regular babysitter. But this didn’t surprise me, what did however is worthy of note.

As the students were “writing” (and I use the term loosely) I saw an alarming amount of them who simply COULD NOT WRITE! It was shocking, 6^th graders who had no concept of grammar, simple spelling or punctuation. Some could barely manage to come up with coherent complete thoughts.

I know their teachers and I know they are working their butts off to make sure these children are prepared for their next chapter but what from what I saw, there was a disconnect. Testing is a part of this I think, teachers everywhere are being forced to indoctrinate students to get a “6” on their writing prompt. Ask any student anywhere what a “6” paper looks like and they can tell you but can they produce such a product? I have seen some students who write for the sheer pleasure of writing and we love to see that but most see it as drudgery, filling only a couple of lines on the page and putting their pencils down in surrender. Most barely make it that far.

Simple 6 +1, YES MA’AM, and other writing rubrics that have been proliferated throughout schools everywhere are being used to help our children learn to write better and to help organize their ideas but it doesn’t seem to be working.  A lot of these student’s letters that I saw were just a jumble of random thoughts and I believe one even had “text-speak”.  We have writer’s workshop and author’s conferences and have spent tens of thousand of professional development dollars all with the effort to help our students write better. They even added writing to the SAT (which has now been rescinded) because they were finding that student simply did not know how to express their ideas on paper coherently.

So at the end of the day, can this be fixed? I hope that what I saw that day is not indicative of their everyday writing.

Focused instruction could be a key, but what does that look like? It should start in the primary grades.

 I saw a way to start on a blog post from Growing Firsties where she created her own spot-check for her friends, which gives her data (I just love data!) to be able to accurately help her friends learn better writing skills.

I am sure there are many others great teachers who are doing their part to help student appreciate writing. Creating Writer’s Notebooks and giving students the tools to be good writers are just the start. When I was in college learning about this process of the Writer’s Notebook, I would sit in my classes and just “people-watch” and get great ideas for stories.

Let’s put the wonder back into writing! 

(Sorry the post is so long, just a lot on my mind!)