“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 1st or 2nd 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 6th 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, 6th 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!)
