24/7 customer support
Professional writers
No plagiarism
Privacy guarantee
Affordable prices
94% of return customers
Free title page
Free bibliography
Free formatting
Free of plagiarism
Free delivery
| Home |
| Order form |
| Contact us |
| Blog |
| Impact on younger teachers. |
| This is related to clause 5 but adds the pressure of promotion to the writing teacher's job, which accentuates the wrong things: if you, the teacher, train students to pass a competency exam, you will have done your job. If you fail at that, you will be judged a failure as a teacher. Forget about meeting students at their present level, and helping them to discover and tell what they mean. Get them through the exam. We don't care what happens afterward. But the hitch here, as always, is that passing or failing an exam may have almost nothing to do with the lifelong need to adapt one's capacity to write to a variety of demands and situations. But. . . here's the discovery of something really important to me, worth struggling to write about: how do you show someone who knows little about the possibilities for learning and teaching writing that an exam is exactly the wrong emphasis to give to a course? My students, even those who start by not being able to write a sentence in an hour, could pass an exam at the end of the term if it were a genuine task (a step in their development toward independent writing with imagination and skill), and if this developing skill were reenforced elsewhere in their school life. But that would also involve educating teachers who give students no feedback on their papers, or who correct only typos and punctuation. The emphasis, instead, must be on giving people the selfconfidence to share, to believe in an audience despite their experiences in school that militate against such confidence. A competency exam works against all of those goals. (This may be the heart of my paper, the place where my own feelings, experiences, and ideas ignite the act of writing it. Come back to this!) Suddenly, half-way through reviewing my list of because-clauses, I have a vision of how this position paper can satisfy the needs of the reader and the writer. I see that clause 7 is related to this discovery as well: of course a competency exam will weaken the image of the English department in relation to the rest of the faculty. We will be seen as a "remedial" department, which is what most academics think anyway ("you writing teachers have the toughest job in the college, why can't you teach those illiterates how to spell?"). So, too, with clause 8. The competency exam is really not for the student or for the English department; it is for the comfort of people who really know nothing about the teaching and learning of writing, but who imagine it as a testable skill that can be measured in increments on a false analogy with computer literacy or statistics. These people are probably skeptical about what students have to "say" anyway. Clauses 9 and 10 directly address this point, too: what I consider necessary in the teaching of writing is actually undercut by the competency exam. They can go right into the middle section of my essay, in their present wording. Clause 11 adds the point that more writing should be required of everyone, while clause 12 explains why, and goes on to the more general point about the connection between writing, educational goals, and society, reflecting our larger responsibilities as teachers of writing and as educators. Certainly, part of the twelfth clause will find its way into the conclusion of my paper. Looking through my original list, then, has yielded lots of information about my essay; not only a sense of the whole design, but the center of the argument, and the feelings, the anger, the ideals, the energy I can bring to a question that at first seemed dreary and futile. I know, too, that I'll be able to use some of the language of the original clauses. This analysis might take about fifteen or twenty minutes, with a few notes sketched on the page as you go along. But you will feel confident that, writing under pressure, you can make your paper, memo, or report clear and powerful. |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
24/7 customer support
Written from scratch papers only
Any citation style
Fully referenced
Never resold papers
275 words per page Courier New font