Wk 2: What should be obvious. And grammar!

Initially I was turned off by what Williams was saying. I tend to get defensive b/c after all, here we are! We did some how manage to learn something from the miserable classroom and teaching methods we're all criticizing. But, after I get over that, I can move on to see that what I'm reading makes sense. A lot of times when I read these sort of "How to Teach" things, I sort of think, well, OF COURSE. I forget that, what comes naturally to some of us (the process or writing, reading) isn't that way for everyone else. So, it's great to see that they are putting the "process approach" or whatever they want to call it, down on paper, into concrete stages.

I really liked the part about "divorcing" editing from the rest of the writing process, and not just because people worry about errors and may stifle their creativity. It's important to realize that such errors are inevitable. (That's why we have erasers.) And this way students can sit down in their last stages and THINK about why their grammar/usage is incorrect. Why doesn't this sentence make sense? subj/verb agreement, etc. Then they understand what that is. If they hurry over that while writing their papers it won't mean anything to them and they will probably be more likely to make that mistake again. This is an excellent example of grammar in context, which seems much more affective than writing vocab words and sentences--which I had to do even in high school. (I had a BISCUIT for breakfast. X 6)

At first I thought, workshops for essay writing, what? Pairs definitely makes more sense to me. That's pretty much what I did during my undergrad anyway, I'd show my paper to a trusted friend, who I knew would give me an honest opinion. Again, we're modeling these ideas off what good writers already do, so it's hard to go wrong. It seems that Carney has adapted the process well for the classroom. These workshops give you the benefit of input from your classmates, but the responsibility lies with the individual writer. I think that's v. important.

Okay, so I'm not a genius or anything because I had no idea what to list as a link, but I was surfing around for associated sites and found this site, TeenLit, and the more I looked at it, the more the writing tools seemed really cool. It would be a great places for your students to go in class when they needed some help and it looks like they have a publication as well. Also, it had a list of cites where kids can buy papers--so you can catch them cheating!