If this is your first night, you have to write

          

          Effective educators make every effort to anticipate the types of skills their students will need in the future.  These teachers will attend seminars, collaborate with others inside and outside of their department, and read the latest publications on their content area.  They make every attempt to ensure their class is relevant to their students.  I want to be an effective educator.  I want my students to understand how writing well will open up many opportunities for them.  The challenge before us today is to develop transformative instructional techniques that will prepare students for the types of writing that will exist in our technologically advancing world.  This summer I want to focus on the most efficient ways to teach rhetoric and grammar, utilizing the technology that will be available to my students.

            In A Short History of Writing Instruction, James Berlin states that English studies have “been at the center of the educational experience in this country, constituting one of the few requirements for all students in the grades.”  Now I am sure that every teacher likes to think that his/her subject matter is the cornerstone of education, but it seems that without the ability to read or write it would be difficult to instruct anything at all.  So much of our educational system in the United States was developed with the notion of how best to instruct writing.  Theories on this have come and gone, but the focus has always been on producing the types of learners that will most benefit society.  That type of learner today is one that can draw on technology to communicate with a much larger audience than one could have even dreamt of thirty years ago. 

            The value of writing is very clear, yet this process that requires an understanding of rules and structure, order and logic, cause and effect is met with much resistance from the majority of students.  Young writers are not grasping how this process will make them a well-rounded student.  Janet Emig stated that, “writing serves learning uniquely because writing as process-and-product possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies.”  I have seen this in action as I have read through the research articles I have been collecting over the past month.  When I sit down to write about this information, I begin to see it in a new light.  I am no longer reading for information, but I am processing that information in a way that allows me to reflect on where I was prior to the writing process and what I will now do with this information in the future.  A big part of this has to do with my interest in becoming a better teacher.  This motivation helps me along the reading and writing process.  All students need a motivation of some sort.  There must be a way that educators can tap into the student’s interest in technology to successfully teach the structural components that often cause students to resist participating in this powerful process. 

            Too often, teachers resist the use of technology in instructional methods because they feel that the traditional approach that they were instructed in is the only way to teach.  I remember when I was in high school and not allowed to use calculators in math classes.  It was so extreme that students were suspended for having calculator watches.  By my senior year of high school, there was a paradigm shift, and teachers allowed students to use calculators on math problems.  Now, the problems students can solve with calculators far surpass anything students were doing while I was in school.  Current technology has the potential to do the same thing for writing.

            This leads me to the reading selection I would like to fully analyze, Chapter 4 of Engaging Ideas by John Bean.  One of the biggest challenges in my classroom is what Bean identifies as “students not taking pride in their writing and seeing themselves as having ideas important enough to communicate.”  It seems that once students have enough passion and dedication to the writing process in general, many of the perceived errors that occur will take care of themselves.  Creating that passion becomes the trick.  This is where I think technology can play a significant part.  Blogs are popular ways to get the ideas a writer cares about out to a large audience.  I would hope that students would be motivated to have better habits of editing and proofreading if they knew their writing would be viewed by a larger market of their peers.  This could also reinforce Haswell’s system of “minimal marking” that Bean indorses.  The notion of withholding a grade until the writing is free of as many errors as possible is intriguing to me and could easily fit into an online forum.  The only problem I see would be in determining at what point the student paper is deemed suitable for a grade.  No paper can ever be perfect, and if errors are connected to stylistic choices when does the writing reach a finishing point?  In any case, I now see that I was trying to do too much when it comes to teaching writing.  I need to help my students advocate for themselves if I truly what to improve their writing skills.  I hope to come to some more specific conclusions and answer some of my questions as I continue to research.