Student A, You have written an interesting engagement with some of Mike Rose’s ideas here. You have a certain flair hiding out in your writing that I really enjoyed too. In particular, in the first paragraph, you write, “from an early age, putting a pencil to a paper seemed like to be the most impossible […]
Feedback for Student C (On Their Response to Rose’s “Rigid Rules”)
Feedback: Dear Student C, Your essay response to Rose’s article was self-reflective and engaging. You successfully demonstrated what from the essay resonated with your own experience and process. Where you lost points in the rubric were in demonstrating an understanding of Rose’s primary message. For example, the first paragraph of your essay conflates the rules […]
Seen and Heard: Attempting to Personalize Feedback
(Student B, Project 2) You really got what this project was about! You center “gratention” around your own experiences, both through what you were taught in elementary school and in your writing experience as you grapple with your introductions. Not only is “gratention” a perfect word to relate to understanding you as a writer, you’ve […]
Project 1, Student C
Student C- I enjoyed reading your insights throughout this essay! It sounds like getting stuck on the beginning of the essay, like Ruth did, and getting caught up on grammar are two things you identify with from the Rose piece. One thing I though was particularly interesting that you discussed was the ability or inability […]
In Search of Student B
Choses Assignment: Rose and Me Chosen Piece: Student B Dear Student B, First off, I am glad to hear that you no longer suffer from writer’s block in the ways you did in high school. It is introspective of you to note that you used to be afflicted in the same way Ruth was in Rose’s […]
Feedback on Student B’s Gratention Essay
I read Student B’s Writing Emotions Essay, here is the feedback I would give to this student: “Hey Student B! For starters, I love your creativity in the emotion you came up with: Gratention. I think we can all agree that writing an interesting hook or pulling your audience into your essay from the first […]
Thinking Thoughts ‘Bout Writing
My students, excluding maybe one or two, told me that they were average, or mediocre, or middle of the road writers. Most of them told me that good writing, or the metric with which to evaluate writing depends on sentence structure, or coherence, or generally grammar. When pushed to examine our writing class alongside this […]
House Plants
Not surprisingly, my young students don’t believe they’re writers at all. I imagine they look at the classroom (and wordpress) as a kind of echo-chamber; assuming their voice will bounce off the walls and return to them— that there is no receiver. This tenuous call-and-response attitude they have when they’re asked to write is typical, […]
Brief Glimpses
I’m not sure how the students who I interact with see themselves as writers. The two complaints I hear the most are that the students are only writing for their instructor’s sake, or that they aren’t sure where to go with a specific prompt. I find that prompting the students is easier than dealing with […]
Imposter Syndrome
My first instinct is that students often feel like imposters when they sit down to write. From every angle, they are receiving information about writing and its processes. Whether that means they are getting reinforcement and praise in regards to their writing that they honed in K-12 or they are reforming their whole conception of […]
Enjoyment and Expectations
As I read through student letters at the beginning of the quarter, I noticed how many students claimed they were bad writers but appeared to have a strong grasp on language within the letter itself. Many of the students who claimed that they were strong writers seemed to identify this skill set with a specific […]
Jenny from the block
I feel like I’m spinning my wheels a bit retelling this anecdote, since I’ve written about it in my journal, but my students really got into the roles of the writer as written by Betty Flowers. My brother uses this to help train his staff on how to write legal documents – he found it […]
Internalized Routines & “The Writer”
In our reading for today, Mike Rose accurately writes that “people don’t proceed through problem situations…without some set of internalized instructions to the self, some program, some course of action that, even roughly, takes goals and possible paths to that goal into consideration” (5). This might seem rather obvious and can seemingly be applied to […]
blog [blawg] n., 1. a website containing a writer’s own opinions
*Belief [bih-leef] n., 1. an opinion or conviction 2. confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof 3. confidence; faith; trust Are my students’ ideas about writing opinions? Convictions? Impressionable notions of truth that are susceptible to the influence of material proofs? Confidences that could be reinforced or shaken, faith […]
Ok, but like, why?
I don’t think my students think of themselves as writers. I’ve always thought of myself as a writer, but I know professional people who write and have PhDs in writing studies related fields who don’t think of themselves as writers and none of my students have revealed themselves as believing themselves to be writers. I […]
Looking Capable (for 11/8/18)
I’m responding here to the last essay in the emotions grouping from Student C. This essay is a great example of written work that is well done. I see excellent connections to multiple secondary sources, self-reflection on the process of writing, and then bringing it together with a personal connection that unites the piece together. […]
Behavioral Problems and Writing Insecurities
The day had finally come. The day I had to have a one-on-one conference with my least favorite student, aka the problem student. My problem student, the one who rolls his eyes, scoffs at me, and repeatedly whispers to people about how terrible my class is, stepped into my office looking surprisingly normal. He FINALLY […]
Inside the Mind of a Eng 101 Student
The simple answer to today’s prompt would be to say that students’ perceptions of themselves as writers varies from student to student. If I was to generalize them into one average student I would imagine that they feel they are functional writers and that all writing, particularly academic writing, is a means to an end. […]
Sometimes the title comes last
This feels somewhat similar to my last post where I peered into my students’ heads and watched their inner critics berate them into paralysis. From talking to them, I imagined them facing these harsh judges, speaking in the voice of English teachers past, who tell them their work isn’t good enough, saying things like “provide […]
The Harshest Critic
As I mentioned in my last post, I believe that many of my students observe the practice of writing and actually write from a very self-critical space. When they first entered my classroom and we began a discourse to determine what makes someone a writer, and what makes their writing good, my students shared opinions […]
Still Haunted…
If I were to look into their brains at the beginning of the quarter, I imagine my students would be thinking “why am I writing? This is silly—I won’t be needing to write essays later on in life”. These assumptions spring up due to their narrow (or Rose may describe it as rigid) definition of literacy. […]
Teaching Writing in a New Way: Unlearning the Rigid Rules
Many of my students undoubtedly consider themselves to be bad writers. They have little to no confidence in their writing abilities and second-guess every sentence they create. As Mike Rose puts it, they have “a growing distrust of their abilities and an aversion toward the composing process itself” (389). Thus, alongside their small confidence levels, my students […]
The Importance of Being Earnest
I apologize for my title. It seems like a huge obstacle to student writing is that they are thoroughly conditioned to be performative and to respond to cues- the compulsion is to mimic each other, satisfy the teacher or get the correct answer. Their writing, at this adolescent stage, is reflective of the way they’ve […]
The Lonely Road of Struggle
I think of two types of struggle when considering the student experience in my class. One type of struggle I would consider unproductive and constraining, while the other I would say is an almost necessary condition for any deep, lasting learning. Shaughnessy’s line about “written anguish” as an alternative “English” felt like an apt characterization […]
Who Offers You the “Writer” Identity?
The myth of genius authorship pervades, always. From the moment students are taught the basics of writing—the standard structures in which to say something in their writing—they are faced with a kind of unconscious model to mimic. Be that example essays of “ideal” scholarship or the supplementary literature they are given to think about and […]
The Struggle is Real
My student’s struggle with writing is the struggle of all writers against that eternal fiend which is ever present: Apathy. I could talk about sentence structure, transitions, reading drafts aloud and so on, but I find these deficiencies all pale in comparison to people’s ability to give a crap about what they are doing beyond […]
The Tyranny of the Critic
The first thing that troubles my students about writing is the idea of it. They’ll have to sit down, sit still, concentrate, produce, be judged by standards they don’t always understand. Let’s look at these one at a time. The first hurdle is getting started. Most of them aren’t natural writers, aren’t particularly interested or […]
Mattering, Struggling, and Whatever else there is…
If I’m being honest, I don’t know what makes my students struggle when they write—not really. The only things I hear about is when they aren’t clear on instructions, but a lot of that feels like something they’re just not paying as much attention to the prompts. They want a clear-cut “answered” way of doing […]
“Good Writing” as Myth
I don’t know when the fear of writing became so widespread amongst incoming undergraduates, but it is certainly something that weighs heavily on the minds of my students. On the first day of classes, I had several students raise their hands when they came to the paragraph in my syllabus that discussed “good writing.” Although […]
Different Values
For some of my students, the struggle with writing is dependent upon the context. Some folks really struggled with the literacy narrative but excelled with the research proposal. More of the students found the literacy narrative challenging than found the research-centered writing. In fact, many of them did not manage to bring their narratives out […]