Before taking this course, I felt that I generally knew what teaching consisted of and felt that I would know what I was doing in the classroom; I was not worried about it. But, once this course began I learned that there is a lot more to teaching than just standing in front of a class for 40 minutes talking about a specific topic for the day. It takes a lot of planning, coordination and thinking. I have learned that there are so many different aspects to teaching that I never even thought about before, especially the writing part of it.
Growing up, I always had my mom constantly influencing my writing and literature style and preference due to the fact that she was previously an English teacher herself. She would pass her methods onto me and through tutoring of peers and younger students as a side job, I taught people how to teach in one way or another. Although this may be true, my experience of teaching writing was very limited. There was no real “teaching”, there were more corrections and there was usually a goal of following a very specific rubric. This class has truly shown me how much more there is to teaching writing than what I thought teaching writing consisted of.
One idea that struck me in class was the discussion on the “correct” way to go about writing an essay. I was always taught that writing an outline was the best way to create and start an effective, well written essay. I have written an outline for just about all, if not all, of the papers I have written in my academic career. I get a pen and paper and start scribbling down ideas, quotes, transitions and so much more. Then once all of my thoughts are organized, I would start typing the paper. This is also how I taught my students to go about writing papers. The students I tutored struggled a lot with writing and how to start writing in addition to expanding upon their writing to reach some kind of word count or page limit. In order to organize their thoughts and have some sort of “game plan” so to speak, I had them write an outline. And for the most part, it worked and positively impacted their writing. Coming to this class has shown me that that is not the only way to create an effective piece of writing, which was a bit of a shock to me and at first I did not really agree with that idea. But I soon realized that in college, there are so many different people with so many different minds and ways of thinking, that no one way is “correct”. It truly depends on what works for that particular student.
The other point I would like to discuss that impacted my thinking was the part of the text in Chapter 2 where a school board member overheard two students speaking to one another, casually, and he found it atrocious. He then complained to the English teachers about it, questioning what the students were being taught if this was the way they were speaking. I found this part to be absurd. English teachers then agreed that “considering context, audience, and message, the blissfully unaware athletes were doing exactly what their English teachers would have understood: communicating clearly with each other in context, aware of audience and accomplishing a defined purpose.” (19)
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I think your post is very interesting because I too always thought there was a “correct” and “incorrect way to not only write but also teach writing. Lost of people who are good at writing (people who become English Teachers) don’t take the time to understand or reflect on what their actual writing process entails.
It seems like you are have a head start because your mother is an English Teacher, and you learned how to understand how you write. The fact that you have a writing process that works well for you. The capacity to reflect on your process and how it might not work for anyone means you already have a very deep understanding of the pedological processes that need to take place in order to learn how to write.
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