Before reading “Writing in the Work World” I was expecting that my biggest challenge as a writing teacher to have been things like teaching my students to use effective grammar skills. I had concerns about teaching students to write at a college level but hadn’t considered how best to tackle teaching students all the various ways they may need to utilize their writing skills. Not only is this going to be one of my biggest challenges as an educator, but I also think it doubles as a large concern. The fact that I had never considered this before is of great concern to me, if I’m being honest. The real issue is with evaluation and standardization. To evaluate a student’s proficiency in writing, they force students to obsess over form and ignore content. The form that is taught obsessively is the form required on nothing other than state exams, therefore it is only useful in that one situation. Life goes well beyond state led standardized tests, but teachers are not afforded the luxury of time in order to teach anything beyond the bare minimum state requirement.
As a writing teacher, you must be knowledgeable in various forms of writing and able to guide students in learning the differences within them. It’s vital that a writing teacher be versatile in their knowledge and able to adapt to the changing standards of various writing forms. Teachers of all kinds should have open minds and be honest with their students. As essential as it is that a teacher be able to answer a student’s question, it is arguably more important for that same teacher to admit when they don’t know an answer. Humility is much more important that misinformation. A technique that I found intriguing, but also effective is to show students various forms of writing in order to show them that the type of writing they do in class is vastly different from some of the things they will need to write in their adult and professional lives. This technique, I think, would be most effective if done “show and tell” style where they bring things in from their parent’s lives as a way to connect their personal lives to the lesson being taught.
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2 replies on “Writing in the Work World”
Hi! What you wrote really spoke to me. I was also worrying about the small things and making sure I did them the right way in the classroom. But, as we have seen, it really isn’t about that. Students will learn the forms and grammar everywhere. Not that this isn’t important, it definitely is. But, we need to make sure we are teaching them things outside of the standard curriculum as well. We can’t just teach them how to organize an essay, but how to make it have meaningful content. The same goes for different styles of writing, namely professional writing. The students already know the standard 5-paragraph essay, we have to be responsible for showing them the vast amounts of writing that they will encounter in their personal and professional lives. We are doing students a disservice by not exposing them to writing across different fields and careers.
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You bring up so many good points here. I specifically was hit when you said it was concerning how little you’d considered how to teach writers to use their skills into their professions because I felt the same way. It’s honestly not something you think about in High School, and sometimes I feel like we only think about how we use our writing because we are English majors. Not every student is an English major, but teaching them all how to be effective writers is very important!
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