Teaching – Donya and I
Teaching is difficult. Teaching is especially difficult when done in block 4 on a Friday afternoon, but regardless, I think some of what Donya and I set out to do was accomplished. I say some because time constraints did not allow us to do everything we had wanted to do. What we did have time to do, however, went quite well.
We went into the class with the plan of beginning with a discussion on what people had found ‘good writing’ to be. I had a a few specific terms I wanted to stress, namely syntax and cadence, or flow. I managed to talk about the latter, though only as an addition to what Mr.Jackson said about the subject, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to say what I had planned about syntax because we ran out of time. Fortunately, the subject had been touched on during the discussion, though not to the extent that we would have liked. We developed exercises to further focus on these topics, but again, time constraints prevented us from actually doing the exercises.
We had planned to give out poorly written paragraphs and ask people to rewrite them. The mistakes in the paragraphs were largely not grammatical; there were no spelling errors and run-on sentences. It was more a matter of simply sounding wrong. The flow was off, the sentence structure didn’t work, the ideas weren’t unified – all the problems were of the sort that were easy to find but difficult to fix. It is these types of problems that plague most writing in our class(in my opinion), and so it was what I had wanted to try to address the most. You can have the most interesting content in the world, but if you can’t write a paragraph that flows, where all the parts connect and the words just work, then your writing will undoubtedly fail.
But it isn’t necessarily lack of ability that people’s writing doesn’t work. Oftentimes, people simply don’t put the effort in when they write something to be put on their blog. They do a half-hearted job, not doing the work to make their writing a good as it can be. That was the second thing Donya and I wanted to stress – that writing something and posting it to your blog is like presenting your work to your teacher, your peers, your parents, and the whole world at the same time, while still saving it to be looked at for years to come. General opinion towards blogging, I think, lies along the irrelevant line – despite it being essentially published writing, people view it more as something silly and pointless. Donya and I wanted to try to change that, to make people realize that blogging isn’t just an easy way to submit homework assignments, not just something that makes writing for English class seem more informal, but that it is a serious collection of your writing that the whole world can see. We barely had time to touch on the subject at all, but hopefully people will begin to understand this more – and I think all the This I Believe essays were as amazing as they were because people truly were dedicated to their writing – which just goes to show what caring about your work can do.
The actual twenty minutes or so of class time we had for the discussion wasn’t enough to get done all the things we had planned, but what was discussed gave valuable insight on good writing. The people who contributed to the discussion made good points and I think cut to the core of what makes good writing seem good, and I would hope that those who didn’t contribute were at least listening and taking note. Becoming a good writer is not something that can happen in a single class, nor a week nor a year. It takes a long time of trying to be the best writer you can be to become that, and I hope that we made people start trying a little harder to get there.
