Kerri Koch
CEE 588- Methods I
Dispositions Essay
Professor Dunn
December 2, 2004
The scenario:
A pre-service teacher observing a ninth grade English class in a high needs district was startled by something that occurred in class. Prior to that day the students were put into groups of three or four and asked to write a short story. The story could be about anything and the only thing the teacher told them was that it had to be three to fives pages long and proofread carefully. They had just gotten done with their short story unit in which they learned the elements of short stories, and they were all very excited to be creative with their own stories. On this particular day of observing the pre-service teacher sat in the circle along with the teacher and all the students. The teacher with about ten minutes of class left began to hand back the graded stories. He called each individual group over to where he was sitting and preceded to tell them how many errors they had in their paper and why they got the grade they got. He had numbered and counted each error in the story and graded it based on that only. Only one group in the class passed. They got a 95, had only nine errors, and were pleased with their mark. The teacher had a rubric, but failed to allow students the opportunity to see it before handing in the assignment. The rubric: if they had done the assignment they got 10 points, creativity got 10 points, and the other 80 points came from the number of grammatical mistakes. With this system everyone in the class got at least a 20 for doing the assignment because they all had been creative and done the assignment.
This past semester my entire view of “grammar” and teaching writing has changed. As well, my tutoring style and personal writing has been affected by the many articles and books I have read about the writing process and “grammar.” The first thing I thought of after looking at this scenario was Schulster’s book Breaking the Rules, in which he talks about “mythrules.” Keeping this and many other texts in mind I am able to come to many conclusions about this scenario.
First and foremost, the assignment was extremely vague in what it was asking the students to do. Although I am an advocate for creative writing, this assignment was not creative writing. It seems that the students thought the assignment was about creativity, but for the teacher the assignment was about proofreading. The teacher seemed to be promoting enthusiasm and creativity, but in his mind he was looking for a well edited paper. Not only was he being ineffective in his teaching of writing, he was also discouraging students from writing creatively in the future. If students get one bad grade, they become deterred to do the same type of creative writing in the future. And let’s face it- there is a place for creative writing and enthusiasm in the classroom. These students may never again be able to be enthusiastic about a writing assignment for fear of the red pen infiltrating their pages. Therefore, my solution to this would be to make the assignment either about creativity or about editing but not both.
The teacher’s next mistake was not telling the students upfront that he was going to be grading 80% of the paper on the number of “grammatical” mistakes. The teacher should have given the students his rubric before they began writing the assignment. The teacher misled them into believing that this assignment was going to be both fun and creative. I believe that students deserve the respect of knowing how something will be graded and what exactly the teacher is looking for. The teacher chose the wrong form of assessment. The teacher was looking for something very particular, but allowed the students to believe that s/he was looking for creative short stories. Every student in the class did the assignment as s/he asked. They at least all should have passed. I agree that it is very hard to assess creativity, but if you are going to give an assignment that specifically asked your students to be creative they should be graded for the most part on the amount of creativity they give. A solution to this aspect of the scenario is that the teacher should hand out a typed assignment sheet that includes the rubric that would be used to grade the stories.
The teacher did not take into consideration the students’ ideas. I am by no means saying that he should not have corrected the “grammar” mistakes in the papers, but that the focus of creative writing lies within the original ideas the students came up with and how they executed those ideas into the written word. The scenario says that the students were excited about the assignment. One can only imagine what they came up with to write about considering that most students are not excited about homework, specifically writing papers. This speaks to the vagueness of the assignment. The solution would again be to change the assignment. For me “good” creative writing involves “good” ideas. So, if I were to give a creative writing assignment I would encourage creativity and ideas.
Last but certainly not least, I think the teacher needs to be taught about effective group work skills. The teacher used this assignment as a way to have students collaborate, but s/he did not take into account that a group of three to four students will have three to four different creative ideas on how to write the story and what it should be about. In my mind, creative writing can only happen with one creator. As well, if the teacher wanted to do constructive group work s/he could have had the students work in groups to proofread each other’s stories. S/he could have taught them strategies for proofreading, and they could have used those techniques to proofread. In my experience as a writing tutor, the more people that look at one paper the better. Everyone has different ideas of what is “correct” when it comes to “grammar.” A group of students could learn both the “mythrules” of grammar, as Schulster puts it, and the concrete rules found in handbooks. This activity would be a good way to get students talking about rules and who gets to decide which rules to follow. If I have learned one thing, it is that everyone has a different opinion about “grammar,” and this teacher took the authoritative role of being the only one who is right about the errors in the stories. I would suggest having the teacher read the Dear Abby article about grammar, in which she discusses good grammar and talks about her grammatical pet peeves. S/he must know that the war on grammar is going on in the English community, and it is quite disheartening to think that s/he does not consider this something worth sharing with his students. I would use the article and excerpts from Schulster’s book to bring students into the controversy surrounding grammar and it’s rules.
Not only did he give his students what I would consider unfair grades, he also humiliated them in front of their classmates. I would never talk about students’ grades in the company of other students. On this fateful day the teacher acted extremely inappropriately in that he did not consider the students’ feelings. We, as teachers, need to be aware of students’ feelings and classroom atmosphere. We need to make our students feel safe and comfortable in our classrooms.