Quote:
Originally Posted by UGAalum94
I think it's really hard to teach writing if the teacher is carrying a large total student load simply because of the time it takes to assess each piece.
If you only have a few kids, you can assign more, grade more, and the students get more opportunities to improve the skill.
ETA: I also think that if every kid in the class is a pretty good writer, so you don't have to devote time to instruction about errors, you can work on writing that is actually good as opposed to writing that's just free from horrible errors or passages of gibberish. What do you think, SWTXBelle?
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Yep, you are on to something here. To see that there is a severe problem with many college students and their preparation for college English classes, you need only look at the number of remedial and freshman English classes that are offered at colleges and universities. The resources being devoted to getting students "up to speed" is amazing, and has turned into a problem for many schools. You would think that as high school graduates who have had to pass certain tests and take certain classes they would be prepared, but you'd be wrong.
It's also worth noting that while all high schools seem to require 4 years of English, upper level math and science courses are usually optional. That does not, however, mean that simply passing 4 years of high school English means you are a good reader or writer. I always got a bit of a chuckle out of native Spanish speakers who took college Spanish thinking it would be an easy "A", not realizing that their native language was not the same as the textbook Spanish they would be studying. I'm sure you know native speakers of English who can't put together a grammatically correct sentence to save their life, or who have difficulty writing well.
As pointed out by other posters, in order to teach writing effectively you have to give the students a chance to write - and rewrite. To develop good literary analysis skills you have to have a chance to engage in discussion, and be given the opportunity to write critically. That's tough to do if you have too many students (which many of my public school counterparts do.) or if you are more worried about teaching the skills to pass some NCLB test - and I realize we are going a bit off topic, but it is interesting.