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Sorry if someone already posted this article (and I didn't see it), but I suspect it might be of interest to many on these forums. I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts:

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/education/edlife/writing-education-grammar-students-children.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

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Articles like that are why I completely ignore what goes on inside of public school systems.  Ideology becomes more powerful than common sense.  It absolutely does not have to be an either/or issue for grammar vs. no grammar or voice and free-writing vs. academic writing.  It is certainly possible to teach proper grammar, not destroy  student voice, and encourage academic writing all with positive teaching strategies.  

 

And obviously those paragraphs that they insist on being produced in K have been the solution to all writing woes.   :smilielol5:

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Mrs. Sokolowski is right that formal grammar instruction, like identifying parts of speech, doesnĂ¢â‚¬â„¢t work well. In fact, research finds that students exposed to a glut of such instruction perform worse on writing assessments.

I want to see this research. I'm doubtful.  I'm currently concurrently using R&S English (for grammar) and WWS1. R&S has helped my dc so much with the mechanics of writing. My dc now can find incomplete sentences, run-on sentences, subject-verb disagreement, etc. on his own. The intuitive stuff totally failed me. I have felt so stunted in my writing skills by simply not knowing the rules well. I still doubt myself. As I go through R&S with my dc I find that I'm growing more confident and I can let free expression take it's place. To me you need some time learning how the art works before you can create art. A comparable situation would be like giving a child a room full of gorgeous fine carpentry projects, some carpentry tools and then expect them to roll out some masterpieces because the room was full of inspiring projects. With anything we need to start with how to use the tools thoroughly and then the masterpieces can be built. Maybe a case could be built for this if all your writing instruction centered around grammar but I'm seriously doubtful that thorough, rigourous grammar instruction itself stunts writing.

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I want to see this research. I'm doubtful.  I'm currently concurrently using R&S English (for grammar) and WWS1. R&S has helped my dc so much with the mechanics of writing. My dc now can find incomplete sentences, run-on sentences, subject-verb disagreement, etc. on his own. The intuitive stuff totally failed me. I have felt so stunted in my writing skills by simply not knowing the rules well. I still doubt myself. As I go through R&S with my dc I find that I'm growing more confident and I can let free expression take it's place. To me you need some time learning how the art works before you can create art. A comparable situation would be like giving a child a room full of gorgeous fine carpentry projects, some carpentry tools and then expect them to roll out some masterpieces because the room was full of inspiring projects. With anything we need to start with how to use the tools thoroughly and then the masterpieces can be built. Maybe a case could be built for this if all your writing instruction centered around grammar but I'm seriously doubtful that thorough, rigourous grammar instruction itself stunts writing.

 

I've seen that cited several times over, actually. I'll see if I can find a link to a cited example. It honestly makes a great deal of sense to me. If you spend a large chunk of your writing class time to teach grammar in a vacuum without focusing on application (which is often how it's done in schools), then of course it's mostly wasted time when it comes to student generated writing.

 

But this is why an article like this is so annoying - it's like 8fillstheheart said above - it's not an either/or choice. You can teach grammar and teach voice.

 

I found the disdain that the Common Core enthusiast teacher had for writing about students' lives to be absurd. But it's just as absurd as a teacher who insists that writing about one's life is the only path to writing. Of course students should also be writing about what they learn about in other subjects. And, I might add, that's hardly a new Common Core concept. Writing across the curriculum has been a "thing" for decades. 

 

But this article isn't for me. It's for people who don't know anything about writing instruction or education policy, who want their information simplified into black and white.

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My Google-fu is failing me, but I'll add that I think the way some grammar instruction is carried about is the equivalent of art appreciation for writing. Just because you can identify and analyze the elements of a beautiful painting (and a poorly done one) does not mean you can also paint a beautiful painting. I think some grammar programs (and certainly doing grammar in a vacuum would nearly always be an example of this) basically do this with well-crafted sentences by training students to identify all of the sentence's parts without helping them understand the next step, which would obviously be how to use those puzzle pieces themselves. Of course, some students may intuitively learn to analyze their own writing and apply those skills. However, I don't think that's a sure thing.

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The other issue I see with the argument is using tests like the ACT essay as a way to judge all student writing.  Writing an essay on an inane prompt in X mins is not necessarily an accurate assessment of student ability.  Some kids process things more slowly and timed essays reflect their processing speed more than their writing ability. 

Edited by 8FillTheHeart
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My Google-fu is failing me, but I'll add that I think the way some grammar instruction is carried about is the equivalent of art appreciation for writing. Just because you can identify and analyze the elements of a beautiful painting (and a poorly done one) does not mean you can also paint a beautiful painting. I think some grammar programs (and certainly doing grammar in a vacuum would nearly always be an example of this) basically do this with well-crafted sentences by training students to identify all of the sentence's parts without helping them understand the next step, which would obviously be how to use those puzzle pieces themselves. Of course, some students may intuitively learn to analyze their own writing and apply those skills. However, I don't think that's a sure thing.

I agree. The same goes for the argument that students don't need to be taught how to write if they are just exposed to good writing. Not true for all kids. Some kids need explicit "how to write a sentence/paragraph/multiple paragraphs" instruction or their writing flails all over the place.

Edited by 8FillTheHeart
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The main problem with public school writing instruction is extreme acceleration of expectations for length and complexity. The five paragraph argumentative essay is expected in fourth grade. And then they spend eight or nine years struggling with it because there was never a chance to develop sentence and paragraph skills.

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The main problem with public school writing instruction is extreme acceleration of expectations for length and complexity. The five paragraph argumentative essay is expected in fourth grade. And then they spend eight or nine years struggling with it because there was never a chance to develop sentence and paragraph skills.

 

Right. And this article almost identifies the problem... but then never addresses it. Instead, they mention kindergarteners writing paragraphs in an offhand manner and never form any sort of critique. I'm all for whole to parts in writing, but in the end, these teachers aren't questioning the fundamentals of the whole "just dive in and write whole paragraphs/essays asap" approach. And they're essentially remediating because they're all working with 6-12 students from what I could tell. It's all backwards. Get them writing essays and then teach them how to make sentences?  :banghead:  But - and this was never addressed, but I'm sure it's a factor - you have to keep up with the Joneses. If they take away the goal of kindergarteners writing paragraphs, then they've lowered standards. Can't have that.  :glare:

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I agree with others that this article did not focus enough on what is happening with the younger grades, where there is too much focus on the writer's process (which adults struggle with!) and too little emphasis on listening and speaking, on noticing and also being trained (verbally) to tell a good story. These are all harder to do when you're a single teacher in a big classroom than to say, "Write what you did this weekend, and then check it against our writing rubric." Learning grammar isn't soul-destroying, but being handed a Revision Checklist when you're a third grader who was proud of your paragraph about polar bears might just be headed in that direction.

 

(Also, as someone with a preoccupation with math education, I couldn't help but notice that this article cited teachers' general discomfort as writers themselves as being part of the problem, which sounded mighty familiar. It reminded me of writer Nicholson Baker, who wrote about his experiences as a substitute and was himself-- if I'm remembering correctly-- puzzled and intimidated by the Writing Rubric posted in each classroom he visited. In any case, you certainly can't fix the writing problems of the older generations by imposing more upon and expecting more of the youngest of children.)

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I'm thankful I'm a homeschooler. Kindergarteners having to write paragraphs is absurd. And makes me want to be sure to keep my caboose boy home through about third grade, even if he does go onto school eventually. I don't know how you teach children how to write a correct sentence withou grammar. How do you explain why the sentence is incomplete? What do you call nouns, verbs, interjections, conjunctions? Thingys? There's also an important part of writing that it's not PC to talk about because it comes from the home: if people speak to you a lot, using correct grammar and complete sentences, you will find it much easier to learn to write correctly than if you don't.

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I always wonder what is meant by "teaching grammar". It is probably like phonics, where there is a wide spectrum of what is actually taught. I have seen public school grammar books, and they are not as thorough or well done as Rod and Staff or Analytical Grammar.

 

Also, when this explicit grammar is taught in these studies, what writing instruction is then used? Maybe the problem is with the writing instruction rather than the grammar. Grammar is necessary for understanding what is wrong with one's sentences. It doesn't make someone better able to make an argument or be more creative, but it can help a writer be more clear.

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I will agree that some teachers don't really know what to do with the new requirements.  My kids were required to write sentences and paragraphs in 1st grade, did a research paper in 2nd, and since then haven't done so much as a multi-paragraph essay (they are done with 5th grade in b&m).  They do grammar worksheets for school, yet they continue to make the same mistakes year after year in their writing.  I keep wondering when it's all going to come together.

 

When I was a kid, I was best in class in English, so it's hard to say what "worked" for me.  I might just have been wired for it.  But I can say the workbook approach - filling in the lines, circling the words - didn't hurt me any.  I actually loved it.  Call me weird.  :P  I also loved composition and writing poetry.  I agree it's not either-or.  I think having a good handle on the rules gives a kid confidence to write freely.

 

I also feel that writing is difficult to teach, for those who don't learn it naturally.  Or maybe it's just time-consuming, and time is at a premium in school these days.

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Thank you for sharing this article; it has reinvigorated my love for homeschool as I get to work today on all my planning! (As I read the article, all I could think about was how narrow everyone's focus was--so many of the educators in the article seemed to place so much emphasis on insignificant bits and pieces that just don't add up to much.)

 

I used to teach English in a public high school before I had kids. I tried so very hard to make class fun and informative and engaging and like a great big writer's workshop, but even the best classroom simply does not--cannot--compare to an entire childhood lived in what Julie Bogart refers to as the "Big Language Arts River":  kids who read books on blankets in the summer sunshine, who giggle over poetry teas, who write in diaries and in homemade notebooks, who write in pencil and paint and gel pens, who watch great movies and go on nature walks and listen to audiobooks at breakfast and lunch, who listen to a parent's read-aloud at bedtime. That sort of richness simply cannot be replicated in a classroom setting. (Now, parents whose kids happen to attend school full-time can absolutely still create this sort of environment and culture in their homes! I could always immediately tell which of the kids in my classroom came from book-filled, loving homes; their work was lovely. But kids who ONLY get this stuff from school, who do not live in homes with books or engaged parents...it's just heartbreaking as far as their language arts educations go, and it's really hard to overcome as a teacher. Two semesters of eleventh grade English instruction can absolutely yield improvement, but it can't, in that time frame, completely make up for a childhood starved of books and language.)

 

Anyway, I'm rambling, but thank you for sharing that article. It helped me check my gratitude and remember that homeschooling is seriously the greatest privilege of my entire life. We homeschooling mothers are so lucky to get to choose to do this with our kids. 

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Right. And this article almost identifies the problem... but then never addresses it. Instead, they mention kindergarteners writing paragraphs in an offhand manner and never form any sort of critique. I'm all for whole to parts in writing, but in the end, these teachers aren't questioning the fundamentals of the whole "just dive in and write whole paragraphs/essays asap" approach. And they're essentially remediating because they're all working with 6-12 students from what I could tell. It's all backwards. Get them writing essays and then teach them how to make sentences?  :banghead:  But - and this was never addressed, but I'm sure it's a factor - you have to keep up with the Joneses. If they take away the goal of kindergarteners writing paragraphs, then they've lowered standards. Can't have that.  :glare:

 

What I'd really like to know is where these standards came from. I have a pretty good grasp of the history of math curriculum but this is much more obscure to me. What change took place in the twenty-five years since I was in school that five paragraph argumentative essays, which I remember from 11th grade AP English, got pushed all the way down to fourth grade? Who made this decision and what was the rationale?

 

Edited by winterbaby
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Author did not research. States students still arrive at college needing instruction in writing. Nclb began in 2002, and featured developing reading comorehension rather than writing skills. common Core began four to six years ago, depending on how fast the district was in bringing the program in. The students who had nclb no instruction weren't able to be remediated in high school, so of course they are still arriving at college with poor writing skills. The students who had successful writing instruction via common core or via an nclb honors program don't have issues.

 

Author is ignoring that NY Public Schools teach grammar in FL class, and also ignores the ENL status of many pupils.

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Thank you for sharing this article; it has reinvigorated my love for homeschool as I get to work today on all my planning! (As I read the article, all I could think about was how narrow everyone's focus was--so many of the educators in the article seemed to place so much emphasis on insignificant bits and pieces that just don't add up to much.)

 

I used to teach English in a public high school before I had kids. I tried so very hard to make class fun and informative and engaging and like a great big writer's workshop, but even the best classroom simply does not--cannot--compare to an entire childhood lived in what Julie Bogart refers to as the "Big Language Arts River": kids who read books on blankets in the summer sunshine, who giggle over poetry teas, who write in diaries and in homemade notebooks, who write in pencil and paint and gel pens, who watch great movies and go on nature walks and listen to audiobooks at breakfast and lunch, who listen to a parent's read-aloud at bedtime. That sort of richness simply cannot be replicated in a classroom setting. (Now, parents whose kids happen to attend school full-time can absolutely still create this sort of environment and culture in their homes! I could always immediately tell which of the kids in my classroom came from book-filled, loving homes; their work was lovely. But kids who ONLY get this stuff from school, who do not live in homes with books or engaged parents...it's just heartbreaking as far as their language arts educations go, and it's really hard to overcome as a teacher. Two semesters of eleventh grade English instruction can absolutely yield improvement, but it can't, in that time frame, completely make up for a childhood starved of books and language.)

 

Anyway, I'm rambling, but thank you for sharing that article. It helped me check my gratitude and remember that homeschooling is seriously the greatest privilege of my entire life. We homeschooling mothers are so lucky to get to choose to do this with our kids.

This was my reaction exactly. I actually heaved a big sigh of gratitude as I was reflecting on how lucky I am. My older girls went to PS for high school and I've heard over and over how much a difference their rich, book-filled childhood has made in their level of comfort with words, both spoken and written. A wonderful AP Lit teacher said of my oldest that no other student in her class had so much context, such a big vocabulary, or was capable of making connections like she did. She said she wished there was some way to 'game the system' for the kids who have only ever read/written what was assigned in the classroom.
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https://www.simplyconvivial.com/2016/teach-writing-without-curriculum

 

Since we are talking about writing I thought I would add this link that I stumbled across. I found it to be helpful and encouraging.

 

The NY times article never really came to any conclusion. They dipped their toe in the water of being on the right track but quickly detoured. I do know that what they are doing is not panning out well. My niece stayed for 2 weeks (she is going into 5th grade) and she had the hardest times doing madlibs with us one evening becasue she didn't even know what a noun, verb or adjective was. That just floored me.

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I didn't know what a noun, verb or adjective was until I started to homeschool my kids.

 

Now that I have done grammar up to about a middle school level, my writing is immensely better. I can even edit some of my friend's articles - and know what I'm doing. Knowing my grammar helps me to see what is happening in my students' writing and pinpoint how to improve - and I suspect that is one difficulty now too (at least here) many teachers don't know their grammar, my peers who became LA teachers are the ones who intuitively got it...

 

Reading the article made me so thankful for homeschooling too, and for SWB! Her materials more than anything helped me to clarify in my mind how the learning to write well process happens. And 8fill's posts! I printed some out...

 

I never ever had anything close to that sort of instruction at school. I distinctly remember my mum helping me write my first essay, and it was all guess work. I would narrow down what I was supposed to do from the comments on my last essay until I got a good mark - then I used the good mark essay as a template. Then, I get to university and they expected something very different and of a much higher standard - I was top of my class but I was woefully underprepared.

 

Dh and I were just talking about this the other day. Dd wrote a paragraph from an assignment in WWS. It was excellent (much better than I expected from her moaning about it lol), I read it to dh and he was blown away - writing well isn't intuitive to him. So we discussed how incredible it was that explicit instruction and age appropriate practice could produce great writing! And not just a fluke paragraph, she knows why it works and how to put it together - it's not guess work or fluffy 'write what you feel'

 

Eta- and I absolutely believe that the explicit grammar instruction makes a difference in her writing. Along with exposure to beautiful writing - reading quality literature just wasn't done. All the lowest common denominator books in high school LA only sent the message that classics are too hard and we can only handle 200 pages. I had to take specific literature classes in 11th grade to read any Shakespeare. I sat in my university literature lecture - a top of my highschool lit/LA classes student - and didn't know who Dante or Milton or even fricking Homer was - and I wasn't the only one. Our lecturer even went on a giant rant about 'what are those schools even teaching?!'

 

The first time I read WTM, I was angry. I felt cheated. Reading this article and hearing these teachers argue about nonsense makes me angry all over again.

Edited by LMD
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. Our lecturer even went on a giant rant about 'what are those schools even teaching?!'

I can't even imagine what Lewis's quote,

Ă¢â‚¬Å“Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools?" would actually say today.   Or what additional commentary Abolition of Man would contain.
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Kids can't write - and let's be accurate here, some can! So, some kids (maybe even many kids) can't write for a number of reasons.

 

1. developmentally inappropriate expectations.

2. need for direct, explicit teaching instead of constructivist style teaching.

 

In my tutoring gig I see so many kids (mostly boys) who are crying out for explicit teaching of the writing process. They can't be guided to discover their writing voice, because they cannot put sentences together. One needs to be able to put a sentence together before finding one's voice.

 

I actually get really angry. These boys have been in school for a minimum of five years, sometimes up to eight, and nobody has ever sat down with them and said "You have been poorly taught. No, you are not stupid. No, you are not bad at writing. You have had insufficient and poorly targeted instruction, and we are going to remedy that."

 

The expectation that writing comes naturally, very early, and needs little to no scaffolding is one problem. Part of my gig is educating parents that scaffolding is not failure. I don't know what students learn in teaching degrees, but they seem to forget about Vygotsky, if indeed they ever studied his zones of proximal development.

 

Having raised and educated two natural writers, who needed minimal instruction and were writing copiously from an early age, it has been an education to find that my sample of two is not representative.

I am visiting my friend today, an excellent high school English teacher (now homeschooler!)

I am going to ask her if she knows who Vygotsky is. She says often that talking homeschooling with me is way better than any professional development courses she had as a teacher...

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Kids can't write - and let's be accurate here, some can! So, some kids (maybe even many kids) can't write for a number of reasons.

 

1. developmentally inappropriate expectations. 

2. need for direct, explicit teaching instead of constructivist style teaching. 

 

In my tutoring gig I see so many kids (mostly boys) who are crying out for explicit teaching of the writing process. They can't be guided to discover their writing voice, because they cannot put sentences together. One needs to be able to put a sentence together before finding one's voice. 

 

I actually get really angry. These boys have been in school for a minimum of five years, sometimes up to eight, and nobody has ever sat down with them and said "You have been poorly taught. No, you are not stupid. No, you are not bad at writing. You have had insufficient and poorly targeted instruction, and we are going to remedy that."

 

The expectation that writing comes naturally, very early, and needs little to no scaffolding is one problem. Part of my gig is educating parents that scaffolding is not failure. I don't know what students learn in teaching degrees, but they seem to forget about Vygotsky, if indeed they ever studied his zones of proximal development. 

 

Having raised and educated two natural writers, who needed minimal instruction and were writing copiously from an early age, it has been an education to find that my sample of two is not representative.

 

My boys were exposed to TONS of literature. They listened to lots of read aloud, every day for their whole lives. All the right things some people say to do to raise a writer. They both turned into people who love books, literature.... but it didn't turn them into writers.

 

I found that neither of them had natural voices. I must say that IEW with Andrew P. Did wonders for them. Now Eldest has a good natural voice in his writing and Youngest is getting close to having one.

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(Also, as someone with a preoccupation with math education, I couldn't help but notice that this article cited teachers' general discomfort as writers themselves as being part of the problem, which sounded mighty familiar. It reminded me of writer Nicholson Baker, who wrote about his experiences as a substitute and was himself-- if I'm remembering correctly-- puzzled and intimidated by the Writing Rubric posted in each classroom he visited. In any case, you certainly can't fix the writing problems of the older generations by imposing more upon and expecting more of the youngest of children.)

 

I also noticed this and thought of how often this is cited in math education.

 

Is there any subject that elementary teachers are comfortable teaching?  

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I took issue with the disdain teachers have for diagramming sentences.

 

I love diagramming sentences.  

 

I love how the modifiers dangle off the words their modify, as if you could easily "unhook" one and  replace it with another, or simply remove it entirely.  I loved that questions and their corresponding sentences "Did you go to the market?" "I did go to the market" are diagrammed the same way leading to a bit of mind-blowing ambiguity.  I imagined entire books written with sentences in their diagrammed form, and how challenging it might be to read it aloud.  

 

Does anyone know who came up with sentence diagramming?  

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I took issue with the disdain teachers have for diagramming sentences.

 

I love diagramming sentences.  

 

I love how the modifiers dangle off the words their modify, as if you could easily "unhook" one and  replace it with another, or simply remove it entirely.  I loved that questions and their corresponding sentences "Did you go to the market?" "I did go to the market" are diagrammed the same way leading to a bit of mind-blowing ambiguity.  I imagined entire books written with sentences in their diagrammed form, and how challenging it might be to read it aloud.  

 

Does anyone know who came up with sentence diagramming?  

 

Stephen Watkins Clark - though his method, like the Reed-Kellogg method you learned in school, is now depreciated. There are more advanced ways of diagramming out there, but somehow, they don't make it into the schoolbooks for children.

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Kids can't write - and let's be accurate here, some can! So, some kids (maybe even many kids) can't write for a number of reasons.

 

1. developmentally inappropriate expectations. 

2. need for direct, explicit teaching instead of constructivist style teaching. 

 

In my tutoring gig I see so many kids (mostly boys) who are crying out for explicit teaching of the writing process. They can't be guided to discover their writing voice, because they cannot put sentences together. One needs to be able to put a sentence together before finding one's voice. 

 

I actually get really angry. These boys have been in school for a minimum of five years, sometimes up to eight, and nobody has ever sat down with them and said "You have been poorly taught. No, you are not stupid. No, you are not bad at writing. You have had insufficient and poorly targeted instruction, and we are going to remedy that."

 

The expectation that writing comes naturally, very early, and needs little to no scaffolding is one problem. Part of my gig is educating parents that scaffolding is not failure. I don't know what students learn in teaching degrees, but they seem to forget about Vygotsky, if indeed they ever studied his zones of proximal development. 

 

Having raised and educated two natural writers, who needed minimal instruction and were writing copiously from an early age, it has been an education to find that my sample of two is not representative. 

 

I wonder if the fact that most elementary school teachers are women might be a factor in how this has been approached?

 

 

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I wonder if the fact that most elementary school teachers are women might be a factor in how this has been approached?

 

[/quote)

 

I doubt it. Men teaching in schools are using the same constructivist approaches as their female peers.

 

The one male English teacher I had was also the most into having us write about our feelings... It would have been annoying enough, but this was for AP English. (This wasn't my least favorite English teacher, though. I had one or two really bad ones...)

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Oh, I would never make anyone write about their feelings! How awful. Many kids don't want to be that vulnerable in their writing, and who can blame them ?

 

This was 12th grade, so by this point, we'd had a good 4 to 6 years of being asked to write about our feelings, if not more. It was a pretty normal part of English classes, and I loved the rare times I was supposed to write something serious and dry.  In this particular English class, the worst was the assignment to write about someone who really affected you, and I took it seriously and wrote about something that included details that made it clear it was about me, so when we "anonymously" read them aloud and critiqued them, it was pretty bad when the teacher let people say it didn't seem very moving. (I mean, it's kind of bad to turn English class into some kind of therapy session, but invalidating someone's feelings?) I picked my college so that the most I had to touch on emotion in writing was discussing music history.

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Writing about feelings made me think of my uncle.

 

He is a math teacher. One assignment he gave his students was to write about a problem they had, and how they solved it. He told. E about some of the kids assignments, and they sounded like stuff best left to therapy.

 

This was for Math!

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I wonder if the fact that most elementary school teachers are women might be a factor in how this has been approached?

 

[/quote)

 

I doubt it. Men teaching in schools are using the same constructivist approaches as their female peers.

 

Do individual teachers get to choose, though?

 

My thinking was that since many girls are much more proficient at LA, earlier, and less often seem to need very explicit instruction, compared to boys, the approaches they have favoured to teaching writing may reflect their own experiences.  I suppose I'm assuming the curriculum developers for elementary writing also tend to be women - I'm not sure if that is actually true though.

 

I wonder if those kinds of boys become elementary school teachers?

 

Would a elementary school teacher who was a late developing boy be inclined to favour that approach?

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I want to see this research. I'm doubtful.  I'm currently concurrently using R&S English (for grammar) and WWS1. R&S has helped my dc so much with the mechanics of writing. My dc now can find incomplete sentences, run-on sentences, subject-verb disagreement, etc. on his own. The intuitive stuff totally failed me. I have felt so stunted in my writing skills by simply not knowing the rules well. I still doubt myself. As I go through R&S with my dc I find that I'm growing more confident and I can let free expression take it's place. To me you need some time learning how the art works before you can create art. A comparable situation would be like giving a child a room full of gorgeous fine carpentry projects, some carpentry tools and then expect them to roll out some masterpieces because the room was full of inspiring projects. With anything we need to start with how to use the tools thoroughly and then the masterpieces can be built. Maybe a case could be built for this if all your writing instruction centered around grammar but I'm seriously doubtful that thorough, rigourous grammar instruction itself stunts writing

 

We encountered some of this research in my English for Secondary Education class in college (it was a class to teach teachers how to teach junior high and high school, not elementary, English).   One of the studies I remembered was on an elective class students took JUST on improving grammar.   Their writing actually got worse throughout the year in comparison to students who started at similar levels and who had not taken the class.  The reason is that they were not taking risks.  They were focusing so much on correct grammar that their writing was filled with short, choppy, "safe" sentences, while students who didn't take the class were experimenting more and creating more complex, mature sentences.  But it wasn't a comparison with students who had never received any grammar instruction.    It wasn't that "no grammar instruction" was better than "some grammar instruction" but that too much emphasis on grammar was counterproductive. 

 

These students weren't remedial students.  They had chosen the class because they wanted to improve their writing.  I forgot if they were high school or junior high students.

 

One writing/grammar instruction technique that was proven, in another study, to help students was combining sentences (taking short sentences and sentence fragments and combining them into longer sentences).  It helped students to learn how to create well formed, longer, complex sentences.  Students were taught proper use of punctuation such as commas, dashes, ellipsis, colons and semi-colons along with the sentence combining.  There was also some instruction on what makes a complete sentence vs. a sentence fragment.

 

Why I remember that particularly is the Professor demonstrated the method on us in class...and it was the first time I really understood how to use a colon & semi-colon.  

 

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"According to Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a scan of course syllabuses from 2,400 teacher preparation programs turned up little evidence that the teaching of writing was being covered in a widespread or systematic way."

 

I can vouch for this part of the article (and I received my teacher education before Common Core)...  I felt the actual instruction on how to teach secondary English was very poor.  I had a total of ONE class on teaching writing (and it covered both writing and literature instruction, so a large portion of the class was not about writing).  While I learned some excellent things in it,  it was no where near enough.     I felt very unprepared when I entered the classroom, and it's part of why I'm no longer a classroom teacher.

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I agree with others that this article did not focus enough on what is happening with the younger grades, where there is too much focus on the writer's process (which adults struggle with!) and too little emphasis on listening and speaking, on noticing and also being trained (verbally) to tell a good story. These are all harder to do when you're a single teacher in a big classroom than to say, "Write what you did this weekend, and then check it against our writing rubric." Learning grammar isn't soul-destroying, but being handed a Revision Checklist when you're a third grader who was proud of your paragraph about polar bears might just be headed in that direction.

 

(Also, as someone with a preoccupation with math education, I couldn't help but notice that this article cited teachers' general discomfort as writers themselves as being part of the problem, which sounded mighty familiar. It reminded me of writer Nicholson Baker, who wrote about his experiences as a substitute and was himself-- if I'm remembering correctly-- puzzled and intimidated by the Writing Rubric posted in each classroom he visited. In any case, you certainly can't fix the writing problems of the older generations by imposing more upon and expecting more of the youngest of children.)

 

I'm actually a big fan of the writing rubric....not as a self-grading technique but as a more meaningful form of feedback than a letter grade.  I'm not sure if it's as appropriate for younger grades (especially for little kids who may have trouble reading it), but when I first got a grade by rubric in high school I LOVED it because it told me so much more than a letter.   It helped me understand why I had gotten the grade and what I could improve.  And, as an educator, writing a rubric for an assignment helped me to better articulate what I expected and to grade with more fairness and consistency.  Plus, it was a CONSIDERABLE time saver.   Writing basically the same detailed advice to the 50 of your 180 students who had the nearly exact same problem with their writing takes FOREVER.   Circling it on a rubric and just making a few smaller notes on their paper saves a ton of time.  And time is precious when you have 180 papers to grade.

 

Not that any of that matters in homeschool where you can take as much time as you want to read the one paper they wrote and then discuss it with them face to face.

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I was told, by my AP English teacher in high school, that diagramming sentences was never created to be a way to improve writing, but was originally used as an intellectual exercise to improve a student's reasoning skills. 

 

I took issue with the disdain teachers have for diagramming sentences.

 

I love diagramming sentences.  

 

I love how the modifiers dangle off the words their modify, as if you could easily "unhook" one and  replace it with another, or simply remove it entirely.  I loved that questions and their corresponding sentences "Did you go to the market?" "I did go to the market" are diagrammed the same way leading to a bit of mind-blowing ambiguity.  I imagined entire books written with sentences in their diagrammed form, and how challenging it might be to read it aloud.  

 

Does anyone know who came up with sentence diagramming?  

 

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"According to Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a scan of course syllabuses from 2,400 teacher preparation programs turned up little evidence that the teaching of writing was being covered in a widespread or systematic way."

 

I can vouch for this part of the article (and I received my teacher education before Common Core)...  I felt the actual instruction on how to teach secondary English was very poor.  I had a total of ONE class on teaching writing (and it covered both writing and literature instruction, so a large portion of the class was not about writing).  While I learned some excellent things in it,  it was no where near enough.     I felt very unprepared when I entered the classroom, and it's part of why I'm no longer a classroom teacher.

 

During my grad school stint, all native English speaking linguistics grad students had to teach freshman writing to earn our keep.  Mind you, my area was phonetics, and I did my undergrad at a school known for engineering. The instruction we got before we started teaching was basically "think about what you liked in your undergrad writing courses"... Um, I got a music history class to count for one part of the writing class, and the other part was strictly for finishing up a technical paper... (and my middle and high school writing instruction was basically writing a lot and hoping we'd get it...) Anyhow, this was at an Ivy League school.  To be fair, that was over ten years ago.  

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We encountered some of this research in my English for Secondary Education class in college (it was a class to teach teachers how to teach junior high and high school, not elementary, English).   One of the studies I remembered was on an elective class students took JUST on improving grammar.   Their writing actually got worse throughout the year in comparison to students who started at similar levels and who had not taken the class.  The reason is that they were not taking risks.  They were focusing so much on correct grammar that their writing was filled with short, choppy, "safe" sentences, while students who didn't take the class were experimenting more and creating more complex, mature sentences.  But it wasn't a comparison with students who had never received any grammar instruction.    It wasn't that "no grammar instruction" was better than "some grammar instruction" but that too much emphasis on grammar was counterproductive. 

 

These students weren't remedial students.  They had chosen the class because they wanted to improve their writing.  I forgot if they were high school or junior high students.

 

One writing/grammar instruction technique that was proven, in another study, to help students was combining sentences (taking short sentences and sentence fragments and combining them into longer sentences).  It helped students to learn how to create well formed, longer, complex sentences.  Students were taught proper use of punctuation such as commas, dashes, ellipsis, colons and semi-colons along with the sentence combining.  There was also some instruction on what makes a complete sentence vs. a sentence fragment.

 

Why I remember that particularly is the Professor demonstrated the method on us in class...and it was the first time I really understood how to use a colon & semi-colon.  

 

One thing I wonder s whether it is a baad thing, necessarily, if students are not immediately better writers after taking a grammar class.  I can see that having done so, they might be very safe and stiff in their writing for a while - when you are learning to use a tool, that is often the case.  It seems to me that leaving the question at that point doesn't say much though - where are they in a year's time?  After they, and the other students, have added other writing classes with a different focus?

 

I was told, by my AP English teacher in high school, that diagramming sentences was never created to be a way to improve writing, but was originally used as an intellectual exercise to improve a student's reasoning skills. 

 

 

I feel like it's pretty limited for improving writing.  

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One thing I wonder s whether it is a baad thing, necessarily, if students are not immediately better writers after taking a grammar class.  I can see that having done so, they might be very safe and stiff in their writing for a while - when you are learning to use a tool, that is often the case.  It seems to me that leaving the question at that point doesn't say much though - where are they in a year's time?  After they, and the other students, have added other writing classes with a different focus?

 

 

I can see your point, but I think the answer probably is "it depends". Ideally, they would've actually mastered all the grammar, but if instead they just learned to be more aware of grammatical mistakes but don't quite remember the rules, just that there is a rule, I'm not sure that it'd really improve over the years (unless they keep taking the time to look up the rule). For example, I know there are times I'll rewrite a sentence with who(m) because I can't remember if it's supposed to have the m or not, so I just rewrite it to not use that word... and I do that on this forum (I'm more likely to do that after reading some question about grammar or something, because then I'm more self-conscious about grammar, but sometimes I just do that out of the blue, even though there are other aspects of grammar or punctuation that I don't care about and knowingly do wrong :leaving: ). And it's been a loooooong time since I've been taught anything about English grammar (though I've read the occasional Wikipedia page about it, and obviously some of the kids' books, but those have mostly been about parts of speech thus far).

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One thing I wonder s whether it is a baad thing, necessarily, if students are not immediately better writers after taking a grammar class.  I can see that having done so, they might be very safe and stiff in their writing for a while - when you are learning to use a tool, that is often the case.  It seems to me that leaving the question at that point doesn't say much though - where are they in a year's time?  After they, and the other students, have added other writing classes with a different focus?

 

Yeah, I think a balance is needed between teaching grammar and exercises which encourage more risk taking and experimentation.   The study alone doesn't prove that grammar exercises are "bad,"  just shows what happens when students have a year of that straight without other more creative pursuits to balance it and put those studies in context.   Just like an artist needs to learn the tools of art (shading, color, perspective), I do think students need some instruction in grammar.  But just as in art if it isn't balanced with more free form expressive work, than you'll never develop past the elementary.  If you focus so much on the fundamentals that you never move on to more creative/expressive  pursuits than you've lost the whole point.  But if you never cover the fundamentals you'll be limited in what you can do with your creativity.  I think it's best when it's a back and forth, where  grammar instruction is followed by more  open ended writing exercises,  followed by work on improving that writing, followed by more experimenting,  etc..   And it's important to try to help kids understand that mistakes are part of the growth process.

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This post says a little of what I imagine was probably missing from that "year long grammar class" that left the kids writing worse than when they started.  When kids are first starting out I think it's fine to just focus on getting a complete sentence out...on correctness.  But at some point we need to teach them how to write sentences that sing.  Grammar is part of that but not all of that.      

 

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/259097784795796096/

 

If you notice the author actually has a sentence fragment in there, though it doesn't hurt the writing at all.   I want to teach my kids the rules of writing, and then when they are doing well, show them writers who broke those rules and still wrote beautifully.   You have to understand grammar before you can play with it like e.e. cummings and other great rule-breakers.   Showing that passage above to a kid struggling just to complete a 5 word sentence would just be discouraging....but when you get to junior high and high school I think it's appropriate to bring that in and encourage them to move on from just making correct sentences to making beautiful ones.  You still can and should correct errors where needed, and if the errors seem to be rooted in a misunderstanding of grammar, back up and focus on the grammar where needed...but by high school, I believe teachers should be moving the primary focus from grammar to style.   However, there needs to have been a foundation in the basic mechanics of writing laid earlier for that to happen. 

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This makes me think of when I worked as a nanny in university.  The boy I watched had an older brother, in grade 5.  He was going to the local Buddhist school, which was a nice place, but they used a lot of the very airy-fairy approaches to writing.  I remember reading an essay he had written, and he used some phrase or word in an obviously incorrect way.  His teacher's comment was to praise his creativity, but I wasn't actually sure that was his purpose - it seemed to me like an error.

 

As it happened, his parents, who were pretty successful writers - as in, they managed to get rich doing it - thought the same thing, and ended up sending him to a different school.

 

My friend's brother went to the same school and finished out grade 1 there, but had a really hard time when he went to the same program I did in university - he struggled with the writing in terms of mechanics and also presenting an argument, and ended up dropping out.

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I found this:

 

One of the biggest reasons students have a hard time writing analysis and argument is because they often donĂ¢â‚¬â„¢t have sufficient subject and domain expertise about what is being argued. They can describe what someone else says, but donĂ¢â‚¬â„¢t yet have the knowledge to build upon that information. I see this time and again in the analytical research papers I assign as students struggle to insert their ideas into debates theyĂ¢â‚¬â„¢re not yet prepared to join. If your (history, philosophy, sociology, economics, political science, whatever) course is the first time theyĂ¢â‚¬â„¢ve encountered your field, they will struggle.

 

really interesting.  When I was a student, my university  department very much took the view that undergraduate classes were meant for learning what other people had said, and the conventions of the field, more than to offer any thinking of our own.  But when I was in other departments, that wasn't typical - students seemed to be expected to jump in.

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Look what popped up in my email! Amazon apparently thinks I'm interested in writing curriculum, and darned if it isn't the same one profiled in the original article here!

 

https://smile.amazon.com/Writing-Revolution-Advancing-Thinking-Subjects/dp/1119364914

 

So if you read those articles and were thinking "Gosh, I want to try this", well, I suppose you can.

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