Ch. 8 and 9 Response

Ruchell Todd
English 326
30 September 2007

In chapter eight, Ellen Brinkley discusses the usefulness of teacher-student writing conferences to teach grammar. Brinkley feels that teaching each student microlessons is one of the best ways to help students with their use of conventions. While talking with the student about his or her writing, the teacher is able to see what the student needs particular help with. Rather than trying to teach every student everything about grammar, the focus can be on the certain things each student is struggling with. Brinkley compares theses conferences to self-editing and peer-editing and feels that they are also beneficial and should be used in conjunction with conferences but not instead of them.

Brinkley mentions a meeting she had with a student named Beth, who needed writing guidance. She was worried that, by focusing the conference on three issues, she may have tried to cover too much information and not gone into as much depth and she would have preferred. This raised questions for me. If a teacher is meeting with a student to discuss a paper and the student has five errors that he or she is continuously making, should the teacher point them all out? If not, how does the teacher decide which ones are more important and how does the teacher then justify noting those other errors on the final draft when they were not discussed during the conference? I understand Brinkley’s view that trying to teach too much will make it hard for the student to internalize what has been said. However, I think that doing this would require the teacher to meet with the student over and over again until each issue is covered and all before the final draft is due. I’m not sure what teacher has this kind of time. I think that the kind of conference Brinkley is talking about is a type of situation, unlike sitting at your desk with a red pen correcting every mistake, where all of the errors can be brought to light and talked about. As a student, if I met with my teacher I would be expecting help with everything and would not be happy to find that there were mistakes my teacher was “letting slide” until our next conference.

Chapter nine, by Lois Matz Rosen, focuses on the alternatives to isolated grammar lessons and “error hunting.” These alternatives include helping students with the writing process, increasing reading and writing in the classroom, and showing students how to develop their own proofreading skills.

Another alternative mentioned by Rosen was to give the students a reason for wanting grammatically correct work by publishing it. I thought that this was an interesting and unique way of encouraging students to pay attention to conventions. Showing students how their work looks published (in a school newspaper, for instance) and comparing it to the professionalism of other papers and journals would help them feel the success of writing something to such high standards. I was told a few weeks ago about an English class where the teacher gathered old hard-cover books from yard sales and second-hand stores, pasted over the real pages with blank paper and let the students use them to “publish” their own pieces in a book. They were then used as writing portfolios. I was impressed by this idea and even more impressed after seeing how well it would fit into helping the students develop their grammar skills. Putting their writing into a book makes the editing process seem a little more important than if they simply type a paper, print it out and turn it in to the teacher for a grade.