The difference between teaching reading and teaching writing

"Give someone a book, and they’ll read for a day. Teach someone how to write a book, and they’ll experience a lifetime of paralyzing self-doubt."

—Lauren DeStefano

How am I going to make this assessment relevant?

Peter Greene said:

. . . if your spouse says, “I’m looking for ways to make you interesting and appealing,” that is not a good sign.

Once you look at a lesson and ask, “How am I going to make this material relevant,” you have admitted that the material is not actually relevant. If that’s true–if the lesson is inherently irrelevant–then you need to ask a bigger question. Why are you teaching it at all? Because it’s on the test? Because your boss said you have to? These are lousy reasons to teach anything. More importantly, no amount of stapling on pictures of movie stars will convince your students that you aren’t wasting their time, and wasting students’ time is one of the unforgivable sins in the teaching biz.

Know why you are teaching what you’re teaching. Know why the material has value for your students. This is not always obvious, but this is where your expertise in the subject matter is supposed to come in. You’re the teacher–you’re supposed to know what the connection is between your content material and the business of being fully human in the world. If you don’t see a connection, you need to go study and look to find it, or you need to reconsider whether you should be teaching it at all.

[Via www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/06/08/dear-teachers-please-dont-make-your-lessons-relevant — Found on Scott MacCleod's excellent blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, about the need to move schools forward into 21st century.]

The same is true of assessments. It's easy to come up with assignments that generate grades for a report card, that rank students against each other, but does the activity actually have anything to do with anything that matters? If the assessment isn't authentic, don't do it.

Guest Post: Four Reasons to be Happy About Internet Plagiarism

by Russell Hunt
St. Thomas University

[This column is reprinted (with the author's permission) from http://people.stu.ca/~hunt/www/4reasons.htm. Teaching Perspectives (St. Thomas University) 5 (December 2002), [1-5]. Repr. Teaching Options Pedagogiques (University of Ottawa) 6:4 (August 2003), 3-5; repr. [as "Let's Hear it for Internet Plagiarism"] Teaching & Learning Bridges 2:3 (University of Saskatchewan) (November 2003), 2-5; Teaching Matters Newsletter (University of New Brunswick, Saint John) (January 2007) 6-9; in Think: Critical Thinking for Everyday Life, ed. Judith Boss (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010): 367-368. Note: this is an excerpt from a longer project, which can be found in draft form at http://people.stu.ca/~hunt/www/plagiary.htm ]

The "information technology revolution" is almost always presented as having cataclysmic consequences for education—sometimes for the better, but often, of course, for the worse. In postsecondary circles, perhaps the most commonly apprehended cataclysm is "Internet Plagiarism." When a university subscribes to turnitin.com, the local media invariably pick up the story—"Students to Learn that Internet Crime Doesn't Pay" -- with the kind of alacrity usually reserved for features on political sex scandals or patronage payoffs. When the newest cheating scandal surfaces at some prestigious southern university known for its military school style "honor code," the headlines leap across the tabloids like stories on child molestation by alien invaders.

It's almost never suggested that all this might be something other than a disaster for higher education. But that's exactly what I want to argue here. I believe the challenge of easier and more convenient plagiarism is to be welcomed. This rising tide threatens to change things—for, I predict and hope, the better. Here are some specific practices which are threatened by the increasing ease with which plagiarism can be committed.

1. The institutional rhetorical writing environment (the "research paper," the "literary essay," the "term paper") is challenged by this, and that's a good thing. Our reliance on these forms as ways of assessing student skills and knowledge has been increasingly questioned by people who are concerned with how learning and assessment take place, and can be fostered, and particularly with how the ability to manipulate written language ("literacy") is developed. The assumption that a student's learning is accurately and readily tested by her ability to produce, in a completely arhetorical situation, an artificial form that she'll never have to write again once she's survived formal education (the essay examination, the formal research paper), is questionable on the face of it, and is increasingly untenable. If the apprehension that it's almost impossible to escape the mass-produced and purchased term paper leads teachers to create more imaginative, and rhetorically sound, writing situations in their classes, the advent of the easily-purchased paper from schoolsucks.com is a salutary challenge to practices which ought to be challenged. One good, clear example of the argument which can be mounted against generic term paper assignments and in favor of assignments which track that writing process and / or are specific to a particular situation is in Tom Rocklin's online "Downloadable Term Papers: What's a Prof. to Do?" Many other equivalent arguments that assignment can be refigured to make plagiarism more difficult—and offer more authentic rhetorical contexts for student writing -- have been offered in recent years.

I'm unconvinced that we can address the problem by assuring students that "they are real writers with meaningful and important things to say," or invite them to revise their work where we can see the revisions, as long as we continue giving them more decontextualized, audienceless and purposeless writing exercises. Having something to say is—for anybody except, maybe, a Romantic poet—absolutely indistinguishable from having someone to say it to, and an authentic reason for saying it. To address this problem, I believe, we need to rethink the position of writing in students' lives and in the curriculum. One strong pressure to do that is the increasing likelihood that empty exercises can be fulfilled by perfunctory efforts, or borrowed texts.

2. The institutional structures around grades and certification are challenged by this, and that's a good thing. Perhaps more important is the way plagiarism challenges the overwhelming pressure for grades which our institutions have created and foster, and which has as its consequence the pressure on many good students to cut a corner here and there (there's lots of evidence that it's not mainly the marginal students in danger of failing who cheat; it's as often those excellent students who believe, possibly with some reason, that their lives depend on keeping their GPA up to some arbitrary scratch). An even more central consideration is the way the existence of plagiarism itself challenges the way the university structures its system of incentives and rewards, as a zero-sum game, with a limited number of winners.

University itself, as our profession has structured it, is the most effective possible situation for encouraging plagiarism and cheating. If I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, or improve my golf swing, or write HTML, "cheating" would be the last thing that would ever occur to me. It would be utterly irrelevant to the situation. On the other hand, if I wanted a certificate saying that I could pick a jig, play a round in under 80, or produce a slick Web page (and never expected actually to perform the activity in question), I might well consider cheating (and consider it primarily a moral problem). This is the situation we've built for our students: a system in which the only incentives or motives anyone cares about are marks, credits, and certificates. We're not entirely responsible for that—government policies which have tilted financial and social responsibility for education increasingly toward the students and their families have helped a lot -- but the crucial factor has been our insistence, as a profession, that the only motivation we could ever count on is what is built into the certification process. When students say—as they regularly do—"why should I do this if it's not marked?" or "why should I do this well if it's not graded?" or even "I understand that I should do this, but you're not marking it, and my other professors are marking what I do for them," they're saying exactly what educational institutions have been highly successful at teaching them to say.

They're learning exactly the same thing, with a different spin, when we tell them that plagiarism is a moral issue. We're saying that the only reason you might choose not to do it is a moral one. But think about it: if you wanted to build a deck and were taking a class to learn how to do it, your decision not to cheat would not be based on moral considerations.

3. The model of knowledge held by almost all students, and by many faculty—the tacit assumption that knowledge is stored information and that skills are isolated, asocial faculties—is challenged by this, and that's a good thing. When we judge essays by what they contain and how logically it's organized (and how grammatically it's presented) we miss the most important fact about written texts, which is that they are rhetorical moves in scholarly and social enterprises. In recent years there have been periodic assaults on what Paolo Freire (1974) called "the banking model" of education (and what, more recently, Tom Marino [2002], writing on the POD email list, referred to as "educational bulimics"). Partisans of active learning, of problem- and project-based learning, of cooperative learning, and of many other "radical" educational initiatives, all contend that information and ideas are not inert masses to be shifted and copied in much the way two computers exchange packages of information, but rather need to be continuously reformatted, reconstituted, restructured, reshaped and reinvented and exchanged in new forms -- not only as learning processes but as the social basis of the intellectual enterprise. A model of the educational enterprise which presumes that knowledge comes in packages (one reinforced by marking systems which say you can get "73%" of Renaissance literature or introductory organic chemistry) invites learners to think of what they're doing as importing pre-packaged nuggets of information into their texts and their minds.

Similarly, a model which assumes that a skill like "writing the academic essay" is an ability which can be demonstrated on demand, quite apart from any authentic rhetorical situation, actual question, or expectation of effect (or definition of what the "academic essay" actually is), virtually prohibits students from recognizing that all writing is shaped by rhetorical context and situation, and thus renders them tone-deaf to the shifts in register and diction which make so much plagiarized undergraduate text instantly recognizable. The best documentation of the strangely arhetorical situation student writing lives in that I know of is in the work done as part of the extensive study of school-based and workplace writing at McGill and Carleton Universities (Dias, Freedman, Medway & Paré, 1999; Dias & Paré, 2000).

4. But there's a reason to welcome this challenge that's far more important than any of these—more important, even, than the way the revolutionary volatility of text mediated by photocopying and electronic files have assaulted traditional assumptions of intellectual property and copyright by distributing the power to copy beyond those who have the right to copy. It's this: by facing this challenge we will be forced to help our students learn what I believe to be the most important thing they can learn at university: just how the intellectual enterprise of scholarship and research really works. Traditionally, when we explain to students why plagiarism is bad and what their motives should be for properly citing and crediting their sources, we present them in terms of a model of how texts work in the process of sharing ideas and information which is profoundly different from how they actually work outside of classroom-based writing, and profoundly destructive to their understanding of the assumptions and methods of scholarship.

When you look at the usual set of examples of plagiarism as it occurs in student papers, for example, what you see is almost invariably drawn from kinds of writing obviously and radically identifiable as classroom texts. And how classroom texts relate to or use the ideas and texts of others is typically very different from how they're used in science, scholarship, or in other publications. There are many such explanatory examples in print and on the Web; let me take one from the Northwestern University "The Writing Place" Web site. They offer the following as an explanation of how to do an acceptable and properly credited paraphrase:

Original

But Frida's outlook was vastly different from that of the Surrealists. Her art was not the product of a disillusioned European culture searching for an escape from the limits of logic by plumbing the subconscious. Instead, her fantasy was a product of her temperament, life, and place; it was a way of coming to terms with reality, not of passing beyond reality into another realm. Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (258)

Paraphrase

As Herrera explains, Frida's surrealistic vision was unlike that of the European Surrealists. While their art grew out of their disenchantment with society and their desire to explore the subconscious mind as a refuge from rational thinking, Frida's vision was an outgrowth of her own personality and life experiences in Mexico. She used her surrealistic images to understand better her actual life, not to create a dreamworld (258).

Key words and phrases in the original are in boldface. The changes in wording and sentence structure in the paraphrase are underlined.

What is clearest about this is that the writer of the second paragraph has no motive for rephrasing the passage other than to put it into different words. Had she really needed the entire passage as part of an argument or explanation she was offering, she would have been far better advised to quote it directly. The paraphrase neither clarifies nor renders newly pointed; it's merely designed to demonstrate to a sceptical reader that the writer actually understands the phrases she is using in her text. Without more context than the Northwestern site gives us, it's difficult to know exactly how the paragraph functions in a larger rhetorical purpose (if it does). But published scholarly literature is full of examples of writers using the texts, words and ideas of others to serve their own immediate purposes. Here's an example of the way two researchers opened their discussion of the context of their work in 1984:

To say that listeners attempt to construct points is not, however, to make clear just what sort of thing a 'point' actually is. Despite recent interest in the pragmatics of oral stories (Polanyi 1979, 1982; Robinson 1981), conversations (Schank et al. 1982), and narrative discourse generally (Prince 1983), definitions of point are hard to come by. Those that do exist are usually couched in negative terms: apparently it is easier to indicate what a point is not than to be clear about what it is. Perhaps the most memorable (negative) definition of point was that of Labov (1972: 366), who observed that a narrative without one is met with the "withering" rejoinder, "So what?" (Vipond & Hunt, 1984)

It is clear here that the motives of the writers do not include prevention of charges of plagiarism; moreover, it's equally clear that they are not -- as they would be enjoined to do by the Northwestern Web site -- attempting to "cite every piece of information that is not a) the result of your own research, or b) common knowledge." What they are doing is more complex. The bouquet of citations offered in this paragraph is informing the reader that the writers know, and are comfortable with, the literature their article is addressing; they are moving to place their argument in an already existing written conversation about the pragmatics of stories; they are advertising to the readers of their article, likely to be interested in psychology or literature, that there is an area of inquiry -- the sociology of discourse -- that is relevant to studies in the psychology of literature; and they are establishing a tone of comfortable authority in that conversation by the acknowledgement of Labov's contribution and by using his language --"withering" is picked out of Labov's article because it is often cited as conveying the power of pointlessness to humiliate (I believe I speak with some authority for the authors' motives, since I was one of them).

Scholars -- writers generally -- use citations for many things: they establish their own bona fides and currency, they advertise their alliances, they bring work to the attention of their reader, they assert ties of collegiality, they exemplify contending positions or define nuances of difference among competing theories or ideas. They do not use them to defend themselves against potential allegations of plagiarism.

The clearest difference between the way undergraduate students, writing essays, cite and quote and the way scholars do it in public is this: typically, the scholars are achieving something positive; the students are avoiding something negative.

The conclusion we're driven to, then, is this: offering lessons and courses and workshops on "avoiding plagiarism" -- indeed, posing plagiarism as a problem at all -- begins at the wrong end of the stick. It might usefully be analogized to looking for a good way to teach the infield fly rule to people who have no clear idea what baseball is.

References

"Avoiding Plagiarism." The Writing Place, Northwestern University. http://www.writing.nwu.edu/tips/plag.html (November 2001). Archived http://web.archive.org/web/20011119211908/http://www.writing.nwu.edu/tips/plag.html Dias, Patrick, Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway, and Anthony Paré, eds. Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts [The Rhetoric, Society and Knowledge Series]. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999.

Dias, Patrick, and Anthony Paré, eds. Transitions: Writing in Academic and Workplace Settings. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2000.

Freire, Paolo. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury, 1974. (Translated from the original Portuguese (1968) by Myra Bergman Ramos).

Marino, Tom. "Re: How many minutes per class day does the typical student study?" Professional & Organizational Development Network in Higher Education , 28 May 2002. http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0205&L=pod&O=D&P=14486.

Rocklin, Tom. "Downloadable Term Papers: What's a Prof. to Do?" University of Iowa Center for Teaching. Tools and Resources: Teaching Ideas from the Center for Teaching and Around the World. n.d. http://www.uiowa.edu/~centeach/resources/ideas/term-paper-download.html

Vipond, Douglas, and Russell A. Hunt. "Point-Driven Understanding: Pragmatic and Cognitive Dimensions of Literary Reading." Poetics 13 (June 1984), 261-277.

Turnitin.com and Student Plagiarism

I have recently come across instructors using Turnitin.com to teach students how to cite and reference scholarship. I find this practice completely wrong-headed.

First, Turnitin is plagiarism detection software. It was not designed as a teaching tool. I remain dubious that it can serve a purpose for which it was never intended better than other forms of instruction. One could easily focus on the most common mistakes students make on their in-text citations without having to resort to Turnitin software—the money spent on the software and the time spent providing students a visual walkthrough of the system would seem better invested in explaining the purpose and principles of scholarship, than teaching students one particular software package.

Second, as an editor and author as well as an academic, I feel strongly that student copyright and confidentiality is routinely violated by Turnitin retaining copies of student work in (an American) database. Instructors may not have an issue with this, but many authors and students feel this is a violation of their rights.

Third, instructors using Turnitin software as a teaching tool by having students run their first drafts through Turnitin.com, adjusting their papers until they get a better Turnitin score, ends up mandating a particular writing process—a common but deeply mistaken approach to teaching writing. My commentary on my frustration with such writing instruction is in this earlier post on this blog.

Fourth, focusing on "catching plagiarism"—which I would argue is more than implicit in a software package called "turn it in"—is in my view a wrong approach to teaching the importance of citation scholarship. Students learn that they must follow certain (to them bizarre and arbitrary rules) to manage the score delivered by a software package and does not, I would argue, properly socialize students into the philosophy of scholarship. This approach does not seem to acknowledge that students come from other cultures/philosophical positions that may view the universe very differently. For example, the mashup artist who takes a hundred different film clips, edits them together with some other person's soundtrack to create a new YouTube video that gets a million likes and a monetized video feed is going to need more than Turnitin software to understand why that same behaviour in university gets them a 0 and a yelling at. Effective instruction is not about explaining the rules, it's about converting students to our worldview. I do not perceive Turnitin software as a useful tool in this process.

I realize mine is a minority view. Turnitin software is 'easy' for instructors and allows them to pretend to be addressing the issues of academic integrity which large classes and a host of other structural issues have made more difficult to manage. That 'easy' or 'widely promoted' equates to 'best practice' or 'best outcomes' remains to be demonstrated to me. I argue there is a difference between 'trained' and 'educated' and using Turnitin to teach rules strikes me (and I dare say most students) like a punitive training exercise rather than an effective approach to socializing students into a new and better worldview.

As I have mentioned before in this blog, the more appropriate approach to issues of Internet plagiarism is to scrap the sort of assignments that allow for 'off-the-shelf' responses, and instead shift to authentic assessments that require original thought and personal commitment. If one asks students for a paper on McBeth, one should not be surprised if students go online to find them one. Instead, ask students how they interacted with the text to relate it to their own lives and or something of that ilk. If your students can't be bothered to actually do your assignments, that likely has more to do with it being a bad assignment, than about having bad students.

Bringing Notes to the Examination

A meme downloaded from "S**t Academics Say" Oct17, 2017:

There are several points to be made here.

First, good on the examiner for recognizing that was on them, not the student. I detest when an instructor makes a mistake and then tells a student, "well, that's not what I meant!" Unless mind reading is criteria in your psychic examination, it is inappropriate to hold students accountable for the instructor's intentions. If they got the literal answer to one's poorly worded question or followed one's poorly worded instructions literally, they get the mark or behaviour.

Second, you have to love this student! That is out of the box thinking! Exactly what every discipline needs more of.

Third, open book examinations are actually harder. Okay, if it's closed book for everyone else and open book for you, that does give one a slight advantage, but not as much as most people assume. There is relatively little knowledge that we need to memorize, as opposed to understanding and having available to us on our computers or google or etc. In most disciplines, one ends up memorize the important facts because that's easier than looking them up every time. If the fact is one you have to look up, it is by definition one that did not come up enough to be worth memorizing. Exams should be testing understanding, not just rote memorization. If the exam is testing higher orders of cognition (analysis, synthesis, evaluation and so on) then making information available to students makes for a better test of skills than the usual rote memorization that many exams seem to be geared towards.

Meme: ESL Test Answer

Another stimulus from the internet. So two principles here:

First is, "you can't mark it wrong if it answers the question asked" so, the solution here is to you congratulate the student on her imagination and authenticity and then ask the student to read you the answer in English so you can tell if they have the concepts you were actually testing for. And then you ask her if she'd care to share the (translated) answer with the class because she probably has a better sense of the actual answer than you do, especially if she asked mom about the family's stories handed down from great-grandmother.

Second, it is a good reminder of an assessment technique to use with ESL students in your classroom (though in this case, the student was obviously bilingual since she is taking the exam in English): it's vital to give the ESL students in your class the opportunity for success. If they are constantly struggling to express themselves in English, the quality of their responses will obviously always be less sophisticated and more error-prone than their native-English peers. So, whenever possible when doing this sort of written assignment, get them to write it in their own language, and have their parent or another adult fluent in their language grade it for content. Because, if they're writing fabulous poetry in Chinese or Italian, you don't want to give them a grade in the poetry unit that says they don't understand poetry. That's just incorrect assessment. English Literature and social studies instructors can make good use of portfolio assessment strategies that allow for the inclusion in the portfolio of pieces in the student's own language, alongside pieces that show the students progress/improvement in writing in English. The inclusion of work in their own language is a huge moral booster for the student—that says, in effect, "I may not have mastered English yet, but I'm still a pretty damn good poet!"—which, if one's purpose is to teach kids an appreciation of poetry, is kind of the whole point of the exercise. Without occasional success and reinforcement, what we are teaching the student is that school is a horrible experience to be avoided whenever possible; that they are a failure at our subject— that poetry, or whatever is not for them; and that they are failures and unworthy generally. I don't know a lot of teachers who signed up so they could oppress and discourage kids, but I have met quite a few who think their job is to enforce English instruction to the point of tears and beyond. Yes, let's have assignments in English, but let's make sure we have some parallel assignments in their own language to remind the student—and frankly, to remind us, the instructors—that these are talented, motivated, and hard-working kids. The reason they only put two line answers to that essay question is that writing two lines in English took them as long and five times the effort as the native-English speaker who wrote three pages. Seeing their eight-page essay in Italian or page in Chinese (Chinese characters are words, remember) with an "B+" from their Uncle reminds everyone that this is not a lazy or inferior student.

It should go without saying that the native language assignments must be optional for the student...at some point, asking a student to do any work in their mother tongue becomes the layering on of unnecessary additional work, which would be both dysfunctional and maybe a little racist. But it should remain an option in every teachers' toolbox.

Teaching and Evaluating Writing (Part 1)

I am attending a writers' conference (When Words Collide Festival, Calgary) this weekend, and especially enjoyed listening to the Keynote Address by Diana Gabaldon. In it, she talked about how writing is taught in schools: in every grade 5 class, the teacher has the students write down bullet points about their topic; then break up into groups to share and critique their bullet points with each other; then use that corrected list to write an outline; share outlines in pairs or small groups; take outlines home to parents for proofing; then turn that into the teacher to provide feedback; then use the teacher's feedback to produce a good outline; then use that outline to write a rough draft; have the students breakup into pairs to read and review each other's rough drafts; then take rough draft home to parents to correct (rewrite); then have them write a good draft; break up into pairs to proof each other's good drafts; and then hand that into teacher. [Well, she actually described the process in greater detail, but you get the idea, and most people recall something along this line from their own experiences.]

Then Diana Galaldon asked the banquet hall of writers, "Does anyone here actually write like that?" And of course, everyone agreed that "the writing process" as taught in schools has almost no connection with real writing or real writers. Diana Galaldon then described her own personal writing process to gales of laughter, because (almost) no one else in the hall wrote remotely like that, and could not begin to fathom how anyone could possibly work like that. It's not that Diana Gabaldon is weird, it's that anyone else's approach to writing seems unworkably bizarre.

What real writers know is that there is no one process that works for everyone; on the contrary, every writer has a different approach to the process of writing. Derrell Schweitzer interviewed something like 1,000 American SF authors about their writing and writing process, and the one thing that stood out for him was that (1) every writer in the sample said there was only one way they could write; and (2) no two writers in the sample wrote using the same process. (Sociologist Howard Becker, in his book Writing for the Social Sciences, came up with the most credible explanation for why that is, but going into that is beyond the scope of the current posting. Sufficient to say, everyone's process is inherently unique.)

The problem is that by insisting on this one outline-roughdraft-finaldraft approach to writing, teachers get passable product out of our kids that allows teachers to assign grades as if these grades were meaningful. It is easy to confuse this manufacture of product for the teaching of writing, but the production of 'final copy' under these conditions has little to do with learning how to write. In the late 1870s, the newly invented public schools decided to pay teachers by the linear foot of writing produced by their students. That seemed fair, because the more your students wrote, the more you got paid. Payment by results. But of course, it only took teachers twenty seconds to figure out that if they set their students to copying out the bible, they could significantly increase their salaries. Consequently, schools became factories that produced written work, without any regard for actual learning. If we know, as we emphatically do, that "The Writing Process" as it is generally taught in school is largely unrelated to the actual process of writing, then someone needs to explain to me how the current approach in schools is in any way an advance over the obviously ludicrous situation of paying by the linear foot in the 1880s?

But suggesting there is only one The Process of Writing" not merely a mistake, it's a destructive lie. I spend a lot of time when I give writers workshops undoing the damage caused by high school English teachers who have dictated "The Writing Process" as "how you write". Because many people believe their teachers that this is the only way to write, if that one approach isn't working for them they come to erroneous conclusion that they cannot write. This is actively harmeful! to the majority of students. I think teachers should also subscribe to the Hippocratic Oath: do no harm. But our assessment practices for writing do a lot of harm. We are supposed to be teaching kids how to write, but the vast majority learn instead the more fundamental lesson that writing is not for them.

I am perfectly fine exposing everyone to the notes-outline-rough-final-draft approach as one possible option with which students should experiment. But that is not the only or even best way to write. I remember one of my English profs talking about how he used to teach THE WRITING METHOD and developed a four stage assignment structure that force students to do the notes and then the outline and then the rough draft before the actual paper as essentially four separate assignments, because it was the only way to force students to do all the require steps. Then one day a girl brought in a paper because she had seen something on TV the night before that had totally inspired her and she had sat down and pounded this (brilliant, as it turned out) paper. Then she said, "sorry, I didn't have time to write an outline yet, I'll do that for Monday if that's okay." And he had suddenly realized that half the class wrote the outline by writing the paper first, and then deconstructing it to come up with the outline. And he smacked his forehead because he finally 'got it', and he stopped using that industrial-model assignment and started designing assessments that helped students become actual writers by helping them discover theirprocess.

I have in workshops and in my editing business occasionally told writers they had to make an outline. This tends to come up more frequently for nonfiction, and especially academic, writing, but even sometimes fiction as well. Notes and outlines help some specific writing problems, and when I see people with those problems and they take my advice to use an outline, they improve rapidly and say things like "thank you for teaching me about outlines." Sometimes that's exactly what they need to become proficient. But it is not universal, and for other writing problems, not only would that advice not be helpful, it would actively make the problem worse.

This should not be hard to grasp. Yet when I teach my English Major student teachers that the traditional approach is the wrong approach to assessing writing, they resist. Because actually assessing writing is complex, challenging and requires getting to know each student to diagnose their individual needs and remedies. The old way is simple, easy, and can be applied to the class without knowing anything about anyone. But um, if your job is to teach writing, then you should probably do that and not turn your class into a factory producing writing by the linear foot.

Meme: Setting Writing Assignments

Another example of a student far more creative than the assignment structure. Also an assignment that makes assumptions about student lives that may not be valid and therefore discriminate against those students. But mostly, if we give students lame stimuli, we should not be surprised when we get mediocre work. Good on this kid for rising about both issues.