Writing Comments on Student’s Papers (Bean) and Response to Writing (Beach & Friedrich)

“The paper graders are here, sir. Shall I send them in?”

The article written by John Bean was a nice read. The opening statement about teachers forgetting the human being who wrote the word and then becoming so harsh and sarcastic that they let their irritation show on the pages reminded me of the cartoon strip above. It is true writing teachers sometimes are too harsh of a critic. The article also reminded me of Peter Elbow, Nancy Sommers, and Donald Murray’s main points all wrapped up in one regarding constructive feedback. Especially the comment about writing teachers being coaches at the drafting stage and being judges at the final stage. This idea of teacher’s being “coaches” during the writing process was a common theme among these three authors I’ve mentioned above.  Although, John Bean’s view point seemed like reiteration of the other authors we read about, the style in which he wrote this article was different.  He not only talked from the student’s view point he also provided a sympathetic perspective. He stated, “We let our irritation show on the pages even though we know how we ourselves feel when we ask a colleague to read one of our drafts (apologetic and vulnerable).” This thoughtful approach make you want to reconsider your method if you are one of those teachers who shows no sensitivity towards student’s work and progress.  Bean also included student’s reaction and view point to teachers’ comments on their paper and alongside that he provided ideas of positive commentary. Bean further provided advice on constructive feedback and how to properly guide students through the writing process.  Again, this article was a great read because it offered in details the proper way to guide and communicate to students throughout the writing process and it also gave great tips on how to implement positive commentary without insulting or devaluing students’ work.

Beach and Friedrich’s article is very similar to the many articles that I have read in terms of discussing and providing guidelines on the effective ways teachers can provide feedback. Although Beach and Friedrich article dated a little later than the others, I don’t think they mentioned anything new that haven’t been said already by the many others that had covered this topic. They did however categorize their main points and included several research findings to back up their arguments.  Even the research findings and their recommendations were conclusive in their approach and remediation. That goes to show you that there was and still is a general consensus regarding this topic. Everyone (meaning the authors who had covered this topics and even the students and teachers who had read these articles) pretty much agree that without effective feedback from teachers, students will not engage in substantive self-assessment and revision that can help students improve their writing. It is pretty much agreed upon that teachers’ feedback need to be specific and nonjudgmental in order for it to be effective, and it is pretty much agreed upon that that various strategies need to be implemented into the writing class to further help develop the writer and the writing process. Having read yet another article on responding to students’ paper led me to believe that there was and still is a lot of focus in this area, but current writing classes do not reflect or put to practice some of these ideas and strategies recommended  through these researches because the last I remember I was still getting vague feedbacks and given really no room for self-assessment  in some of my college classes  and last I remember my teacher colleagues were doing something similar with their lower grade students. Overall I enjoyed reading the article and I will be using a lot of the strategies and tips recommended.

Bi, Butch, and Bar Dyke: Pedagogical Performances of Class, Gender, and Sexuality

The three articles were very interesting. I like how Gibson, Marinara, and Meem each talked about their own personal experience of class, gender, and sexuality performance, but for each reading you had to follow the narrative closely to tell who was telling the story. The first article examine how story telling work as a way to construct identify narratives and voices. Especially the voice of lesbian or working class. In the article she writes, “all identity, all social construction, begins with narratives.” The second article talks about how being a butch lesbian  has more advantage than being a femme lesbian because being butch is associated with both visual and non-visual characteristics. The final article talks about “speaking our memories” how writing about our personal experiences can give voices them. Although all three article were interesting and had a common theme of identity and voices, the first article seemed to stand out the most to me.  In this article Marinara discussed her position as a bi sexual and working class woman, who has “entered the academy”. In the beginning of the article I didn’t really understand the connection between the story about the little girl at the grocery store and being lesbian. With that it seemed like she jumped from one point to the next without a proper transition. Also, I couldn’t tell who the author was refereeing to because she had a general sense to her tone. Anyways, Marinara argues that we see identities primarily in terms of binaries. She writes, “This politicized voice emerges from a self –empowerment that hinges on an appeal to universalities of class and sexuality, self-empowerment that depends on binary opposition.” She basically said we can be working class or professionals, straighter, or  heterosexual or we can  create complexity in our self-construction, but the reality remain that we see things in only black and white there are no in between.  And she stated it’s because of this "dualistic system of thought" that makes it impossible for her to come out of the closet because she doesn’t fit that mold. Marinara ended her article by pointing to the fact that identity is not as simple as black and white it is by far more complex than that.   

Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking & Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar

Although, Peter Elbow’s article was written in 1993, his opening statement about assessment driving and controlling teaching was not only honest, it rings true in today’s classrooms. In this article Elbow talks about “sorting” the different act of assessment. He begins his argument by reminding us all that he is by no means a professional in this field, but strongly feels that nonprofessionals such as himself should work and focus on sorting out assessments because the so call professionals “have not reached definitive conclusions about the problem of how to assess writing (or anything else, I'd say).” Elbow also reminded us that decisions about assessments are often made by people even less professional than we, namely legislators. Although, this was a very small part of his argument it was one that needed to be said because it gives a reason to why assessments need to be sort out. After reading this I found myself sharing similar views to Elbow. Maybe like him I am idealistic and want to also find fairness in judging other’s work, or maybe as an educator I too find my self frustrated and want to try to find constructive ways of assessing student’s paper because some of the current assessments that are in place are shamefully stupid, whichever the reason I did find myself agreeing with a lot of his ideas and also disagreeing with some as well. One of the arguments I agree with is the problem with ranking.  Elbow writes, “I see three distinct problems with ranking: it is inaccurate or unreliable; it gives no substantive feedback; and it is harmful to the atmosphere for teaching.” He further went on to add that “ranking or grading is woefully uncommunicative. Grades and holistic scores are nothing but points on a continuum from "yea" to "boo"-with no information or clues about the criteria behind these noises.” This statement is quite true because as an educator when you assess it needs to meet several criteria in order for it to be considered valid and one important criterion is feedback. What good is an assessment if the score is based on feelings rather than judgment that tries to discriminate strength and weakness? What good is an assessment if it can’t influence students to develop or even enhance their learning? So, in these regards I agree with Elbow, we should have less ranking and more evaluation.  An assessment should be able to provide more than just a numerical score. Elbow not only argues for evaluation but he provided the beneficial reasons.  He states, “Instead of using grades or holistic scores-single number verdicts that try to sum up complex performances along only one scale-we should give some kind of written or spoken evaluation that discriminates among criteria and dimensions of the writing. “Again, I agree with Elbow on evaluation 100 percent, however we must consider current realties and be a bit pragmatic in how we view and implement evaluation.  The reality is that teachers need to rank and level students. They need to distinguish the lows from the high and the passing from the failing not just for teaching purposes but for state, international, status, and funding purposes. So, Elbow’s suggestion of minimal holistic scoring where you give only 2 scores sounds more reasonable to me. Also, Elbow’s idea of “liking” seems like a radical idea, but again because of current realities and the way teachers are trained these progressive ideas seems far away for now. After reading this, I do have to say that Peter Elbow is bold in the fact that he entertains us with the idea of changing the way we view assessment (in his case writing assessment). Elbow made a powerful statement that has truth to it. He said, “we see around us a deep hunger to rank-to create pecking orders: to see who we can look down on and who we must look up to, or in the military metaphor, who we can kick and who we must salute.” Beautifully said!  There is this feeling in education, well I can’t speak for all, but this feeling in my educational community at least, that thorough evaluation is not real enough, and that a numerical score on a paper speaks more volume. Unfortunately, I wish that wasn’t the mindset, but in many instances it is, so that is why I applaud Elbow for his attempt in tackling ranking and offering alternatives and making them sound like they are things that can be done if we put forth a little effort.

The Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar was interesting. After reading the first few pages I was surprised to find out how many experimental research had been done on this topic alone. 75 years’ worth of research and still counting is a lot and for the issue of grammar learning to remain unresolved still today says a lot about the complexities of language and language acquisition. I couldn’t help but to be curious about how these studies were conducted because Patrick Hartwell did not really go into details about these experiments, however the questions that came to mind were: In these grammar experiments, did students have to memorize patterns, grammatical rules, or drills? How was conversational grammar used? I asked these questions because I don’t believe that grammar teaching and learning is effective if it’s taught explicitly. Conversational and pronunciation skills are also important to grammar learning and teaching.

 I though the author did a great job of covering all 5 grammars, however I believe grammar 1 and 2 are the ones that carry weight or real significance, all the others follow after. Hartwell defined grammar 1 as “the internalize system of rules that speakers share” In many ways I agree with this statement because as a second language teacher when teaching my students grammar I’m not really teaching them a new set of structure and rules, these students already come in with their own rules and teaching them is really about helping them discover how to fit those rules into the new language.  Overall this article proved that grammar and the application of grammar is not only intricate, but also divisive.

Responding to Students Writing (Sommers) & On Reflection (Yancey)

I like how Yancey open up the article by describing her class activity and characterizing the conversations and the students that made up her narrative composition class. The beginning of the article read almost liked a journal entry and I was convinced that would be the tone of the whole article. However the article changed form when she introduced the research study conducted in the 70s and 80s that asked the question “how do students learn to write.” Yancey stated that this question aroused because teachers who taught writing didn’t know much about the process. She stated, “We didn’t know much about the very thing we were supposed to be teaching: writing and the process that create it. We certainly didn’t know much about it from the point of view of those we were daily practicing upon: The students.” Yancey also discussed the writing process’s shift from traditional to current theories.  She briefly discussed these theories and stated that reflection played a very small role in their histories and out of theses popular practices in composition she asserted that only one single article was able to link reflection and composing together and this article was published by Sharon Pianko. In this article Pianko wrote, “The ability to reflect on what is being written seems to be the essence of the difference between able and not so able writers from their initial writing experience onward.” Although, both Pianko and Yancey admitted that reflection is a critical component of learning and writing, their descriptions of reflection is a bit different. In Pianko’s 1979 article, reflection was described as the author’s pauses and rescanning during the writing process and 20 years later in Yancey’s class room, reflection is “not defined behaviorally as pauses and rescanning, but as a means of going beyond the text to include a sense of ongoing conversations that texts enter into.” Further along the article Yancey clarified the term reflection in her text. “What I’ll mean in this text when I say reflection will be 1) the processes by which we know what we have accomplished and by which we articulate accomplishment and 2) the products of those processes.” Through out the article she continued to define and discussed reflection as a necessary body of practice that can help enhance the developing writer. Yancey does this by quoting others like Donald Schon, Brookfield, Dewey, Vygotsky and Polanyi.

Yancey ended her article by introducing 3concepts that she applies to teaching and learning of writing and they are reflection –in-action, constructive reflection, and reflection in presentation. 

Yancey’s article was very encouraging in that it discussed how reflection can enhance student’s learning of the writing process, however I had to trudged through it because its was not only boring, it felt very repetitive, wordy, and even a bit disorganized. I though too much emphasis was put on defining reflection rather then exploring how to apply it during the writing process and more importantly how to apply to teach and into the classroom.

I though Nancy’s article shed a light on a not often mentioned topic in education. As Nancy stated in the beginning of her article commenting on student’s paper is needed because “as writer we need and want thoughtful commentary to show us when we have communicated our ideas and when not, raising questions from a reader’s point of view that may not have occurred to us as writer,” however its not always clear that students learn from teacher’s comments on their writing. In my educational experience I don’t ever remember getting insightful feed back comments from my writing teachers that had help me to better evaluate my writing, I mostly remembered making the changes that my teachers requested so I can get a good grader and also to follow directions. Now that I’m a teacher I try to add thoughtful commentary to students writing and at times to the point of hinting to them what to add to their text, however I haven’t really put too much attention on whether they truly understand some of the comments. As the article stated this is an area teachers truly lack training in and I appreciate Sommers’s article because although there’s not really a right or wrong way to response to student’s writing, unlike Yancey, Sommers provided practical guideline teachers can use for commenting on students paper.

Regarding the final project I thought the handbook idea where everyone share their expertise in a subject is exciting, however like many have already stated the right audience and grade level need to be established before moving forward. Also, the idea of going digital vs. print is a good one to ponder on, but I would prefer a printed book because for me as an educator if the book is physically present I am more likely to read it and retain the information in it. But that’s just me though, others may see it differently. In any case we can always combine both.