Reply #35: As a 6th - 8th grade teacher, [View All]

[LWolf]

I would have insisted on a lot of editing before any letter got mailed in. It would have passed my inspection first.

Of course, my students are required to spend more actual time revising and editing their writing than they are creating first or final drafts.

Still, I have plenty of middle school students that can't produce a literate piece of writing without me doing the editing with them, one-on-one. Coming from a small, isolated rural community, where reading, writing, grammar, spelling, and literacy are generally disdained in their homes, they think I just "don't get" what's important and what's not. In their worlds, spelling and grammar are just not priorities.

They have a terrible time editing for grammar, because their spoken grammar is as bad as their written. Their functional vocabulary is minimal. I see a great deal of writing just like those letters, every day.

The difference is that I don't let it pass; it returns to the student as many times as necessary to do it correctly, and yes, their elective can be yanked if they don't get it done.

If I were not so persistently demanding, their writing would never rise above the examples cited in this article.