Where did reading and writing go?

Matthew Amaral, Teach4Real - I’m teaching 9th graders again, and again it amazes me how they seem to do little or no reading in middle school, and almost no writing (thank you, high-stakes test prep). I ask them on the first day, “Does anyone know what a Topic Sentence is?” Crickets. “How many of you read a book last year?” A few hands. “What was the name of the book?” They don’t know. “How many essays did you write?” Silence.

Maybe they are nervous on the first day, or amazed at the activities I have them do in the first week. But in my experience as a high school English teacher who generally only teaches 9th and 10th graders, I certainly wish they had some very basic skills that frankly should have been addressed by now. In fact, I just wish that when they come to high school, they know how to write one thing. I now make it my job to make sure I teach it to them every year. Some of my biggest successes as a teacher of writing have to do with teaching this one very specific thing: Writing a paragraph.

This is the problem: You get to the end of a story in a textbook (notice I didn’t say Chapter in a book, because evidently no one teaches those anymore), and you tell the kids to answer questions 3 and 5, because those are the least moronic questions whoever wrote the textbook came up with. But then what do the students do?

They answer questions 3 and 5 in a sentence or two, because if that’s all you’re going to tell them to do, they are going to give you their version of a paragraph, which is one sentence. So let me ask you this, when you ask students to write a paragraph, have you already taught them what exactly that means?

By the end of the year, when I tell any class to write a paragraph, I get 12 sentences with two quotes. Minimum. That goes for my Sheltered classes as well. But that is at the end of the year. Right now they write one sentence...

Students say this about my English class: “This class is easy.” Then I ask them if they’ve ever read 5 books and written ten typed essays in one year before, and they’re like. “No, in fact I haven’t ever read a book before in school,” or, “I haven’t written ten essays in my entire education up until now.” I then ask, “So if it’s so easy, how come you did more work than you’ve ever done?” They are silent.

That is what I think writing instruction should be: Easy and every day. It isn’t hard to teach paragraphs and essays, but it does take commitment and it does require you to fight the good fight every day of the week.