Junking old way of teaching writing

Jay Matthews:

I almost never give advice to teachers. They live their work, while I just observe it and cannot hope to know as much as they do.

But on one subject, writing, I could teach most of them. My learning to put words together was long, painful and instructive. I know what works and what doesn't.

That's my excuse for suggesting in my last Local Living column a new kind of high school course. We should suspend the regular English curriculum for a semester and teach "Reading and Writing." Every student would produce an essay each week and spend time at the teacher's desk being edited. We would hire or train teachers to do what my first editors did: Cross out cute phrases, ask what I was trying to say, break overlong sentences into pieces, ask for specific examples, replace inactive verbs with active ones, and so on.

A class of 25 meeting five times a week for 50 minutes would allow only 10 minutes of editing a week for each student. But that adds up to 200 minutes of one-on-one editing per student by the end of the semester, a big improvement over what students get now, which often is zero. The usual written comments on graded papers lack the force of these personal exchanges.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 6, 2012 1:03 AM
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