On assigning and grading freshmen essays

It may be a little known fact that being an English teacher is time consuming. In order to alleviate the paper load many teachers may assign fewer writing pieces, especially papers. Some teachers can effectively get students to write without assigning a great number of papers, and still others say that a teacher must assign many papers, because we need our students writing often and wring well.

I agree with both ideas...to an extent. A teacher must assign writing, but relevance is the key factor in getting them to write,  let alone to write well. If I simply told my students that we would be writing a story one day and the next that we would write a letter, they'd probably question my intent. Hey, I would question it. There will be a blog to come on what it looks like in the eyes of a student to write irrelevantly. Students need context, generally speaking. There are those students who don't need it and those who love to write no matter what. They are God-sent.

Relevancy means that the writing is embedded in context. Context is not only improtant to them, but it is important to a teacher, too. It is what helps teachers keep their content connective, and it forces them to answer that ever-looming question, "So what?" So, teachers, if you find that you have too many piles of papers or that you sit for too long trying to figure out how to grade what you've assigned, maybe that's a sign that the paper load isn't worth the fight. If you are struggling to keep up, maybe the students are too. I'm definitely still learning this lesson!

As far as formal writing units go, I cover a few during the fall semester.

• Effective journaling (we do this throughout the semester)
• Essay writing (argumentative, persuasive, and informative)
• Autiobiographical incident
• Much, much more writing is covered, but I take specific time for these. 

We just finished the autobiographical incident piece, and I'm about a week late in getting them back to the students. (This post is as much of a direction for me as it is for other teachers!) 

But beyond that, what made this writing so connective what that student immediately had a wealth of knowledge about their content--themselves.  They take the ideas of journal- type writing and the formal structure and create it while I give them examples from others students, my own examples, and as we cover a number of writing strategies. 

What I love about this writing is that it is automatically theirs. Ownership isn't something a teacher must force. It is just...there. 

Comments. I had a very helpful professor who said the most beneficial corrections were those that the student sees himself, which many times are encouraged by the comments in the margin, not the grammatical red marks. We want them to want to write.