This week's reading brought the half full/half empty glass dichotomy into the classroom. Benjamin's deficit model of teaching is the half empty glass with the teacher focusing on students' mistakes. Conversely, Benjamin's resource model suggests teachers look first for the strengths found in a student's writing, with grammatical mistakes demoted to less important. This made total sense to me.
Benjamin also dismisses as unnecessary many traditional writing rules like, never end a sentence with a preposition and never start a sentence with a "but" or "so." I also prefer informality in writing, and I think its all about just getting kids to write, period. Egregious mistakes should be noted, but I'm not sure you need to take off for them in content areas other than English.
I'm studying to be an Earth Science teacher. I suppose that if a scientist is writing a research paper for publication formal english is used. But when he or she writes lab reports, scientific journals and observations, the writing is informal. I think science teachers should embrace informal writing as long as the rule bending isn't egregious.
I'm taking a meteorology course this semester at Brooklyn College and every week the instructor assigns a good deal of written homework. I know what's he's doing. He's promoting learning by writing, and its working. The homework he gives is all essay questions and I think he knows that by making us write out the answers it helps us learn the material. He's not concerned with the grammar or if we're finding the right tone, as long as we answer the questions correctly.
My point is that my instructor is using writing assignments to help us learn science, but he's seems unconcerned about how we write. Would I model a class of my own on his teaching methods? Yes I would. Its great to have a powerful, witty of amusing writing style, but in some fields like science, style just doesn't matter much.
Benjamin's chapter 2 also offers a ton a great advice, from how to turn long-winded paragraphs into dense powerful writing, to how to focus writing assignments. Its great, and I feel I'm not just learning how to teach writing, I'm learning how to be a better writer myself.
I agree with your points that when writing comes to the different content area likes science and math, as long as students’ answer are correct, style really doesn’t matter. Informal writing is a quick and informal activity and teacher can do it frequently. The purpose of integrating writing in these areas is to help students building deeper understanding, give students chances to organize their thoughts related to the topic.
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