Teaching kids to write well

[Shelley Larock <larock -at- TYCHO -dot- ARH -dot- CDC -dot- COM>]

I'm another one of those parochial school kids who learned to
diagram sentences quite well.  I guess I saw it as more of a
game than actually *learning* something (hats off to Sister
Mary Edwards!).

When I was in fourth grade I was reading at an eighth grade level.
When I started public school in the fifth grade I was forced to
read the 5th grade level books, because they didn't have a teacher
who would teach higher level reading to younger students.  So
I went to the public library and checked out some "good" books--
books that challenged me.  Was I a "nerd"?  You bet!  Ask my
friends (who, of course, weren't my friends in the 5th grade).
I didn't know what most of the words meant, so when I read,
I had a dictionary with me so I could understand what I was
reading.  Pair that with some Coke-bottle reading glasses
and I was your typical bookworm!  (My dad has a picture and
says he's going to use it to really embarrass me some day.:) )

When I got to high school I had to do a lot of writing in
my English classes.  I can handle people editing my writing.
I can even handle a person telling me to rephrase a
sentence so the meaning is clearer.  But what I couldn't
handle was a teacher grading a paper down because she (yes,
this particular teacher was a female) didn't like the
subject I picked to write about.  We were given two grades
on the paper. The first was a grade for grammar, punctuation,
spelling, etc.  The second was a grade for content.  Not
creative abilities or anything, but how the teacher liked
the subject.  My grades were always something like A/D,
A/D-, etc.  I could never understand how I could get
a failing grade for my imagination.  At one point I even
took my papers to another teacher who taught a different
section of the same class.  She said my papers should have
receive *much* better marks than what they did.  Unfortunately,
she couldn't change my grade.

That was _very_ discouraging to me.  That was my junior year
in high school and I certainly wasn't looking forward to my
senior year and "Advanced English".  It took me a while to
realize that it wasn't that I had a poor imagination, just
a poor teacher.

I aced both senior English and Advanced English in my senior
year and now I am a soon-to-be-graduated WRITER!  Ha!  Ha! to
that teacher I had!

Shelly
larock -at- tycho -dot- arh -dot- cdc -dot- com