Teaching Practices Make All The Difference

I enjoyed reading Cheryl's blog; I can totally relate to it. I was a mediocre student throughout grade school. That is, the parts of it that I can remember. I wasn't really into writing too much but I was a book junkie from a very young age. It wasn't until I started working on my M.A. that I really began to take a serious look at my writing. I've always wanted to be a writer, on the best-selling list, and to become rich but not so famous. I've always kept a journal and I write a lot of poetry. I was taking a Shakespeare class, one that I initially dreaded but came to enjoy immensely, and the professor was reputed to be a number of explitively nasty things. She used a red pen! She marked every grammatical error, every MLA mistake, and had an endless supply of comments. When I received my first graded paper, I walked out of class with my head held in shame, embarrassed to look the professor in the eye, and feeling like a complete failure. Talk about humbling. I hated her! So I worked even harder on the next paper, triple checked everything before turning it in and felt confident that I did much better. It was returned smeared in red ink and I just said f..k it, she's unreasonable and nothing I can do will make her happy. To cut to the chase, she is the one professor who actually took the time to bring my errors of academic writing to my attention. I have to credit her with the fact that I now have relatively few grammatical or MLA mistakes in my papers. Also, her enthusiasm for Shakespeare rubbed off on me and I am now a fan of the mighty man. She has been, by far, one of the best teachers who I have ever met and I now have the utmost respect and admiration for her. Some of the expletives are true, and although she may have been a hard-ass, she never lost her passion for the subject matter that she taught. Armed with her red pen, she did her students a tremendous favor by taking the time to point out the errors of their writing. The other professor who pushed me to write; who commented on a piece of my creative writing, "you certainly can write" and whose passion for writing has been an inspiration to me, takes a much more relaxed position in the classroom and guides us to find our own voices. He gives just the right amount of guidance and a huge amount of freedom with our assignments. This huge amount of freedom can be frightening to a student who needs more structure when writing a paper, but it can also be very liberating and self-illuminating. As an educator and a student, I have been blessed to have both experiences. The perspectives and attitudes of instructors can make all the difference in the world to a struggling writer. I don't always agree with the theorists who say that pointing out students errors can be detrimental to their learning, it certainly benefited me. But I do agree with the idea that giving students enough freedom to find their own voices through their life experiences and imaginations is a positive approach to teaching writing. Therefore, my own approach to teaching writing generally falls somewhere in the middle of these two spectrums.