A handful of students mouthed off about how their junior English teacher, Mrs. Thornton, hardly ever gave out hard assignments. As class went on Mandrell was pelted with more and more complaints about how her class was stressing the students to a level where they could not really focus on their assignments. All the class came together in unison and agreed that she was assigning them too much work. After some serious thought Mandrell concluded that maybe a change in the way the class was taught would release some of the stress put on the students and take away the worries of focusing on grades (380). After Mandrell was burdened with the complaints of her class, she went home to meditate on the day’s new found conclusion: the students thought her class was a nightmare.
By the time that we were in middle school, the majority of my friends felt that reading was a chore and turned their noses up at any books I'd suggested to them. It's only logical to conclude that there is some grievous error that teachers are making between first grade and junior high school. That's not to say that students cannot be rescued from this loathing of books during high school, but by the manner that high school teachers present them, that isn't a likely prospect. The serious decline of youths reading literature that Francine Prose notes in her essay is a depressing, almost tragic circumstance. If reading is exercise for the brain, then are teachers doing enough in other areas of education to promote thinking?
in my paper, I will write about my accomplishments, routine writings, and major strengths and how they help develop my writing skills today. All of the accomplished writing I produced came from papers I had to turn in for class. Some of them were research, others opinion, or reviews on books I had to read. The research papers were generally the hardest. These papers took the most effort, time, and reviewing.
treI haven't written a paper in about 12 years. Since I've just recently gone back to school, I have found it very difficult. When I was in high school I really enjoyed reading and writing papers, I have lately found that i have a hard time expressing my words on paper. I really do not enjoy writing. I do not have any misconceptions about writing I'm just very out of practice and I'm sure with time it will become a lot easier and feel more natural.
Writers share the rituals of writing—or not is an article by Geoff Pevere detailing the various rituals shared—and not shared—by an assortment of writers, ranging from poets and novelists, to journalists and cartoonists. I found this article both interesting and entertaining, but, as a writer, also very easy to identify with. According to Pevere, “the [writing] process always involves certain rituals of delay” (1). This “navigation of perpetual inertia” is definitely something that resonates with me as a writer (Pevere 1). For me, starting is always the most challenging and lavishly avoided aspect of writing.
She states multiple times that the children within the education system are being cheated every day because they are not being forced to read more difficult books. “Such benefits are denied to the young reader exposed only to books with banal, simple-minded moral equations as well as to the student encouraged to come up with reductive, wrong-headed readings of mulitlayered texts” (Prose 97). The reader can blatantly see that Prose thinks negatively of the high school curriculum that today's students face. It seems clear that Prose does not want to hide her personal view or feelings, so she starts her essay out in a way that we do not have to read between the lines to get a sense of how she feels about what she is writing. She uses more emotional language when she says, "The intense loyalty adults harbor for books first encountered in youth is one probable reason for the otherwise baffling longevity of vintage mediocre novels, books that teachers may themselves have read in adolescence"(Prose
Esme begins the book with the most prominent issue facing new teachers; discipline and classroom management. Luckily for Esme, she had a great cooperating teacher in one of her student placements. The teacher taught her to ignore bad behaviors until you can’t stand them anymore. In the school district I am at now, the discipline of the school is very strict
My feelings on the issue are mixed. Although I do support Fish’s and Blum’s position that a person should be taught and shown how to avoid plagiarism by their teachers, I also believe that a person who plagiarizes should be punished for what they have done. Last year, in my English class, our final assignment was to give a farewell speech to the class describing our experiences in high school and our goals in the years to come ahead for after we graduate. We had about a week to write this assignment and as a few days passed I still couldn’t figure out how I even wanted to start my speech. So, like most do when they need some inspiration, I turned to the internet to see if I could find something similar to the assignment I was assigned.
Now having to research and provide proper citings to given topics, of which I often had no interest. I began to detest writing, the practice of being forced to plan and propagate my thoughts on paper in fancy ways to “get ideas”. I always asked myself “what’s the point of ideas scattered in bubbles on a paper?” way too disorganized and it never once helped me to “gain ideas”. In fact nine out of ten times creating the prewriting exercises was harder than actually sitting down with a blank page and just writing because I was always able to just write what flows in my mind. Trying to compartmentalize and break it all down into generalized topics to follow made my work become overly stiff and choppy.
I was really sad that day. However, I always tried to learn English and speak better. I never gave up. For the next two years, passing the ESL (English Second Language) exam and proving my English skills to myself had been my dream. In my class and staying in the ESL class only became harder and harder for me to bear.