Teaching Grammar and Grading Papers!

Over the last few weeks in my placement at Central Dauphin East Middle and High School, I have been able to read over a large amount of student writing. I was even allowed to bring some fiction stories that my 8th graders wrote home to grade on my own. These experiences weighed in heavily when it came to reading Image Grammar and "The English Teacher's Red Pen: History of an Obsession".  To begin, I would like to discuss a quote from the "Red Pen" paper: "I'll read your paper only until I get to the third error, then I'll stop and send it back," or "If you have more than two errors in your paper, it's an automatic F" (Zemelmen and Daniels 2). The mere fact that this is something any teacher would consider an option scares the crap out of me. Are these the kinds of people I am going to be teaching alongside of? How is it plausible to anyone that this would be a helpful teaching strategy for correcting students' errors? If this were my co-op's grading policy (it is NOT) about 95% of her students would have failed the last paper. They're not going to learn from a grading policy like that. My co-op has observed that if she overloads her students' papers with corrections they will glance at them and then simply toss them in the trash can. This isn't what I want from my students; I want them to want to improve! Perhaps this is too idealistic of me, but so be it. It shouldn't be about the quantity of errors...it should be about the category of errors. What are the common errors in the class? What are the common trends in writing (both good and bad) for each individual student?

As far as teaching grammar goes there are two methods I would like to play around with. One would be to hold certain designated "grammar days". My high school co-op devotes every Wednesday to grammar activities and instruction. I haven't been observing and present in the classroom long enough to measure if this method is as effective as possible. But to me, it seems as if the students appreciate knowing exactly what they will be doing every Wednesday. Because they know what to expect, they seem more comfortable in the classroom and ready to sit down and focus on grammar for about 45 minutes (we have really short class periods). Another would be to give mini grammar lessons when my students show that they do not fully understand a particular concept. Every class I teach is going to be different, so why set grammar lessons in stone?  I could also use the mini grammar lesson idea to introduce new skills right before my students will need them. This goes along with what I have learned from James Gee and his learning principles. His "Explicit information On-Demand and Just-in-Time Principle" states that the learner is given explicit information both on-demand and just-in-time, when the learner needs it or just at the point when the information can be best understood and used in practice. 

The "Red Pen" Piece

"For example, parents do very little evaluation or correction of their young children's early speech. They don't give two-year-olds feedback about their placement of adjectives relative to nouns or about the quality of their subordinate clauses...Junior will not go off to college saying 'I no like chemistry,' but  it won't be because his parents started correcting his earliest errors in the crib" (Zemelmen and Daniels 4).

don't explicitly say what is wrong but respond in the correct fashion. And he definitely picks up on it. Poor thing, living with an English teacher and an English major.

"In writing, on the other hand, we think that every word that every kid ever writes must pass beneath a teacher's red pen. And kids who risk writing anything imperfect, exploratory, playful, or over their heads are tld, in effect, "This is terrible. You flunk. Don't try this again until you can do it perfectly"(Zemelmen and Daniels 5). This quote made me think of a scenario in a piece I had to read for Teach for America. The piece was called "Assessment Through the Student's Eyes" and it discussed ways that current assessment practices simply segregate our students into those who succeed and those who fail, and from that, how these practices only serve to perpetuate these feelings in students. The piece proposed a few ideas for fixing this, and you can read them by clicking HERE! The scenario I am talking specifically about goes something like this:

Scenario 2: Help Students Turn Failure into Success

          Here is an illustration of assessment for learning in mathematics used to help a struggling elementary student find the path to recovery from a chronic sense of failure. Notice how the teacher highlights the meaning of success and turns the responsibility over to the student. In addition, notice how the learner has already begun to internalize the keys to her own success.
          Gail is a 5th grader who gets her math test back with “60 percent” marked at the top. She knows this means another F. So her losing streak continues, she thinks. She's ready to give up on ever connecting with math.
          But then her teacher distributes another paper—a worksheet the students will use to learn from their performance on the math test. What's up with this? The worksheet has several columns. Column one lists the 20 test items by number. Column two lists what math proficiency each item tested. The teacher calls the class's attention to the next two columns: Right and Wrong. She asks the students to fill in those columns with checks for each item to indicate their performance on the test. Gail checks 12 right and 8 wrong.
          The teacher then asks the students to evaluate as honestly as they can why they got each incorrect item wrong and to check column five if they made a simple mistake and column six if they really don't understand what went wrong. Gail discovers that four of her eight incorrect answers were caused by careless mistakes that she knows how to fix. But four were math problems she really doesn't understand how to solve.
          Next, the teacher goes through the list of math concepts covered item by item, enabling Gail and her classmates to determine exactly what concepts they don't understand. Gail discovers that all four of her wrong answers that reflect a true lack of understanding arise from the same gap in her problem-solving ability: subtracting 3-digit numbers with regrouping. If she had just avoided those careless mistakes and had also overcome this one gap in understanding, she might have received 100 percent. Imagine that! If she could just do the test over . . .
          She can. Because Gail's teacher has mapped out precisely what each item on the test measures, the teacher and students can work in partnership to group the students according to the math concepts they haven't yet mastered. The teacher then provides differentiated instruction to the groups focused on their conceptual misunderstandings. Together the class also plans strategies that everyone can use to avoid simple mistakes. When that work is complete, the teacher gives students a second form of the same math test. When Gail gets the test back with a grade of 100 percent, she jumps from her seat with arms held high. Her winning streak begins (Stiggins, Arter, Chappuis, & Chappuis, 2004; Scenario 2 adapted by permission).

I think this method (though used in a math class--ewwww) is awesome for both improving students' work and increasing their opinions on their own abilities. If we could integrate a practice like this into our classrooms our students would be so much better off!

If you're at all interested, or even still reading at this point, one of my favorite comic/grammar/generally awesome websites is The Oatmeal. You should definitely check it out.