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Tatiana Cortes November 30, 2013 LAE 3333 Amy Piotrowski Case Study When studying to be a teacher, gaining

real world experience is invaluable. Having the opportunity to actually grade students writing in a teaching writing class made the class incredibly helpful. I learned so much from my field experience reading and grading Mr. Filalos students paper. Though it sounds fatalistic, I learned to not expect students to be great writers coming into the classroom. I need to remember that that is why they are in school, to learn to become good writers. I should not judge students whose writing abilities are not very good, understanding that everyone has their unique strengths. It is my job to take them from weak writers to effective writers, a challenge that I accept. As a future teacher, I learned how large of a load grading many papers at once will be. I only had to grade, at most, eleven, and took me a very long time. Imagine 120 papers! The process of learning how to help students be better writers by writing has also been helpful. I have learned that when I respond to students writing I need to not only criticize, but give encouragement as well. This is the tricky part: Showing the student a balance of what they have done wrong and what they have done right. If you are only showing the student what they have done wrong they will be discouraged, and feel like writing a good paper is just too much work. If you show them that they have also written well in some areas, they will see that they are able to write well and just need some guidance. As a whole, though, I do understand that as I practice and learn what I need to look for in students papers, the process will get easier and faster.

I noticed that many of the students struggled with similar things in their writing. They had problems with the structure of their papers, keeping focus, creating effective support and syntax, and using correct grammar. I gave a lot of feedback concerning these elements. When it came to structure, students did not seem to know how to format their persuasive and narrative papers, with introduction and conclusion paragraphs, as well as good transitions. This goes hand in hand with support. Many students did not know how to include effective support that would help advance their argument. Their rhetoric and syntax choice would also have helped their papers. Many of the students sentences did not make sense in the context of their paper and their word choice was very poor and unprofessional. Rhetoric and syntax could also have been strengthened through the use of proper grammar. Punctuation was very poor; most students did not know when to put a period or a comma. Also, there were many incomplete sentences that took away from the strength of the paper. As I said earlier, it is important to show students what they did well as well as what they did wrong, and in the papers that I graded, there were many things that were done well. The papers had a lot of voice and showed a lot of creativity. I felt like the students truly believed in their arguments and had a lot of passion in their writing. With a bit of guidance, these ideas could be developed and made into very effective papers. I really enjoyed Mr. Filalos visit to our class. I felt that his visit shed light on what it actually looks like to teach writing in the classroom. He reminded me that many of the students that I am going to teach will come in as very poor writers and will have very little experience with writing persuasive and timed essays. I need to be aware of this reality and not go into the job with lofty expectations. I also learned how to grade a paper holistically. While I dont necessarily like holistic scoring, it is important to learn how to do it because it is how my

students will be graded when they do any standardized writing for a state test. It is important to know how to look at a paper as a whole. While there will be a time and a place to look at a paper in its parts versus holistically, it is vital to know how to do both.

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