Reply #12: Now, Here's the Reason I Started This Thread

[NashVegas]

A new national survey of high school writing instruction finds it lacking, with 50 percent of teachers reporting they are not prepared to teach students how to write well and rarely assign complex writing tasks.

The study by Steve Graham, professor and Currey Ingram Chair of Special Education, was published this spring in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

“The lack of writing and writing instruction was more pronounced in social studies and science, but even language arts teachers provided little writing instruction for their students,” Graham said. “Another disturbing finding was the sizable number of teachers who made few or no adaptations in their teaching efforts to assist weaker writers.”

According to the results, teachers rarely ask high school students to complete assignments that involve writing more than a single paragraph, and most common writing assignments involve little to no analysis or interpretation. Some teachers reported using a variety of effective writing practices, but indicated that the use was infrequent, removing their effectiveness.

http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/news/releases/2009/04/22/vanderbilt-survey-half-of-high-school-teachers-unprepared-to-teach-writing.78295

My first reaction to this was to try to remember what kind of writing assignments I was given in HS. Not all, but most of the more intensive ones were given in electives: mythology, film criticism, rhetoric & research, ie, classes that were designed for students who wanted deeper studies or college prep.

Aside from the idea that *maybe* HS English teachers aren't given serious enough assignments (NCLB, anyone?), to me this simply looks like just one more attempt to shift blame, or add a burden, to HS teachers for something that really isn't their province in the first place.

We've got several thousand self-promoting marketing "experts" wandering around Web 2.0 who spent so much time in IT and Electronic Communications classes, and not enough in Humanities, that they can't tell the difference between taking something "for granted," and taking something "for granite."