I was very happy to read Spandel's comments regarding student's writing straying from the promt topic. In the scenario I read, I thought the students who strayed from the topic did more work than the promt asked. I was shocked to find that many teachers deducted points for these students when they went above and beyond what was asked of them. "Wander from my topic and you will pay" is somthing I was exposed to in school and something I see now in my student teaching and work at Tuttle. Ofter, teachers are rigidly bound to grading on what the directions suggest that the writing quality is overlooked.
Where Spandel called me out was on her idea that students should be offerred writing examples for the work we aske of students. I found myself asking students to do a writing assingment in my lesson plan, and had no samples to show them about what I was looking for on a particular assignment. Granted I had a few published writing examples to show them from Tim O'Brian's "The Things They Carried" but I had no specific samples regarding the assigments I was going to give them. This made me rethink my lesson plans, such that if I expected to have students do these assingments, I should do them too and show them to my students.
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I absolutely agree with your post. My one question would be: if we write sample essays to use for examples, should we dumb down our writing? I'm assuming here that we're all much stronger writers than the typical high-schooler, so would it be detrimental to provide an example for them that might be outside their reach? Or on the flip side, if we do water it down, how far is too far before we insult their intelligence?
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