Memorandum Reflection

After completing my memorandum on the teaching of writing, I realized that I had a completely different perspective of what exactly a memorandum was. I thought that they were extremely short, brief, and to the point. I had no idea that some memos are multiple pages long. At first, I was extremely intimidated by the assignment. I had never wrote a memo that long before. I did not even really know how to write a memo. Once I realized how to write it and I actually started doing it, it came easier than I had imagined. I leared a lot by looking at the sample memo beforehand. I also was really happy that we got to bring a rough draft to class and talk about them in our groups. That helped me so much. I was able to ask questions and fix the problems I was having. After talking to my group about the memos, I really understood much better. I was able to go home and write my memo without any problems. I am happy that we had this assignment because this is something that I might have to do one day. I am glad that I learned how to do this now instead of later.
I learned a lot from the articles that we had to read and incorporate ideas from in the the memo. I learned writing approaches that I will definitely use as a future teacher. The articles really opened my eyes to how teaching writing differently affects how the students write. I have learned so much about effective teaching of writing approaches and I have learned some approaches the generally do not work so well. I will definitely implement some of the appropriate approaches into my classroom one day.

Things that I think could be different if this were done again would be to actually do the memorandum in groups or only write about the articles we read. I usually do not like groups work, but I felt like the hardest part of the memo was writing about topics in articles that I did not read. Even though I read my group members bibliographies, it is still not the same as actually reading the articles. It would have been alittle easier if we only wrote the memo on the articles that we read.
Something that I really liked about the project was that we were able to bring in a rough draft and have our group members go over it. That was extremely beneficial to me. I was able to work out my issues after I brought in the rough draft and asked my group for help.
This is a project that I am glad I participated in because I will actually have to use all of the components of this project in real situations one day.

Importance of Correctness

As I was looking through the book, Rules of Thumb, I noticed that there are so many rules that students have to learn when they first start to write. These are rules that come naturally to me now. I don’t even think about all of those rules when I am writing. When I was in school all of my teachers were sticklers for correct grammar, but never to the point where I felt as if they were not actually paying attention to the concepts of my writing. Now, I am so happy that they pushed and pushed me because I feel like it has helped me so much in college. I will have other college students ask me a grammatical question that I learned in 3rd grade. Therefore, I definitely believe that the correctness of writing is important.
However, when having your students write, I do not think that you should focus on the grammar. I believe that it obstructs their thinking process. I think that when students are so worried about writing correctly, they are not worried about what they are writing. If they do not have to worry about the correctness of their writing then they will really write what they are trying to say. There will be much more to their actually story than just correct grammar. I do think that if the grammar is completely off-based to the point where the reader does not understand what the writer is trying to say is not okay. I think that the author of this book says it well when he states, “too much concern about spelling, punctuation, and grammar can inhibit your writing; too little concern can come between you and your readers.”
As a future teacher, I think that when I assign a writing project I will have my students write and tell them to not worry about the grammar at all. Then, I will talk to them about their story, not the grammar. Then, I will have them go through and correct their own grammar. Then, turn it in. If it is done that way then the students will be able to write worry-free. Then, they can correct the grammar. I definitely believe that the content is much more important than the correctness of it, but I would want my students to understand that correct grammar is important.

What do I know

I have now read three articles about the teaching of writing. I have also discussed with my group some other articles. I have learned that When you assign children to write you can put them in groups. They can talk with each other about their writing and ask each other for help. They can assign roles to themselves and to the other members in their group. This helps children in their writing process. I have also learned that when students can write about a personal experience rather than a topic given to them by the teacher, they write much better. Students want to write about an experience. Students enjoy writing about topics that they are familiar with and know a lot about. Personally, I would much rather write about a personal experience than a random topic that a teacher assigns that I am not interested in. I am knowledgeable about the topic if I can relate to it. I think that students write better when they can relate to the topic. Another important thing that I have learned is that you cannot teach all students the same. Some students will need that extra effort to get them into writing. English language learners, for example, usually have horrible experiences with writing. They have been taught that literacy only occurs within the classroom and that is all that they can write about. If you take those students and just have them talk about their lives or their experiences they become interested. Once they have talk about those experiences then you can ask them to write it down on paper. Most of those students just want to tell you their story. They want to tell you that they think that making money out in the field is more important to them than writing about useless information that they will not need in their future.
I have learned that everybody is different. Different styles of teaching will cause different styles of writing. All in all, letting the students write about their own life experiences seems to be the most rewarding.