Did Balance Literacy Fail to Teach Your Child to Read? – radical eyes for equity

Did Balance Literacy Fail to Teach Your Child to Read? – radical eyes for equity

Did Balance Literacy Fail to Teach Your Child to Read?

For 36 years now, I have been teaching people to write; that journey is a large subset of my own being and becoming a writer, an experience that is captured well in an old Nike poster I used to hang on the wall of my high school classroom, proclaiming “There is no finish line.”

For the last decade-plus, I have taught first-year college students to write. While I am teaching writing, however, I also am teaching young people how to do college, how to make the important transition from being a student to being a scholar.

Part of that work is unlearning bad habits from high school embedded in traditional approaches to writing essays.

Here is one of the worst: Many students come to college having followed a narrow writing process in which teachers require students to submit a one-paragraph introduction with a direct thesis statement. Once approved, the student is then released to write an essay that fulfills that approved essay thesis.

This instills in students two incredibly misguided practices. One is writing with a level of certainty that an 18-year-old has yet to reach (particularly on topics about which they have only second-hand knowledge); and another is failing to see drafting and writing as an act of discovery, as a journey to understanding ideas better.

Neither of these lessons from high school serve young people well in their CONTINUE READING: Did Balance Literacy Fail to Teach Your Child to Read? – radical eyes for equity