Summary 11/28

Lindemann starts her chapter with a discussion on "basics." She and many other people in the writing field believe written exams do not measure a person's writing performance. This failure to measure makes it hard to tell if a person has basic writing skills or not.Cooper and Odel believe that a teacher should diagnose students' writing problems and provide good feedback to the students in order to help them become better writers. Lindemann believes that in order to diagnose students' problems, the student should write two different short papers about two different subjects. This should provide much information about the students' writing skills. But, some problems the student may be able to avoid so the teacher would not know the student is having a problem in that area. After reading a student's paper it is important that the notes that teachers left are useful to the students. This is complicated by the fact that many students see comments on essays has marks of failure and do not look at them to help improve their writing. Also corrections can be made by viewing the paper on a piece by piece basis (atomistic) or has a whole (holistic.) The last part of the chapter deals with the teacher's workload.

According to the "professionals" standardized testing does not work. Especially when it is writing standardized testing. What I do not under stand is, if standardized testing does not work then why would writing for the teacher be any different? Is it the cold nature of having someone you have never seen grade your paper? Or is it due to the weight that people sometimes give to these standardized tests. The idea that Lindemann mentions with the two short writing assignments has failures that even Lindemann agrees exist. But, I guess that it would provide a general idea on where the student is in their writing development. Then the rest of the year should be used to find all the little problems that student has. The cryptic notes that a teacher leaves on a paper also does not help the student has much has a teacher would think. But, the shorthand nature of comments is due to the work load that the teacher would have from their students.