Day 2: Educate us on something you know a lot about or are good at.

I spend my days from August to May as a reading teacher, so in essence, that is what a great deal of my energy and attention goes to in any given year. 

Along with reading, though, I am fascinated with the art of writing!  I believe it is a skill that is often skipped over in schools as it is challenging to teach. or grade. or make time for.  With that being said, writing is a life-long skill that can shape a person's future or crush it in a heartbeat!  

I was an English major in secondary education, so I had to write my fair share of analytical essays that then went under the scrutiny of a well-established professor of the English language.  If you want a humbling experience, write something you think you did well on and hand it to one of those guys.  They are brutal~  It was through this experience, I learned I had little exposure to authentic writing as a student myself, which led to my lack of writing eloquence as an undergraduate. 

Then I married my husband-the civil engineer, who spends a great deal of his time crunching numbers, but also a fair amount of time writing reports.  He brought home a report one time for me to look over, and I quickly learned the jargon of engineering, but I also learned he never developed the ability to put a comma anywhere in his sentences.  Eeek! 

Writing has become my passion-or at least one of them.  I strive everyday to not be the teacher that demolishes students' papers, because I've been there, and I know how horrible it feels.  At the same time, though, I know now how important it is for students to understand where a comma goes, so you can't just deliver the positives and forget the feedback to improve.  It's a balance between well done and identifying opportunities for growth in their own writing!

Throughout my years of experience, I have run across various statistics in writing. For my teacher friends, this may be a little frightening, but it simply illustrates how powerful good writing can be or how consequential ineffective writing instruction is.

Approximately 70-75% of students in grades 4-12 are low-achieving writers  (Persky, et al., 2003).

Very few teachers require their students to write more than a few hours per week, and 2/3 of students say their weekly writing assignments add up to less than one hour  (Applebee and Langer 2006).

81% of employers describe their employees as deficient in written communications such as memos, letters, and technical reports (Conference Board 2006).

The nation's private companies spend an estimated 3.1 billion per year-and state government spend an additional 200 million-teaching their employees to write. (National Commission on Writing 2004).

This is one of my passions in my job-to teach writing every single day.  If every teacher incorporated some form of authentic writing into each lesson, think how different these statistics would be!  Our statistics say we really aren't doing a very good job of giving students the tools they need to formulate their own thoughts and opinions into written word, and I am hopeful that Common Core will help us regain our rigor for writing!