Commenting on my post from last week, Dan pointed out that writing and reading are scarcely connected to each other in classrooms. He raises an important point. We haven't explicitly discussed the connection between reading and writing in our class, but reading and writing are complementary processes. Reading teaches people how to write; it's the process through which we observe how text is constructed and generates meaning. When Shakespeare wanted to write a tragedy, he didn't just sit down and begin writing Hamlet. First, he read a bunch of Roman tragedies, especially Seneca, to see how tragedies were written (incidentally, the Elizabethans were as familiar with the Greek tragedies as we are with the Romans - barely at all).
I had the pleasure of observing a class recently which had several good strategies for reading difficult texts: reading guides, integrated art projects that demanded textual evidence, and mock trials. To my increasing horror, though, they didn't follow up with complementary writing strategies. The same class is in the midst of a trial run of an online essay-grading engine. Students type their essays into this engine and it automatically grades them. For the teachers, this means they not only never have to grade their student's essays, they never have to look at them. This means no feedback for students on their writing and - worse - no motivation or context for their writing, because no one will ever read what they write.
Not only will their writing not improve, it stands the chance of getting worse. I worked with several students on improving the score the engine gave them. I helped one student improve a few of his introductory sentences, making them stronger in my opinion. When the engine re-graded his essay, it lowered his grade.
In theory, this engine is supposed to be tuned to the standards by which the eighth grade state writing test will be graded; and so it prepares students to pass the writing test. I can see this as a supplementary tool to a class's writing workshops, a concession to the demands of the state curriculum. The teachers working to implement the use of this engine, however, see it as a way out of not just grading essays, but of teaching their students how to write. As another teacher pointed out to me, this may mean that the teachers don't actually know how to teach writing.
I worry about the literacy of these students. I foresee their interest and investment in writing falling apart by the end of the year, and I wonder what it will do to their reading skills. It may, in the end, do nothing to them, because writing has been so decontextualized from everything else they do in the class. That may be the best-case scenario.
