Student Writing Assignments and Class Sizes

["George F. Hayhoe III" <george -dot- hayhoe -at- SRS -dot- GOV>]

Three short observations from my years in the classroom:

1. Not every writing assignment needs to be read and graded by the teacher.
Journals should never be graded. Other assignments can be shared in small
groups with fellow students for feedback on content, style, and mechanics
(with a little training, students can be very perceptive in their comments
to peers). What's important is that students write as often as possible,
not that EVERY scrap of paper they produce be edited by a teacher.

2. No writing class is small enough--except the one-on-one conference
between instructor and student.

3. Lots of people talk about improving the quality of education, but when
it comes time to put up or shut up, few are willing to PAY UP. Good
education doesn't come cheap!

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I haven't diagrammed a sentence in years, nor would I want to. I DID do a
lot of heavy-duty sentence diagramming in my parochial elementary school.
It didn't seriously warp me as far as I can tell, but it did give me an
understanding of English sentence structure that I don't think would be
easy to get any other way--except maybe studying Latin, but that's another
story.