Self-evaluation and sudden realizations
Posted in Life, School, Teaching on 10/04/2006 09:50 pm by Katie“Use an immature and ineffective “knowledge telling” strategy when writing – each written thought or idea generates the next (sequential chaining).”
This was a description in one of my Curriculum & Instruction assignments of students who are “struggling writers” in their education. The unit is based on Assistive Technologies for students with learning, physical and mental disabilities.
Guess what, folks. That’s how I write. That’s how I’ve written since I got out of high school (maybe since I dropped out of FSU…I don’t remember any of the papers I wrote there). The last time a class emphasized the structure of the papers we wrote was Communications 110 last semester, and every paper I wrote there felt contrived and stupid. I write in a rambling sort of way. And yet, I have not been marked down for it at all in any recent memory. In college, I’m sure teachers are more interested in subject matter than in writing competency (outside of grammar, spelling and basic structure), but still…I thought I was a rather well-educated person, with good paper-writing skills. I’ve been getting good grades on papers as long as I remember. But maybe I’m just not that great at it, and no one’s been slapping my wrists about it.
In my textbook, there was also a section about “gifted and talented” students. I was one of those. Starting in 2nd grade, I got pulled out of classes to do creative outside work in the “Creative Learning Room”. In 5th grade, I got sent to a different elementary school to be in “the smart class” as we called it. In 7th and 8th grade, I was brought back in with all my old classmates, but still in the “smart” track. I don’t really remember taking many honors classes in high school, though. I took one AP course, but never took the test (because I was doing poorly).
Anyway, it states in the book that if given inadequate teaching, “gifted and talented” students may become “gifted underachievers, with social and emotional problems linked to boredom and lack of education.” That’s a pretty accurate description of me up until last year, which leads me to believe that maybe harder material in the smart classes doesn’t always equate to better achievement or appropriate education for students like me.
It’s just scary, when you look into teaching, and you find all these little mechanisms at work that shaped who you are as a person.
Creepy.
