Day 10: Bad Writing

Agenda:
Homeroom
Class: Pre-AP Sophomores
Free period for rubric planning
Class: AP Lit Senior
Lunch
Prep Period

Students today spent time working on their papers in both English classes. In the senior class their rough draft was due. They put some final touches on them and then hand them to us to read. I was really surprised at how the students wrote. I expected them to be better writers because they were in AP. A lot of them didn’t have any quotes from the play they were writing about in their papers and many of them were badly organized. I started to think about it and really I’m not sure why I thought they would better writers. Just because they are in AP doesn’t mean they are automatically good writers. I know that when I was in high school I was in AP because I was a better writer than many in my grade but the class itself is what made my writing good. I wonder if maybe I should do an intensive writing unit with them. I don’t think they have gotten as much practice writing as I think they need. AP at my school was all about the writing because we knew we were going to have to take the AP exam and in order to do well on it you needed to be able to write a decent essay in 45 minutes or less. How are my students going to be able to do that? I think I need to review essay writing basics with them and then allow them to break the rules. I think we need to talk about audience, point of view, objective, and subject again and how all of these things affect what we write. I think I need to dig out some of my old papers and show them some examples of the good, the bad and the ugly so that they get an idea of how to write a good paper. And maybe I need to have them take a few practice AP tests to show them what they need to be able to do in a short amount of time. It makes me sad to think that even the writing of AP students is not good. I know that a lot of students in regular classes don’t write well also. Why has writing gotten to be so bad?