On Writing and Other Educational Endeavors

I am not a great writer and probably never will be. I do hope though that I am able to convey ideas accurately and in an organized fashion. I know that there are many people who have a natural flair for writing and don't have to work at it too much. But I think there are probably a lot more people like me than like that. In teaching my own children in our homeschool, it is all too easy to avoid the hard things, and I've become more convinced the harder something is for me or my kids the more we need to work on it. This quote from I'm the Teacher, You're the Student (book I wrote about in an earlier post) even uses the music analogy that I have used before. It isn't just applicable to writing, but in a lot of educational endeavors. It also can be instructional for us as homeschoolers to know areas of potential weaknesses in college students.

Most Emory undergraduates are bad writers; most Berkeley undergraduates are bad writers; and I know from talking with my academic pals around the country that most students at Yale, St. Louis, Stonehill College, Colby-Sawyer College, Hiram College, Notre Dame, and Duke are also bad writers. They have not done enough writing to become good at it. They've been cursed with a lifetime of multiple-choice examinations instead, so even the highly intelligent ones come to writing as a strange and alien activity that is occasionally forced upon them. But writing is an activity that needs constant practice if you're going to be good at it. It's like being a violinist--if you once had a few lessons but then got into the habit of picking up the violin just four or five times per year, you would not make sweet and beautiful sounds on it to delight an audience. So it is with the students' papers. They haven't written much, ever, most of them, and they don't really know how to do it, with the result that they can't convey their knowledge and intellectual ability in writing.

Dr. Allitt goes on to explain other problems in students' writing--one of which is grammar. Mistakes in grammar he finds in students' papers are subject-verb agreement problems, mixing tenses, misuse of past participle forms in verbs, misuse of apostrophes, and lack of understanding of the use of the pluperfect tense. Confident usage of these things take practice. If the teacher/homeschool parent doesn't know these things, she will be unable to help her student correct them in writing. If the teacher/homeschool parent does know them, she will be much more able to help her child in his writing. Much can be learned about grammar in the context of writing if the parent is educated herself. So learn that grammar with your kids! You'll be glad you did.