As a middle school English teacher, I wonder if I should give more assignments that encourage students to complete shorter tasks that are relevant to them. On the other hand, students need to learn how to read and write in order to be successful in high school and college. When schools develop curricula for different subjects, should they take this into account or should they continue using traditional methods and assignments? My students have little interaction with the internet, so when should they learn how to type and use email? Should these skills be favored over writing longer assignments?
These questions make me wonder what we value in education, specifically in English. Which skills will most benefit our students in their future careers?
1 comment:
While I agree that there is a LOT to be said in the article’s favor, mainly that longer passages of written work are becoming obsolete, to simply eliminate the lengthy writing assignments would be more detrimental than beneficial. From a purely academic stand point, any pursuit of graduate level work will include writing of some kind – whether a cumulative thesis, 10 page research papers, technical documents, etc. Not having the background in writing long prose would be a large problem for the graduate student.
I believe the problems do not lie in the assignments, but in the understanding of WHAT plagiarism is and what original thought looks like. A large part of this involves not giving assignments that can use clichés or have ready to buy papers on a website. Also, not many people will end up writing essays on the themes of a great work of fiction or historical event. They will end up writing technical job specific documents to be either published on a website, training manual, power point presentation, etc.
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