Teaching students skills that they will take with them for the rest of their academic careers or just their lives, in general, is something that should be done because it will only wind up benefitting the student. Teaching students how to recognize genre is definitely important because, in my experience, myself included need to either look up the genre or try and look in the back of the book somewhere for it. We should be teaching students skills that they will continue to build on because it will just set them up for success later on. If all of the writing teachers continuously use the same essay format that we used in middle school, then what are we actually learning how to do aside from just honing in on the one basic essay format?
Teaching students about discourse, and how relevant it is in our everyday life is important because I had no idea what discourse was until my junior year of college. I do not even think I once learned about it in high school, and it is important to know for writing because it can be used to have your own voice in writing and challenge ideas.
Doing activities with students in which they are applying what they know to real-life situations is something that was hardly ever done in my time in school. Writing should not just be this very simple subject that is only done to analyze stories or books that were read in class just to make sure you understood the meaning. That should only be a small piece of the puzzle, and it has minimal to do with your own opinion and writing with your own voice. The writer is just using the information given to them, and they are not allowed to go “off-topic” or they will get a bad grade for it since they are just analyzing or regurgitating.
The way writing is being taught now is not the most effective way as Beaufort says, and it definitely is a hard task because what is most important to teach the students is subjective from person to person. For the younger students, one can argue that the way it is being done now isn’t too bad because they might need those basics.
However, once you feel like they learned those basics, challenge them, and with scaffolding, they can get there. From middle school up to college, writing should be taught the skills that will help them later on, instead of learning it while they are in that class. If you get a professor that just assumes you know how to challenge ideas or learned those transfer skills, then that class won’t be what the professor wanted it to be since they have to spend time teaching the basics that the previous teachers should have covered. Not saying there is nothing wrong with a little review, but the point still stands.
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