On Autopilot

The introduction to the Deeper Reading chapter seems like a scene from my life! I often drive down to Springfield from home and with everything that is going on in my mind...I look around and realize that I had already driven 100 some odd miles without any recollection of how I got there. This is exactly like a teacher and Gallagher makes a good connection between that and reading papers. Sometimes you can be totally involved in reading one student's paper and then not at all in another's. This isn't really fair to the students, but it still happens. Whether we, as teachers, are completely involved in the drafting process, we must completely immerse our students in their own writing. Some of the ideas present in this chapter seem that they would work really well. The ways for students to understand and retain information from texts that they are required to read are really helpful though. I think that character charts would work really well, if the students did the work. We have a character chart in my field experience right now for To Kill a Mockingbird, but students don't always fill it out the way they are supposed to. If they were more willing, they would probably get more out of the assignment, but students don't always, if ever, think that way.

These two chapters are very intertwined. It is interesting to see that both of the writers have similar ideas regarding the writing/rewriting and draft process. The key point in both of the chapters is to create student involvement and really get them interested in their writing. I think this is really important and agree completely with all the points. I thought the part about the multi-genre writing was interesting also. The papers that we graded incorporated this, but not effectively. I thought that the poems, charts, information, etc. was just thrown into the paper to meet the requirements. Although this was only their second draft, i figured that they would know how to incorporate them a little better. I think multi-genre writing would be very effective if used correctly. Finally, the part about grammar and information in the paper is important. Some teachers focus too much of a grade on solely grammar, but what is important is what the student has to say. I love grammar and, unfortunately, focus on that often when I am reviewing the papers. I really need to focus more on the information, rather than mechanics. As usual, these chapters really pointed out some great points....that's probably why we are reading them!!!