HOW I WAS TAUGHT TO WRITE

I am taking a fantastic trip down memory lane of how my writing skills developed and its all pleasant memories. I don't recall being whipped for not shaping my letters correctly by either my parents or teacher. During my days at infant school I  remember those activity books and language arts work books which asked us to shape letters and then eventually consonant blends and vowel blends. We practiced tracing the aforesaid blends in the language arts workbooks. There were also pictures corresponding to words that had the blends at the beginning , middle and end of words. Thereafter we would write list of words using the blends and finally we selected  several words and use them in sentences.Throughout these processes tracing, making vocabulary lists and forming sentences the teacher modeled the task, provided several examples, gave guided practice by having students come up to the blackboard to try out an example and thereafter we were left to work on our own in the language arts workbook. The teacher collected the workbooks for correction and then based on how well the exercise was done she would decide to move on to a new concept at the next class or revert to more guided practice to rectify the most common errors among the whole class group.

Later on in primary school we used a stimulus for writing paragraphs. Those stimuli included a picture of a scene we  students could relate to such as the beach or  a birthday party and sometimes there were several picture frames which we pieced together to form a picture story. Sometimes we thrashed around thoughts and  ideas as a whole class and the teacher put key words on the board. Equipped with dictionaries and thesauruses we would find meanings of unfamiliar vocabulary as well as antonyms and synonyms for words. Sometimes the teacher would begin a story for us to take cues from by speaking and writing on the board in unison, but other times independent practice would take place right away.Students were allocated a specific time frame to complete the writing task.  The only freedom may have been the title and to name unfamiliar objects whatever you wished. The best of students' own writing was placed in the writing corner and so that was motivation to want to write using the conventions that had been taught.However, by the time I reached Standard Two there were no more pictures or picture frames used as writing stimuli, just one topic that the class was expected to be able to write about.

During my tenure at secondary school, writing in the English Language classroom was an arduous and burdensome task. This was because I "wrote for the teacher", my writing fit into a mold based on content standards dictated by the curriculum. I felt like my childhood was being taken away from me in the English A classroom because we seldom composed short stories, dialogues or poems and I have no recollection of role plays. There was only one debate in Form 5 and I wished there could have been more-but that never happened. Writing was serious business and most of my 5 years were spent writing persuasive, argumentative and expository essays. Time in class was spent discussing topical issues related to various writing genres, writing conventions (punctuation, word choice, sentence and paragraph construction) using the recommended text, "A Comprehensive English Course" which was not the most student friendly text-much of the literature used to stimulate our writing seemed far removed from my life experiences. There were no teacher-student conferences to assist with my growth in writing. I just knew that I was at the level of attaining a General 2 pass for CXC and I needed to work harder...but harder on what ? That was not clearly explained because the assessment of my writing was often to find fault in what or how I wrote and not to make the what or how I wrote better.