After reading “Writing in the Work World,” I tend to agree with a lot of what David, Weller and Funderburgh had discussed. Once students exit high school, are they really “career ready?” All throughout high school, the main concern from every teacher and faculty board is to get students ready for standardized testing. Sure, you can have students memorize default answers, but how is that preparing them for the careers and fields that they’re about the enter? The fact of the matter is it isn’t preparing them for anything except how to be a test-taker.
The writing list people generated contains a wide variety of topics. Police reports, computer coding, and scientific notes are just a handful of many topics that had been discussed and thought about. Are high school students generating this list? Probably not. Giving students choice is a major key to gearing them up for success post-high school. If you want your students to leave high school on the cusp of being career-ready, they have to be trained to flexible in terms of what they write. That is the job of the teacher. The article even says, “we all agreed that standardized writing assessments would do little to prepare students for this range of writing” (David). Instead of teaching our students to be robots (purely memorizing), we need to introduce them to anything and everything so that they know what they want to pursue.
As an aspiring teacher, I’m a little concerned for the students in high school. Is there more writing flexibility now than when I was five or so years ago? If so, students are being trained before college the necessary career skills. If not, how can we expect them to be ready for these high-skill tasks in college? Expose them to a range of texts. Go over a sample police report, a scientific experiment table, heck even have them edit an email that was going to somebody’s boss. In order to be a successful writing teacher, one must be open to allowing your students the freedom to choose from anything that comes to mind. With this, you’re allowing them to be who they’re. We live in a time where knowing your students couldn’t be any more important. We need to learn their tendencies so that we can extract as much knowledge out of them as possible. Our attitudes have to be positive, and the idea of can’t or won’t is unacceptable as educators.
Writers Uncensored 