Knowing When to Push or Praise -Casey Van Attenhoven

Although I wasn’t necessarily sure what the entire purpose of “Inventing the University” was I found what Bartholomae had to say interesting. He sort of eloquently says students need to fake it until they make it in their papers. Try to do different and new things they aren’t familiar with because to Bartholomae its makes the writing better? I don’t believe that to be true. I do think though that for drafts and outlines on papers it could be fun and interesting to try something new and sort of out of the box or for a student to use vocabulary that is new to them.

Now with that being said I think that a lot of this goes into the idea of knowing your students and their work. If you have a student that isn’t a strong writer and struggles to get an essay done then they should be rewarded when they complete a grammatically correct essay that makes sense and is written well. On the other hand if there is a student where writing comes easily then they should be encouraged to try new things and do things differently without risk of penalty.  This reminds of a teacher I had my senior year of high school, she is the main reason I am so comfortable with my writing because she would push me. She would challenge me to try and do new things and as long as it was obvious I tried hard she would grade me more on my attempt than on the outcome. One of the my favorite essay’s came from her pushing me.

I know in the reading Bartholomae is talking about college students and it might be hard to know all of your students and their writing abilities when teaching college, but most of us are going into a teaching career in middle or high school and that is the place where we can make a difference. Bartholomae talks about how college freshmen are unprepared because of what they learned in their previous education so it is up to us as teachers to push them and make them prepared.