By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Sophomores spent 92 seconds Monday on their first piece of writing.
Since their second was a feature story filed from London for the New York Times, Union High social studies students were allotted a more expansive seven minutes.
Mark Dressel, who teaches teachers, even tossed in a little drama with the writing, contending that Elijah Wood equals "terrible acting," aping the mouth-agape stare that the "Lord of the Rings" star relies on for a range of emotions.
Dressel, of Grand Rapids, the author of "Writing About Literature: Ideas for the English Teacher," spent three days at Patrick Hamilton Middle School last August tutoring teachers on strategies for writing, a skill so fundamental that even English teachers receive little instruction in teaching it.
Dowagiac's school improvement team determined by evaluating Michigan Educational Assessment Program data that writing was the area on which the district most needed to dwell.
As seven DUHS social studies teachers observed, Dressel imparted to the world studies students an editing skill - reading their work aloud - in tiny voices the consultant likened to the hushed "I love you" his son Matt, a junior at Grand Valley, slips into his cell phone to "Ashley of Indiana" if the call occurs in the car when dad the driver is leaning into listening range.
Writing makes their lives more difficult, Dressel allowed. "Because, if I had to write down everything I said so far, instead of just talking, I would have to think about spelling," punctuation or capitalization. "There are a lot of things I don't have to worry about" with a verbal presentation.
Collins taught fifth grade in Boston and developed "Five Types of Writing," from remedial reading to advanced English. Dressel is in his eighth year since taking an early retirement from teaching.
In the 10 years prior to being introduced to Collins' strategies, Dressel noted there seemed to be two schools of thought for evaluating student writing.
There was gushing: "Everything looks good, great, super, terrific and everybody gets an A. Everybody likes that and it's easy to evaluate. Or, with varying degrees of rigor, you'd edit. You'd get that red pen and bleed all over the thing. In our English department there were two camps. I vacillated from one year to the next. At the end of the year I didn't feel like I made a big difference."
Collins advocated, "If you want kids to write a good thesis statement, make them write that as a Focused Correction Area (FCA) in the upper left-hand corner of the paper and tell them that's one of the things they're going to be evaluated on. If you do that, you'll get a better product … Kids liked it because every paper had the guidelines of what they had to do right on it."
Dressel returned to Dowagiac Sept. 24 to present to the entire district.
He will be back Feb. 22 for the professional development "in-service."
Dressel did four writing sessions with freshmen and sophomores Monday, including science from 7:35-9:06 a.m.; math from 9:14-10:41 a.m.; English from 11:17 a.m.-12:44 p.m.; and social studies from 12:50 p.m.-2:19 p.m.
Having the consultant visit as a follow-up to four days of writing training and to work individually with the teaching staff "works well," Principal Paul Hartsig said. "So often we just have the presenter lecture 170 people and not come in to do any follow-up. We are picking a class rom each department," such as general biology from the science department.
While Dressel taught the social studies class, Kurt Reich, Bob Kwiatkoski, Mike Stanger, Kyrie Krenz, George Sachse, Dan VandenHeede and Mike Williams watch how he interacts with students.
That's fitting because social studies is the second biggest chunk of writing when it comes to the MEAP test.
They take out two sheets of paper. Dressel directs pupils to print the NCA in the upper left corner and their names in the upper right corner.
They skip lines, marking every other one with dots "for two reasons. One, it makes it easier to read what you've written. And two, it makes it easier to fix things. Although, type one is a brainstorming activity you're not going to have time to fix" in 92 seconds.
The extra two seconds were a gimme because it was the last period of the day.
Their mental rummaging yielded seven other "what elses": grudges from past conflicts, whether it's a wealthy nation or poor, their general sense of right/wrong, culturally, how they were brought up, media characterizations, geography and leaders' effectiveness and politics in general.
Next, Dressel told them to fill in a three-part FCA: a clear position statement (10 points), explain two reasons (20) and write complete sentences (10/-2).
Students were told to pretend in the seven-minute segment that they were stationed in London by the New York Times for a piece analyzing why the British think differently than Americans.
Buttressing their topic sentence are reasons, such as Dressel's first example, "The speed on interstate highways should be lowered from 70 mph in Michigan to 55 mph, as it was 30 years ago, because it would save lives and it would save fuel."
Wood was his second example from a film he also faults for being too long. "Remember, this is just my opinion, but the movie stars one of the worst actors to ever grace the silver screen. He only has one expression, period, no matter what happens in the three hours of this film. It's hypnotic. If you've seen any movies that star him, he's like that. I don't expect you to agree, but I have given a specific example to support the reason that said there was bad acting.
Once time drains off the clock, Dressel has them review what they've written, using check marks to alert their instructors at shortcomings they can see, from indenting paragraphs, misspelled words and missing words to lapses in reasoning. "If any of your sentences sound funny, as in oh-oh, not ha-ha, check mark that sentence," he said. "Everybody in here should find at least two places where they could improve this paper as a result of reading it out loud."