The new school-imposed weekly writing assignment, the Write Way, requires students write a 30-minute essay based on a staff assigned prompt. In concept, it is a good idea. Students get regular practice writing under the pressure guidelines of specific time constraints, as in a testing situation. Sounds great, right? However, numerous flaws in the way it is currently structured negate what should be positive outcomes of the Write Way.
Because of this year’s statewide $8 billion budget shortfall, MHS student/faculty ratios increased from 11 to 13 students per faculty member. These numbers alone imply that based on a teacher’s regular lesson plan, teacher workloads increased 18 percent. With that statistic in mind, junior English teacher Mrs. Diane Elliot oversees 175 students, or roughly 30 per class period she instructs. In addition to her daily lesson plan, the Write Way requires Mrs. Elliot to assign an essay every week to each of her students. Thus, over the course of the school year, Mrs. Elliot must read and grade 6,300 Write Way essays. The hours it takes to accomplish this are unfathomable– which leads to the question: should the English teachers be solely responsible for grading the essays?
A plausible solution would be divvying up essay grading. Every certified staff member should be able to read and score a Write Way essay, especially since grading under the current Write Way policy does not require any sort of teacher feedback. If each faculty member were responsible for 13 (the student/faculty ratio) papers a week, the Write Way would not be such a laborious task for English teachers. Another option would be to lessen the number of essays assigned. If students were to write a Write Way essay once every two or three weeks, the teacher and student workload would be cut substantially, and teachers could refocus their time to provide beneficial feedback on essays.
Thirty extra minutes of writing each week seems like a small requirement, but on top of already loaded schedules of homework, extracurricular activities and jobs, those additional 30 minutes can be hard for students to set aside. Furthermore, after spending the extra time writing, feedback is not given on the assignments. Is simply the rigor of regular, timed writing supposed to improve students’ abilities? How is that possible without teachers’ feedback?
For some students, blowing off the Write Way is just another way to get out of class. If the essay is not completed at home, those students are required to sit in the hallway during English period and complete the writing. “The corral” ends up being almost a social gathering, and those students miss out on valuable classroom instruction time. Once again, where is the benefit in this program?
In addition, the policy from the get-go purported to be only a writing exercise. In past weeks, however, administration has broken this promise– the Write Way has been assigned to students for a summative grade. With the new 70/30 grading policy, a summative grade over the Write Way is unfair and a threat to students. Class grades should be a percentile of the number of objectives a student masters. The prompts, however, are in no way linked to class materials. Further, if they are never graded with feedback provided by teachers, administration cannot expect students to perform well when the essays randomly count as summative grades.
Another flaw, the Write Way assignments were supposedly formed to heighten standardized test scores, but providing arbitrary essay prompts like, “Write a story from the point of view of an apple sitting in a fruit basket on your kitchen counter observing life around it,” certainly does not reflect the type of prompts students see in authentic test settings.
To mend these imperfections, administration could provide multiple prompts in order to broaden students’ writing imaginations. If students were given a week after the assigned prompts, rather than a mere weekend to write their essays, it would lend a bit more flexibility to students’ busy schedules. Also, more complex, TAKS-reflective writing prompts would better prepare students for timed writing scenarios.
That being said, the administration needs to give the Write Way a complete overhaul, rethinking the true objectives of the program and how to achieve them – the right way.
by Quinn Murray
