Chapter eight’s concept of teaching students the art of writing an argument is indeed interesting.  Whether a template works or not, I’m not sure.   In elementary school, I used to love the exercises where we had to fill in the blanks.  They were easy, and they had a clear right or wrong / yes or no answer.  But as we grow older, we crave challenge.  If we don’t, its because we’re not understanding the concept, or it’s just boring. 

Ginny makes a nice point about the importance of engaging students in “cultural and academic debates”.  Debates challenge students to research and stand for what they truly believe in, to defend it.  A teacher’s job would therefore be providing a variety of intellectual and engaging topics for students to choose and work with.  Templates may confine student thinking.  I say this because when I started college, I had brought with me the idea that all that mattered was the grade.  I would follow the exact guidelines and templates of my instructors.  I would write papers based on the extent they agreed with the lectures.  But before long, I noticed I was not enjoying college.  I would receive the A that I desired, but the grade was still not satisfying.  This was the case until I took a class on Shakespeare plays, where the teacher helped me understand the material, required the students to take a stand on issues from the text, such as how it related to personal beliefs: i.e. bonds, honesty.  Then learning fell into place.  Debates enhanced learning. I didn’t learn to argue from a formula, but from a passion the professor helped me find toward the material.

In a previous comment I expressed my desire to acquire a more sophisticated vocabulary.  Graff’s section on A Word for Words and a Vote for Quotes reminded me of the vocabulary exercises I would do in high school.  In school vocabularies meant true/false or choose the correct definition from a/b/c/d.  Francois makes a good point about the method educators use in teaching vocabulary.  Memorizing was really not my thing.  But either way my school required that we memorize and learn twenty six words per week.  We had exercises in our workbook to help us learn the words, and quizzes to see if we had learned them.  But the teachers didn’t have time to explain each word, and we didn’t have time to really understand them.  So it was just another homework that was forgotten once turned in.  I had to restudy most of the terms for the SATs.  I succeeded, but not because of the vocabulary workbook we were handed in school, but because I had searched for different vocabulary software that helped me understand and digest each word through pictures, vivid examples and much more.  The best part was that I actually enjoyed the activities.  So my point is methods we use are very important in finding interest in the subject we are teaching.  Perhaps if we didn’t have to “memorize” 26 words per week, and instead worked thoroughly on only six, we would have been left with much more.

Chapter nine on criticism reminded me just how difficult understanding criticism can be for students.  I learned about literary criticism in English 325, sophomore year in college.  Every single one of our papers required that we read what critiques had to say about a short story, and then compare and contrast their opinions to each other.  We were allowed to jump in any time, but normally we had to take one side.  As if that was not scary enough, our professor would then return our papers having marked every single grammatical and syntax error he found.  We had to then rewrite the paper and hand it in to receive a plus on the letter grade we had received.  The class did help me understand criticism, but it didn’t help me enjoy writing about Literature.  Which is more essential I ask.