Teaching and Instructing Business and Dentistry

Often teachers, instructors and professors shape their class curriculum to meet goals created by themselves, or by school administrators to which they report.  The course work laid out by high school English teachers may fall within parameters set by the school district, such as to prepare students with a basic ability to comprehend readings, analyze, and then present a concise, supported argument based on the reading.  Public school districts have a responsibility to their communities to produce graduates with basic skills needed to become capable members of society.  Thus, in high school, English teachers are largely responsible to the students, and the communities in which they teach.

In the U.S. capitalistic society, since the government does not provide a free college education to each American, the college professor becomes more accountable to who is ultimately responsible for paying the students’ college tuition bill, the students, and less accountable to the community.  Therefore, each teacher’s goal for their class tends to be offering more advanced knowledge and skills in the class subject for which students register.  Teaching the more advanced knowledge and skills requires deep exploration of a subject by students through the use of research and critical analysis, and creating complex arguments.

At Lewis & Clark High School, in Memphis, WA, the AP English teachers create a curriculum that relies primarily on the use of the five paragraph and three paragraph essays.  Both of these essays contain an introduction, thesis, plan of attack, three main supportive points, and a summary/conclusion.  Students often assess the validity of a literary work, or compare and contrast two separate literary works.  Also, teachers facilitate the writing of essays as in class tests, with 30 to 45 minute time constraints, to prepare students for AP exams.  The teachers strive to produce students who can critically analyze a literary work, create a simple thesis, and strongly support that thesis.  Ultimately, the teachers want to impart this ability to compose valid arguments to students so they can apply it to situations in the future.

On the contrary, in college, professors frequently assign writing assignments to students with the goal of creating a deeper understanding of the class subject area.  Two types of assignments are often employed.  First, professors assign four to twenty page papers on a subject requiring research and conclusions that illustrate a thorough understanding of the subject material.  Second, professors can create midterm and final exams that include essay questions that the students must answer without any information being provided for on the test.  Instead, students must learn about the subject before the test and use this prior knowledge to answer the essay questions.  This contrasts high school essay tests, where the teacher provided the information to be used for the essay with the test. 

Interestingly, college professors accept and/or often prefer five paragraph essays on the midterms and finals.  Although, they require a more well thought out and complex argument than high school English teachers, college professors appear to appreciate the simplicity and structure that a five paragraph essay provides.  Grading papers based on whether college students learn the subject becomes an easier task when each student turns in a paper with a similar format.  The professors know exactly where on paper to look for points and support, and may find it easier to create an objective grading standard.    Although, college writing tends to focus on teaching the subject material to students and high school writing focuses on developing analyzing and writing skills, elements of high school writing can be extremely useful in a college class.   
Meta Analysis
I read through Chapter 1 of Reading Context and tried to keep my SA1.1 paper in mind as I was reading.  I asked myself questions such as “How can I apply an ‘Argument’ to my paper?”  After carefully reading Chapter 1 and attempting to understand all of its points, I began rewriting my SA1.1 assignment.

My first goal and a major change was to have a specific argument and stick to it through out the whole paper.  My initial in class writing was more of a list describing what kind of writing I did in high school vs. college.  I decided on arguing that high school English teachers taught writing skills and college professors used writing to force students to really understand the class subject.

Next, in hopes of making my paper more interesting and credible, I decided to delve into why high school writing differed from college writing.  This is the second major change of my paper. This part of the paper I am still unsure about and I find it difficult to decide whether to keep it or not.  Even though I think this information is interesting and adds credibility, it takes up approximately 40% of the paper.  Since, explaining the why is not part of the paper description, I am not sure I should have it be 40%.  Nevertheless, I got the impression from our textbook that going deeper into issues is part of college writing and that’s what answering the why does.  So, I am going to keep this part for now.

I also attempted to leave any broad assumptions or over exaggerations out of my paper.  Since I want to prove my thesis, I am often tempted to write down broad generalizations that are not necessarily true, yet support my thesis.

The largest difficulty I faced was trying to add a certain amount of specificity to give credibility and interest to my paper, without making my paper too long.  Therefore, I added “Lewis and Clark High School” and went in to some depth about the most frequent kinds of papers I have found high school teachers and college professors require students to write.  Yet, I did not make my detail or examples too thorough, in order to meet the two page maximum assigned by Christian. 

I would say I write much slower than the average writer.  One reason for this is that I am constantly rereading my previous sentences and paragraphs as I write.  As I do this I find grammatical and punctuation errors and I also make sure my paper flows together.   Thus, as I conducted a final self-edit, I found only a few errors.  Mostly, I took out words that I felt were awkward or superfluous, or added commas to sentences.

This second paper is better than the first because it contains an argument, the paper is written in line with the argument, the paper goes into more detail, and, to a degree allowed by the paper length limit, I critically analyze the issue.