Writing What We Teach

The Writing What We Teach assignment seemed beneficial both to myself and to my students. Through my composing the textual analysis assignment with them, the students were able to visualize the techniques discussed in class and see them put to practical use. As I learned last semester, the students seem to struggle most with this particular paper, so I think it helped them feel more comfortable and confident with their own writing.

I chose to use a piece that wasn't from The Presence of Others, so that students would not be able to model my own paper. However, I feel that by seeing my use of introduction, thesis statement, and topic sentences, they were able to better understand how to put these concepts to use; the subject didn't matter--it was the method of execution that they needed to see. This ended up producing far stronger papers than I received last semester, and it also helped me to explore what I like to see in a good textual analysis.