Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #WhyTheyCantWrite
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THREAD: I loved the chapter “What about grades” from @biblioracle’s #WhyTheyCantWrite. Does a S who goes from “D+ work” to “C+ work” deserve a lower final grade than the S who remains at a “B+ performance” the whole semester? Is this symptomatic of a broken scoring system? 👇 
As graders, sometimes we mistakenly focus on a universal destination (that’s devoid of any context) as that which determines a S’s grade. The Ss who get closer to this abstract destination get the superior grade, which reinforces inequality... #WhyTheyCantWrite #Ranciere18
What if we focused on each S’s starting point & focused less on an abstract outcome that effaces all considerations of each S’s unique situation? Grade the S’s journey. Perhaps it’s a way to move from extrinsic to intrinsic motivators... #WhyTheyCantWrite #Ranciere18 @MrShakedown
As the #WhyTheyCantWrite slow chat winds down I wanted to highlight some of the books that proved so useful to me as I worked on the book. These are in no particular order, but they're all recommended.
I'm going to use Amazon links because they're easiest to access, but I urge people to use their local booksellers, libraries, etc to access these books if possible.
"Air and Light and Time and Space" by Helen Sword. This is good to help reflect on one's writing process, but it's also interesting to see the conditions under which academics work and contrast them with the circumstances under which students often work. amazon.com/Air-Light-Time…
It's difficult to know where to start when it comes to today's paean on the changes to the College Board's AP exams written by Thomas Friedman, but I feel a thread coming on. nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opi…
My first thought as someone who is struggling to get #WhyTheyCantWrite seen by influential people such as Thomas Friedman is that I wish I was as lucky as David Coleman and had a NYTimes columnist as my PR agent. Here's another example from 2017. nytimes.com/2017/05/10/opi…
Heck, let's start with 2017 when Friedman repeated a College Board talking point uncritically as a nice little boost to his bud. nytimes.com/2017/05/10/opi…
The number of things that teachers are asked to "teach" that likely can't be taught, and even if they could be, can't be measured (though those at the top of the chain insist on measurement), boggles the mind. #WhyTheyCantWrite
In #WhyTheyCantWrite, I talk about how a concept like "grit" a useful framework as far as it goes, escaped the lab and took on a life of its own, and was applied in schools in ways Angela Duckworth, the popularizer of grit, even said were reckless.
I frame the chapter on fads through the work of Paul Tough who first wrote How Children Succeed, which helped advance the belief in the importance of character-based education (like grit), and begat prescriptive practices around these traits. This was supposed to be a panacea.
The Writer's Practice is a book that's meant to be use, not just read, and it can be effectively used over the course of years (not kidding). The book could be introduced in an 8th grade classroom and follow the student through high school and into college penguinrandomhouse.com/books/566892/t…
I use elements in The Writer's Practice every single day in my own work. Yes, I use my own book as a way to reground myself in what I'm trying to do when I get a little bit lost. This is why I talk about the writer's "practice." A practice takes practice. publishersweekly.com/978-0-14-31331…
Also want to thank @thejeffoneal whose graphic I used every semester and challenged me to think about writing a book which would embody the truth of what he says. I kept this in mind every day while working on The Writer's Practice. amazon.com/Writers-Practi… #WhyTheyCantWrite
