Sherpa Raquel 3/27

Since there was no class today, this sherpa blog will be about the Zinsser reading, and thinking about the essential question "how can writing help students to learn?" Before reading, what automatically came to my head was the story of a man who suffered from amnesia. He was at the hospital and he couldn't remember his name; this was a huge dilemma because he was brought in by a good Samaritan who saw him get hit by a car and nobody knew who he was. The man woke up in a haze, not knowing anything about his identity, and the doctor cleverly thought of a way to have the man remember his name. The doctor gave the man a pen and paper, asking the man to sign it; sure enough the man, without thinking, signed his real name. The doctor knew that the connection from brain to hand in itself is a strong memory; we have short term and long term memory but the hands memory is a little different I guess.
Some people are naturally great writers, they know how to get their point across, to be precise, and demonstrate their understanding with a wide range of vocabulary. Others aren't so fortunate, they tend to ramble, not able to make a point etc. For example, the students of Norman Walbek mentioned in Zinsser's excerpt. tHis students rambled until he gave them guidelines or a rubric on the paper, then he said they did much better when they knew that clarity, logic, precision, common sense were all at hand while grading.
Another important professor in this excerpt was Professor McRostie- an International economics and management teacher, taught how to write in his first three lectures. He said that without reasoning and writing, economics won't take you very far which is true. His theory is everything that we've been learning in this class so far; even though some of our content areas dont have much to do with writing, it is a necessity and without literacy, one doesn't have much of a chance for success. Every student needs to be a good writer for all their subjects because writing shows what they know
Writing is a way of understanding, writing is physically getting our thoughts out on paper. Our hand is the tool. "A piece of writing is a piece of thinking." p. 50, I believe this to be a strong quote. Every time you pick up a pen to jot something down, are you not thinking about what you are writing? regardless if it is something short like a "To do list" or a compare and contrast essay on Dante and Petrarca you are putting thought into it. Writing is a thoughtful process. So by teaching writing, you're teaching how to think! And what is thinking? thinking is learning, thinking opens the door, opens the mind to take in knowledge.

The person who i nominate to be the next sherpa blogger is Larry D.