TYCA-PNW.ORG

First, deep thanks to conference organizers who provided so much enrichment in a very short time! Good jobs all 'round, Tammy, Jill, Kelly, Justus, and Jeremy.

It's tough to be the last presenters of a conference just as it is to pay attention to the last talk, but Gary Pollitt and Craig Baker's session on guided navigation to teach writing was REALLY lively and interesting. They teach explicitly and in discrete chunks all the skills needed for unpacking and analyzing a text, that is, the kind of skill that the AP students in your local high school get through an enriched reading and writing curriculum. Unfortunately, many of the students in cc classes have not encountered that curriculum and arrive at college, as Mike Rose tells us, seriously underprepared to read the world as academics do. Pollit and Baker's work breaks down the analysis of a literary text into steps on which students CANNOT fail. When they finish the sequence of steps, they have a claim, textual evidence supporting the claim, and analytic development of the claim. With time and practice, they learn the habit of analysis that underpins academic behavior. When I returned from the conference and asked the class to whom I'd just returned essays what I could do better, they suggested practice analyzing quotes. I used guided navigation to get them to draw an inference about Dickens' benign satire in Oliver Twist. They enjoyed the exercise and said more such practice would serve them. Time--and their next essays--will tell.