The Composition Mastery Exam (CME) results for my two fundamental English classes were encouraging. For the most part, those who are ready to move on to English 1 passed the test, and those who aren’t, didn’t. This is a big change from a couple of semesters ago when even some of my best students didn’t pass or, which came next, some of my best students didn’t pass while others who weren’t strong writers, did. In other words, CME results seemed almost random. I interpreted that inconsistency as a problem with my teaching, which was easy to believe since I was new to teaching English.

I first worked at Solano in the Writing Lab to fulfill my practicum requirement when I was taking Ruth Saxton’s Theories and Strategies of Teaching Writing at Mills College. (Ruth was amazing and the course got me interested in teaching.) I continued on helping in the lab and sat in Sharyn Stever’s Creative Writing and Shari Pabst’s English 370 & English 2 classes. Bless Sharon and Shari for letting me not only sit in their classes but also for not getting too upset when I asked questions and generally was just as difficult and disruptive as their students. In Shari’s classes, if you can believe it, I was in class for the entire semester!

During my first semester teaching classes at Solano in 2006, I thought, even though I knew better, that I had some answers. I emphasized the creation of a writing arc, which I derived from the arc of a story, frequently called a checkmark story structure. With some modifications, the checkmark idea can be used effectively with a response, but I found that while my students could understand its elements, they had difficulty putting it into practice. Their confusion was exacerbated by my approach, which was overly theoretical. I talked of writing with particles and fields, which worked for me as a catchy idea because I’m a retired physicist, but which didn’t work at all for my students who didn’t necessarily find a structuralist’s approach helpful when trying to write a four- or five-paragraph compare-contrast essay.

That first semester as the CME approached, I felt my students sinking with me at the helm until I introduced a rather straight-forward outline approach to writing a response. That class was memorable because many students finally seemed to understand the they could always find something to write about with a structure that would work even if they were confused by the topic. All was well, I thought, with this prescriptive approach until I got the results back that first semester: Even some of my best students had failed to pass the CME.

The spring 2006 semester was followed by a summer 370 class that was way too fast for the majority of my students. We met for 2 1/2 hours four days each week for six weeks, and the students also were in the Writing Lab for a couple hours each day. For students who need to significantly change their reading habits and reasoning and writing skills, such a fast pace only works for the most dedicated. Many tried hard, but again the CME results were too random. I was so upset after getting the scores that I sat in the kitchen as my wife was cooking and read each essay aloud to her to get her opinion. I ended up overriding too many of those students, which is my prerogative as the teacher if I think the student can handle English 1, but I certainly didn’t feel good about doing it. I felt so bad, in fact, that I made copies of my students’ CMEs so that I could discuss them with other faculty to get a sense of what I was doing wrong.

If one has been properly prepared by failure to seek and listen to advice as I was, a few minutes can make a world of difference. One evening when I was working in the Writing Lab with Sharyn Stever, there were no students waiting, and I asked Sharyn if she would read some of those summer CMEs that I thought should have passed but didn’t.

“Analysis,” Sharyn said. “They’re not analyzing enough.”

Which made immediate sense to me, that my students weren’t relating ideas to each other with appropriate inferences, because in class I hadn’t stressed how cause and effect are used to create closure when responding to an author’s writing.

During the fall 2006 semester I began to spend a lot more time on analysis of readings and my students’ writings though I continued to emphasize the sentence-combining skills so many of the students need as well since they have difficulty constructing grammatically correct sentences that properly express logical relations such a compare and contrast and cause and effect. I also modified the repsonse template, but most of the corrective effort occurred in classroom discussions. The result that semester was most encouraging. Like this semester, those who were ready tended to pass the test, and those who weren’t, didn’t.

Since I’m now a convert to using templates to help students, an approach which is also stressed in the Writing Lab, I discovered, when rooting about the faculty text lists, a template-based book, They Say / I Say by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, that may be exactly what my English 1 & 4 students will need to take them to the next level in their writing.