Writing coaching: Living the Achievement Gap

My first experiences with coaching young writers has certainly been eye opening. Over the past year and a half since I've restarted my own educational journey as a Master's student at UW-Milwaukee, of course I've learn a lot about the theory of teaching English to students, about what to expect in the classroom, and about how I can best use my own expertise to assist students in becoming better readers and writers themselves. However, as is so often the case, there's is nothing quite like getting that hands-on experience.

The progression of the students I have worked with so far has turned out to be very much like turning on a video game for the first time. As we began working with students from Kohler High School, I was somewhat shocked to see the impressive level of skill from these young writers. Both students I worked with introduced themselves as freshmen, but when I read their essays, I felt very much like I was reading the work of freshmen in college, not high school. It was a joy because although I felt like I didn't have all that much to teach them to be perfectly honest, I found myself able to really focus in on some higher-order issues that they could work on, as well as being able to offer plenty of praise.

As the next waves of writers began to roll in, however, it became clear to be that the first round had merely been the game's tutorial, and now that I had pressed "OK" to acknowledge I understood the basics of game play, I was being fully thrown into the fire. While there were certainly positive things that I could see in the writing from the rest of the students I worked with, there were a number of mechanical issues that I felt I needed to help correct before I could even begin to attack the meatier issues of their content. The basics of punctuation usage, capitalization, singular/plural agreement and sentence structure were real problems throughout the essays of the rest of the students I worked with, in some places making it hard for me to even understand what the student was trying to say, which of course makes it difficult to engage students regarding higher-order concerns.

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, the disparity between the students from Kohler High School and the other students I have worked with is another example of the black/white and urban/suburban achievement gaps. Kohler is a suburb of Sheboygan, which is itself a suburb of Milwaukee. It is populated with families of relatively high social-economic status, and is largely composed of white people. The other students I worked with were from the city of Milwaukee, many of them were students of color, and the areas they come from are substantially lower social-economic areas. I won't attack the causes of this issue in this post, or it's solutions -- that has been and will continue to be covered ad nauseum by those much smarter than me. But I hope that the work that I do with students can contribute to helping to close that gap.