Week 5

This week in class we read an important essay about a fictional student, Dora. Dora showed how a student usually responds to writing and grammar if only given the right prompts. It impressed me how the teacher handled the situation in order to give her students as much free learning and exploration as possible. One of my favorite parts in the essay is when Dora is learning to separate her words. At first all Dora’s words run together, followed by being separated by ‘dots.’ Dora puts her ‘dots’ in between every word before hearing the teacher calling them ‘periods.’ This was amusing to me because after a while Dora starts calling her ‘dots’ ‘periods’ and still puts them in between every word. It was also fascinating to see how Dora’s language and writing skills improve over time. I was furthermore blown away by the confidence that Dora achieves by simply being able to explore with grammar and writing. My only question would be that why do college professors not teach writing by letting the writer explore with writing? It seems to me that exploring in writing would be a great tool in analyzing or expressing something without the constraints of rigid rules.