Chapter 4: The Devil's in the Details

I read this chapter first and felt that a lot of the strategies were unrealistic. There were so many "Don'ts" that I was doing and I couldn't understand why they were wrong. HOWEVER, after going back to chapter 1, once I got to 4, it all made sense to me. The scaffolding was perfect and right on time. How many of us have told our students when answering a question, they are to begin their response by restating the question? Over and over again, as I read this book I keep thinking, "You don't have to teach the test, if you teach the students." All of the skills and strategies you teach in the beginning will give them all they need to answer any prompt. Teaching chapter 4 explicitly will be needed to show students the correct and incorrect way to go about their writing. It will also be quite funny and eye opening for some. For example, as you remind your students not to write in one big, long, blob of a paragraph minus indentions, and they look down and notice that's exactly what they've done in the past, you can stress the fact that this writing looks immature and becomes confusing to read. I thoroughly enjoyed this chapter.