"Students' Rights" Response

It is not necessarily bad that a teacher guide the student’s writing to her tastes. If we look at the students as apprentice writers as the article suggests, we might think back to apprentice blacksmiths. Not all blacksmiths had the exact same ways of blacksmithing, but each master taught his apprentice his own preferences and methods as correct. For that master those methods were correct, and they become so for the apprentice until some other authority can convince him there is another way of being successful. I see teaching writing to be quite similar. Our students learn good style and good taste from us, their teachers. It does not mean that our good is good for everyone else, but it does mean that we pass our same notions of good writing on to our students until some other writing authority in their lives convinces them differently. Just like any other profession, teachers (i.e., masters) vary in ability level. Some may pass on a richer, or even a different, knowledge of the profession to the students. Our students become, in a way an outgrowth of our writing as they apply the skills we teach them—the skills that are personally important to us—to their personal development within the profession. So, yes, a teacher is subjecting her students to her limited style preferences, but isn’t that necessary for the apprentice to become the master?

One of the problems with what this text asks us to do is that it asks that we extricate ourselves from our Ideal Text and judge the students’ work in how effectively it communicated what the student wanted to communicate. However, to me, a teacher is going to interpret the text a certain way because in her mind there exists an ideal way to communicate. If the student does not meet this ideal, he will have failed to communicate to her and will therefore be told that he failed in his intentions. That means not necessarily that he failed but that he failed for that particular reader. It seems to me that judging students based on an Ideal Text is an inescapable issue that this essay does little to fix.