The fourth educational myth Correcting texts

The fourth educational myth:          Through correction the teacher learns the strong and weak sides of the student.

4                   Through correction the teacher waste valuable time and sometimes don´t have time to learn the strong and weak sides of the student.

The teacher training schools do emphasize good procedures in correction of the written material produced by the.

In some school teacher put up to a third part of their totaI working time with their correcting of the students’ texts.

Most of that can be saved if the teacher just reads the material and makes some shorter notes saved for the communication with the student

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If the reason for the correcting is that there shall be a learning part in the correction, it must be done by the student herself, guided by the teacher.

Very often personal correction of the student includes a bigger reconstruction of the material, in which a second version is produced.

It´s an important part that the student in the long run gets an understanding of the natural processes in producing texts, through following versions. They are to commented and reproduced by the student herself, but also by others. Version followed version, until you are finally satisfied with the result.

If the student intends to publish the text, this working style is to prefer. In other cases, it´s too complicated.

The real myth is in believing the teachers´ correction will affect the learning process of the student and that it develops the ability in her writing. There nothing showing that kind of result after written correction from the teacher. Wasted time and resources.

A focused communication in IRL with the student is much more effective and gives the student the opportunity to confirm, that she has understood the comment.

To really get the best out of written corrections and suggestions, you need a long training and this is normally only done in higher education.

This doesn´t mean that basic training in this area is uninteresting. But then we talk of pupils reading and commenting of other pupils’ production.

These working pairs are set to develop both their skills to manage the task and this teamwork’s aim is to come to two fulfilled results and publish them. This kind of training can be done already by beginners writing.

All personal writing with the personal mail account of the student, ought to be excluded from correction. But the parents must control for younger pupils that no monkey business is on.

On publishing her material on the internet, the pupil need support to reach results to be proud of. Here short instruction videos can do much of the work. Any time the same is said and done in education, there is probably a need for instruction videos. A video that can be copied and distributed all over the country. Technical support is also needed. Advices about models for presentations is necessary.

The pupil’s skills in live performance and visual appearance, with the frequent use of video cameras, is another important task for the school. The pupils must learn how the audience observe their behaviour.

Already in the pre-school simple video productions together with theatre and singing performances of the children should be used. The children learn a lot of them. Later on, this could be developed to great productions, to be presented for a big audience.

Other understanding and skills in this area, is the use of light and use of microphones and the sound producing to speakers. Level for different ages.

Goa the 12th of February 2017              Lennart Warenius