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Composition 1.01: How Email Can Change the Way Professors Teach - James Somers - Techno... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...242468

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shared by Chris Long on 28 Jul 11 - No Cached

Ericsson argues that to become an expert at something you have to log about 10,000 hours of practice, but not just any practice -- a kind of practice that includes an "active search for methods to improve performance," immediate informative feedback, structure, supervision from an expert, and "close attention to every detail of performance 'each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit.'"
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It's no wonder that so many students struggle with writing: you're never really shown how to do it.
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that their guidance, however individuated, isn't fast enough
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...6 more annotations...
Or as John Whittier-Ferguson puts it, "It's moving at a pace that's not at all like the pace of someone actually working on a piece of writing."
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With e-mail, Whittier-Ferguson didn't have to so much invent a wonderfully responsive critical machine as become one: sit at his computer; encourage students to send him work in progress; respond to it quickly.
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"That's what it's all about," he says. "They rise to the level at which I'm engaging."
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But above all it's deliberate practice: goal-directed, supervised.
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Of course that may be the answer: the practice might be uncommon because professors just don't want to see that much student writing or spend that much time critiquing it
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But it's a shame, too, because that could be all it takes to get a few of those students to take seriously the idea that they have something to say, that saying it right matters; to show them how hard that is and to give them a taste of the labor; to rope them into the delightfully painful business of trying and trying to write.
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