Julie Hamilton

A Success Curriculum for Remedial Writers

By Gerald Camp

The National Writing Project

Gerald Camp works with remedial writers at the high school level in the San Francisco Bay area. He was assigned the "remedial group" initially, due to his new teacher status. After paying his dues, so to speak, he was offered a job teaching an advanced writing class. He declined, having found that teaching the remedial group suited him well and was where he wanted to stay.

I was immediately intrigued with Camp's perception of the typical "remedial write." He distinguishes between a reluctant writer and a person who is incapable of writing well. Most remedial writers, he suggests, are reluctant, not incapable. I can relate as a reluctant technology student. It's not that I can't learn it, I don't want to and I try to get through it with as little effort as possible. For this reason, Camp begins the teaching of writing to with a carefully structured behavioral plan. His rational makes sense. When we're forced to do something we don't want to, we will often try to get out of it or control the entire event so that it can not go as planned. His plan is contractual and gives the student an opportunity for choice and success.

For the most part, Camp has his students work in mixed ability groups. These groups work together to form brainstorm lists from which they compose their individual papers. One particular brainstorm list I found interesting develops around the five senses. Students need to list 10 observations associated with each of the senses pertaining to the topic of their piece. The students then respond to each other's papers in a similar fashion as we do in class. Then they write their final copy. Camp gives considerable attention to how other students and the teacher should respond to the writings. Some of his suggestions support my own practices that make a lot of sense to me, but I have noticed are not part of conventional teaching. This is true mainly in the area of marking corrections. He categorizes four types of errors in conventions:

1. careless errors, which he says should be ignored

2. misspelled words that are new to a student's vocabulary, which students should be encouraged to use, not corrected

3. general convention errors due to lack of exposure that will likely disappear over time, which should also be ignored

4. misspelled words which should be within the range of mastery and, therefore,

should be corrected

Above and beyond this list, Camp states, there should be a focus on positive comments on the content of the piece.

I found this book informative and helpful. I felt support for some of the practices I use in my classroom and for some ideas I've not proceeded with due to a lack of confidence.