Kyle, I have so many comments, but want to keep this short and sweet. Yeah, right, like Moms AND English teachers don’t have the gift of gab…in that case, I’ll keep it as short as a Mom and English teacher can… 1) I never said you’d use book reports in your job–I said you’d use English skills in any job you do. From what I have seen that you’ve written, you’ve done an excellent job. For someone in your profession, you will use the technical writing skills acquired rather than the creative ones authors use. For the most part, middle schoolers aren’t ready for technical writing. 2) The skills you DO use from book reports and all that useless analyzing of characters and plot and all that other useless garbage are not as apparent in your job. Do you not automatically analyze clients, figure out and predict what they want or what they would like based on your impressions of who they are and how you can make the most money from them? Isn’t this what you did in the book reports? Figure out the character’s motives. Describe how this happened and why and how it directly affected the character and his/her ultimate actions. Don’t you silently plot out the direction to go in a campaign based on present and past experiences with the client? Can you not write a pretty darn good memo or a proposal using correct grammar and good sentence structure? These are the English skills I pushed, and not writing book reports. In fact, my students don’t do book reports. 3) One of my colleagues said she received an email from a parent thanking her for teaching poetry. Her son, who was shy, picked up his guitar and because of the poetry is now writing songs.
What a shame it would be if we only taught to one type of student. We aim to please and to teach technical and creative writing. 4) I could easily argue that math or science was pointless for me as a kid. However, I can add, subtract, multiply and divide quickly because I learned it. I can estimate my grocery bill, measure the floor I plan on laying and figure out how many square feet of oak laminate I need and then figure out how many boxes that would be, I can double or triple or half recipes, most of all I KICK BOOTY ON A POOL TABLE to this day because I loved geometry! I can take apart and repair a toy because I learned how things moved and worked together in science. I can’t keep a plant alive to save my soul. :)

With that said, I’m proud of you and all you have done. You know that and I know I don’t say it enough.

Love,
Mom

take care,
kemal

Paul> I agree, I didn’t intend to say that by becoming an effective writer, you instantly become an effective speaker. Let’s take good ol’ GW for an example. I bet the guy could write a killer essay. Too bad my 12 year old brother sounds better than him at the podium.

However, you do become better by association. Maybe not good. But better. It’s kind of a one complements the other sort of thing in my mind.