The Importance of Being a Nongrader
Gainer, Kim (2009-03-28)
>>KIM GAINER: Alright. My name is Kim Gainer and I teach English at Radford University. But I would like to tell a story from long, long, long ago when I was in what was called then Junior High School. I would like to talk about my seventh grade English teacher. She required everyone to turn in journals; every Friday you had to turn in a journal. I don't remember if it was four pages or five, at least four pages. And of course this was hand written. So I wrote my first journal and I got it back from her with just all kinds of enthusiastic commentary. No spelling marks, no grammar, no punctuation, no comments on my style; just encouraging statements as to how interesting the journal was and how she was looking forward to reading more. Of course I was very enthused so I cheerfully launched into writing my next journal with equal enthusiasm. It came back with all these encouraging comments, no spelling, punctuation or grammar marks. Nothing, just encouraging comments. I kept writing and the journals got longer without my being instructed to write them longer. I just kept writing because I was just enjoying myself so thoroughly. I became more and more ambitious and I began writing a serial narrative that went on for great length and time. You know, creating characters, creating dialogue. Again, everything she wrote was just very, very encouraging. Now, the screen has gone black. Is that a problem?
>>INTERVIEWER: Oh, not too big of a deal but if it does you can hit this and come back to it. 
>>KIM GAINER: Alright. Well, I began to notice things about my own writing without her pointing them out to me. For example, I noticed that my writing style, my vocabulary and my sentence structure would alter depending on what book I was reading at the time. So I became more and more aware. Again, she never specifically pointed out these things to me; I just started noticing them and paying quite careful attention to my own writing and paying careful attention to my sentence structure. Gradually I wised up to what was happening here is that she was going to everybody in the class -- eventually we compared notes and we just realized that uniformly, no matter what you wrote she responded encouragingly. But we also as a class, by the time we had caught on to what she was doing, we all recognized that we had become better writers. We were enthusiastic about writing, we were confident writers and I think by any objective standard we were better writers. 
>>KIM GAINER: I always keep that in mind when I am responding to my students' writing. I have got some writing that is draft writing that is meant to lead on to another product and I have got to give a certain amount of response in terms of grammar, spelling, punctuation and so on and so forth, but I have always had my students do a considerable amount of writing that is, in fact, not graded. It is writing -- and I will tell them this -- that if I think you made a good faith effort, you are going to get full credit for this writing. I will set certain guidelines and if they are not met I will tell the student to resubmit a piece. I won't actually give the student a zero but I will say "Well, there were certain things that had to be addressed." And "This needed addressing so you've got to give them a go." It is good on a practical level; students need to do more writing then you could ever possibly, in fact, grade. They need to do a lot of writing. So there is a practical aspect to it.
>>KIM GAINER:  But there is also a, in terms of the confidence, their willingness to take a risk. If they are not fearfully submitting something thinking "Okay, I know this is going to come back and it is going to be marked up. I know I am up for a grade here." That allows them to take the risk that they need to take. In terms of, again, allowing them to write because ultimately they are writing for themselves. When I started writing pieces much, much longer than anything I needed to do for my teacher, I had moved beyond the point where I was writing this in terms of I have to fulfill the assignment. I was writing initially to please her but then it became something that I became so enthralled in and so committed to that I went well past the point of writing for the teacher. So that is my story. 
>>INTERVIEWER: That is a great story. 
>>KIM GAINER: That is along the way to becoming, I think, now a very good writer, actually.