How to Benefit Most From our Evaluation Service
Part 3: More on Writing Evaluation

The following is the third part in a series of posts about Tree of Life’s Evaluation Service.  The aim is to help you as parents help your children to get the most from our courses.

In the second post, I talked about how you can be supportive of your child’s coursework with Tree of Life.  Our goal is not to replace the role of parents on the homeschooling scene, but to supplement it, to provide accountability and feedback, and to guide students academically.  Therefore, we encourage you to oversee your children as they work through their courses, submit assignments, and receive feedback/corrections.Today, let me offer a few thoughts on writing and evaluation. I hope to show that writing feedback and evaluation are valuable.

First, writing is hard to learn and hard to do well.  Why?  Think of language as a tool.  Learning to write means learning how to use that tool well, for many different purposes.  Chefs receive training in knife skills so that they can carefully and efficiently cut many kinds of foods – fruits, vegetables, meats, etc. When beginning to practice knife skills, work is slow and cumbersome, and perhaps you even nick your finger. When skill develops, the chef’s movements are quick, precise, and seemingly without effort, yielding beautiful dishes. In the same way, the craft of writing involves skill and practice, and must be developed using different materials, subjects, and formats. I believe our analogy breaks down, however, in that writing never becomes effortless. Why?

It has been said that “writing is thinking“. In other words, writing not only communicates ideas to others (an end), but writing itself is a process for thinking thoughts in the first place (a means). As I write this very post, I am challenging myself to think more carefully about what constitutes good writing. I ask myself questions, I clarify terms in my own mind, I consider the relevance of some point, I choose the best evidence. If I’ve been successful, my thoughts about a subject will be more organized, and I will be ready to discuss it, hopefully with some level of intelligence. In any event, I have spent time really thinking about something. That is why there is always effort in writing.

But perhaps I don’t need to convince you that writing is hard to do well, and helping kids to write is a long term task often resisted. And few homeschooling parents would doubt that writing occupies a prominent place in the curriculum, even if there may be different ideas on what to write about.  But if learning to write is such a comprehensive task and if the act of writing is itself thinking, then surely it deserves attention, time, effort, help, support, an audience, feedback, and….you get the idea.

Our Writing Evaluation Service – remember, real caring people at the heart of it – is intended to listen and help and respond to your student’s efforts. We are interested in the long view: from elaborating an animal fable in grade 5, to describing cause and effect in a novel in grade 8, to synthesizing biblical, theological and literary ideas in grade 12.  To this end, here are a few points about writing and our evaluation service:

• The words at the end of Ecclesiastes give instruction on good writing and are worthy of reflection: “In addition to being a wise man, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge; and he pondered, searched out and arranged many proverbs.  The Preacher sought to find delightful words and to write words of truth correctly” (Eccl. 12:9-10 NASB).  Note that the Preacher’s words were both true and delightful; they contained divine knowledge and were well arranged.  Here is skill.  Although King Solomon was an inspired writer, even he had to spend time and follow a process in writing (‘pondered, searched out and arranged’).

 

• Following the steps in the writing process (eg. gathering ideas, organizing, outlining) are essential, and if these are skipped, the quality will be far less than what is possible.  Compare to practicing those knife skills; if you rush about chopping your vegetables before you have developed the skill, you will do a sloppy job and may even hurt yourself.  I mention this point because parents in the home, unlike evaluators, can be directly observant of their students’ habits and their following or skipping of steps.  If your high schooler polished off a 5-paragraph essay in an hour and a half rather than taking a week of work, it might earn a passing mark, but it doesn’t represent what they can really honestly do.

 

• When helping a student on your end, remember that a writing assignment is not just a product but an exercise in thinking itself (‘writing is thinking’).  Expect assignments, at some level, to naturally prompt new questions, help organize thoughts, and draw new conclusions about ideas.  If we are humble, writing may change us; watch for it.

 

• When evaluators offer feedback on submitted assignments, some points may be focused on the end product (grammar, presentation, vocabulary) and others points may imply something about the writing/thinking process itself (questions asked, evidence provided, logic, conclusions).  As you help your student interpret and learn from this feedback, consider what is being said about the process or the final product.

 

• In addition to our various evaluated courses, did you know we also have a flexible writing evaluation option that is not tied to our curriculum?  You can submit any 5 or 10 pieces for feedback; you can specify the age/grade level of your student, subject, and writing aspects you are seeking feedback about.  See Customized Evaluation.

Next Month: Part 4 -TBA