Another session that spoke to me both as a current writing consultant who deals with a lot of first year writing as well as a potential high school teacher was “I Thought I was a Good Writer: Investigating Perceptions of Preparedness for College Writing.” Two students from Ohio State University – Newark observed and interviewed students from a local high school English class that was purposefully trying to prepare their students for a college writing environment.

The high school classroom was different from most typical high school English classes. The students sat in a lecture hall format, with 72 students assigned to two teachers. The class only met Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with the teachers available for office hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The class’s entire grades were based on a few papers and exams.  This environment mimicked many local college writing classes. All of the students agreed on one thing: they hated it.

Even though the class was set up like a college classroom, the students felt like the workload was not rigorous enough. Almost 60 percent expected more writing to be assigned, and all of them expected the writing assigned to be more difficult than the common 200-word blog response post on their version of Blackboard. Teachers were searching for critical thought in these blogs and papers, but students just quickly learned how to parrot one another’s ideas so they could do as little work as possible.

While the session was eye-opening, the discussion afterwards amongst the high school teachers and writing-center coordinators was even more educational. Both sides agreed that large-scale standardized testing was causing many writing problems, but, since that is not something that can be easily changed, they concluded that professional development between both sides—local high school English teachers and local first year college writing professors—would be an ideal way to start to bridge the gap.