If you didn’t know, now you know: Research!

The discussion regarding What College Should Teach is an elongated and controversial debate. At least Stanley Fish takes an apparent position on this debate. Notably, I agree to a section of Fish’s argument that secondary and middle school teachers have failed to teach learners appropriate aspects of academic progression in the lower grades. I also support Fish’s argument that the danger of such failures is that it places more responsibilities on college teachers since tutors and professors have to cover areas that the learners ought to have learnt in their earlier academic experiences. Fish is accurate on this element, since college teachers have to expand their responsibilities to capture topics that undergraduates should have conceptualized in their high school education.

According to Fish, the primary element that colleges should teach first-year students is how to constitute excellently structured sentences. Considering the failures of high school teachers, Fish's argument is essential. For instance, most college students struggle in the writing classroom due to the inability to construct elaborate sentences. Consequently, the inability to construct acceptable language structures undermines learning at this level. Therefore, Fish is accurate with his assessment of the situation.
                             
Throughout the ARE paper that I have been doing in class and the different activities I completed I now realize how much emphasizes is put on being a successful college writer. While in the Writers Studio at the OSU-Newark, I have noted the emphasis tutors put on doing research and how to conduct meaningful research to students. This has guided me in the right directions when I was doing my own research for my paper. Things that were emphasized to be helpful to a success college writer included finding credible sources, focusing on a topic and knowing how to correctly cite in a MLA format.

Fish states, “ writing class should primarily focus on teaching learners sentence structures, I consider such a practice to be extraordinarily easy to spend much time teaching at the college level." Although most of the first-year students were not adequately taught sentence structures in high school and middle-level learning institutions, it would be a mistake to prioritize aspects that learners ought to have learnt in their earlier levels in colleges. Moreover, writing functional sentence structures is a straightforward learning activity that can only be captured in a limited portion of the first-year experiences. Learners at this level must be able to improve in their sentence construction through individual efforts instead of spending elongated hours on a subject that should have been learnt in the earlier learning stages. For this reason, college writing can prioritize teaching students how to properly do research and finding credible sources to be successful. On the other hand, students in high school were to taught to research topics, but were not required to use databases and libraries to find credible sources. Most of their research will come from an internet source, but with college, the majority of the primary research will be from databases, involving peer reviewed academic articles.

 College instructors when the student use Wikipedia.

I believe that the primary focus of the writing classroom should be on helping learners understand how to get reliable writing sources instead of focusing on teaching sentence structure. With students understanding the functions of research and gathering data from reliable sources, they are set up for success. The search for research sources is a unique experience to most first-year students; hence, it should be a priority in the writing classroom. Secondary education does not emphasize the use of scholarly sources in the same way as college. For example, most papers in college, including my ARE, require sources from the database such as scholarly articles.

me when i was reading fish article.

Furthermore, most learners struggle in the search for credible sources due to their lack of knowledge in this area. The elongated time students spend searching for credible sources could impact their academic lives in other ways if they were taught how to locate reliable scholarly writing resources. Most of college writing practices require the use of credible sources hence making this aspect a crucial topic of study for college learners.

Fish provides an in-depth understanding of the embedded problem in the education system. I agree with most elements of Fish’s article since the failure of secondary and middle school teachers is the primary cause of the pressure college teachers incur to teach elements that learners should have learnt in earlier levels. However, I consider the need to teach learners how to locate reliable sources as the primary challenge that writing classrooms should prioritize at the first-year level. Teaching source finding prospects would enhance the learners' abilities than focusing on sentence structures. In this way student are receiving a proper education in terms of research and academic understanding rather than wasting time on remedial coursework they may not even need.