Lou

Each year I send out a flyer with information about the upcoming tennis season.  Once a year, I have to figure out how to use the “merge” feature in Word so that I don’t have to fill out each mailing label by hand.  It normally takes me about an hour of trial and error until I figure the “merge” feature out.  Although that hour-a-year is tediously spent (the “merge” feature in Office is so kludgy), the labels get printed and I quickly forget how to use this feature for another year.  Today, I had a grueling set back that has caused me to reflect on an upcoming teaching goal for this year.

I thought that I was doing myself a favor.  I created a spreadsheet so that any potential player could come by my classroom and “sign up”.  I added a name field, address field, phone number field, and e-mail field.  Any girl could stop by and add her name to the list in order to receive the flyer that I send out each summer.  I had another form filled out by incoming freshmen who were interested.  My teacher’s assistant dutifully typed out each name and address.  This morning I had some free time so I decided to prepare the flyers for mailing on Monday.  Due to the fact that my students apparently don’t know how to format their names and addresses for a piece of mail, those couple of hours turned into a four hour ordeal.

I generally dismiss the importance of formatting.  To the comment of, “Students these days only know how to write ‘text messages’ and don’t write properly,” I have flippantly responded, “You know, they are reinventing the English Language.”  I now know that I have to reassess this view point.

The students and potential players did not generally capitalize their names or street addresses.  They did not put a comma between their city and state.  They did not end abbreviations with periods.  All of these mistakes meant that I had to reformat 90% of these labels before they were printable.

Two out of 54 students formatted their names and addresses correctly.  Not surprisingly, these students were also top English students in their classes.  To her credit, my teacher’s assistant did format correctly.

Simple mistakes in formatting caused me significant real-world problems.  If my students don’t learn any better, they will make these mistakes again.  As a teacher and coach, I felt frustrated. If I were an employer, I would not tolerate these errors that affect productivity.

Formatting is going to be a topic of focus for me and my students this school year.  I believe that an important new teaching goal is to learn more about formatting, creating more opportunities for my students to learn about formatting, and to assess my students on their ability to format properly.  The ability to properly format a piece of writing is a skill that many studnets apparently don’t have. For thier sakes as much as mine, they need to learn it.