Beat Not the Poor Desk

The best guide to teaching writing -- hands down! Next to "The Common Sense" (the student version of this book), this is the most valuable book I have ever owned. It is the guide and bedrock of my teaching life. A must have!

I first bought and began using this book in the early eighties, and just today took it off the bookshelf to browse through it again. Two other books and this one have had the most influence on my teaching since I began grad school in 1975. I urge all new and even veteran teachers of writing to read this wonderful book. If anyone's interested, the other two most influental books that I credit for the pleasure I take and success I've had teaching comp are William E. Coles, Jr. "The Plural I and After" and Roger Garrison, "How a Writer Works." If you can get a hold of Garrison, try to get the teacher's guide that goes with it. Wonderful.

This book, along with Inside Out by Dan Kirby and Tom Liner, changed my teaching life. Using the ideas of these two authors, I have successfully taught high school, community college, and university students how to think and write for personal as well as academic audiences. This book should be required for ALL teachers of writing.

Writing is a process. An exciting way to communicate thoughts and emotions. Just as we learn a spoken language through practice without judgement, so must we learn the written language. Beat Not The Poor Desk is a teaching tool based on that philosophy. It is a compilation of lessons and projects presented in sequence as a guide for teachers of English. Written with input from English teachers,it gives instructors a sequenced set of writing lessons that make it easy for students to get past the anxiety they may have about producing 'perfect prose'. It includes student models of lessons presented in the book that are interesting to read and study. In a step by step approach, writers are encouraged to stretch their skills and do the 'playing' necessary to get good at expressing themselves with the written word. The authors start with a series of lessons about fables, then moves on to lists, essays and stories. On a parallel track in the book, Ponst and Deen address the grammar, syntax and semantics of writing. Although the book was written for use as a guide for teachers of college writing courses, I found it of great help in teaching multi-age groups of children (ages 8 through 13), and for summer tutoring of high school remedial English students. Beat Not The Poor Desk is a well-written text for teachers of written English. I found it to be one of the best I have ever used, and one of the most versatile in its success with diverse student populations.