A Good Girl Writes Like a Good Girl

This article discusses one student's persistence in misunderstanding her teacher's written comments on her papers, even when these comments are accompanied by other response channels that serve, in part, to clarify the written comments. It presents the idea that student and teacher each bring to the written response episode a set of information, skills, and values that may or may not be shared between them, and it is the interplay of these three elements that feeds the student's reading and processing of teacher written comments and that leads to misunderstandings. This happened even for a high-achieving student in an otherwise successful classroom. An in-depth look at one student and the classroom context in which she learns to write, focusing on her grappling with her teacher's written comments, reveals the complexity of the teaching-learning process in the high school writing class.