I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I really dislike grading. While I understand the point of grading (because they pay us to do it, right?), I have this awful feeling that a “C-” will cause a student to shut down, as opposed to desiring to improve. While there were vast improvements between the two essays, most of those improvements happened to students who had a grade that was originally within the high-C to mid-B range. I had one student who went from a “C-” to a “B+” (out of the more than 15 “C-” grades given), because she actually brought her second essay to me during office hours and worked on it with me. However, 1 out of 15 doesn’t seem all that promising.

To combat this fear, I’ve decided to allow students the ability to “revise” their essays during the conference. While the prompt allows for a student to argue that they deserve a better grade, to be their own “defense lawyer”  against my status of “judge”(Elbow 332), I felt that they would be better served by being allowed to use my comments as a means of training. While the possibility of arguing for a higher grade is still available to all of my students, I’ve offered them the ability to move up 1/3rd of a letter grade (say, from a “C-” to a “C”) by briefly explaining how they would change one problem area in their essay.

My hope is that by allowing them to raise their grades slightly, the students will come to see me as less of an enemy. Additionally, I hope that this will get my students into the habit of revising their writing (which they swear they do, but… yeah, right). Depending on how well this works out, I may get in the habit of allowing minimal revisions after a grade is posted.

I found the concept of “teaching” (of course he claims to not be teaching very often) entirely through conferences to be a very compelling concept. Would it be feasible in a large, public university such as FAU to teach ENC 1101 entirely through conferences? Simply for the sake of time – 22 students with 3 hours a week of classes – it doesn’t seem possible. In an ideal world, these time structures wouldn’t matter, but due to the concerns surrounding metrics that seem to run this university, I can’t imagine that this type of structure would ever be universally adopted at FAU.

That being said, I think that a sort of hybrid form of this process could be extremely useful. As a UCEW consultant, I find that most interactions are too fleeting to do a great deal of change in student writing, and it is only the students who return on a regular basis to the same consultant that improve as writers. When students develop a relationship with a consultant, it seems that they are able to make realizations about their own writing, because the “teaching” is directly applicable to the content of their own individual paper. On the other hand, as a GTA, I think there can be value to the traditional classroom structure. At a minimum, MLA, grammar, the “basics” of writing, and classroom discussions are things all students need to experience; therefore, why can’t they all experiences this at the same time in the same room?

Like I mentioned above, perhaps a hybrid of this conference system would be most beneficial for student writing. If we met as a class for one week, and then the next week met in conferences to discuss drafts, they could have the best of both worlds.  Murray paints a very pretty picture of his abilities, claiming that his students continue to do more and more of the teaching themselves. I wish I could talk to him, because I can’t fully understand what this means or how it can be possible. If his students teach themselves, and have only conference experiences, how do they learn the norms of the discipline? An easy example being MLA. Of course students have a handbook, but I don’t believe that they can simply pick something like this up and then magically understand everything about it. It takes time, much longer than a 25 minute conference that should focus on larger concerns. Finally, how does he make sure that students maintain an intrinistic motivation to learn and improve, when Murray provides such little guidance?

Bartholomae talks about “a necessary and enabling fiction at work” in student writing.  Brilliant.  That phrase puts words to an observation I’ve been making over and over again during this last month.  I just haven’t been able to sit with it, to think on why all of the papers I’ve been reading sound disingenuous, overdramatic, or, more to the point, fictitious.  What mindset are these students adopting that limits their use of genuine examples and authoritative tone?

Could it be that my students are writing to me, to a fictionalized version of me—some amalgam of all the voices they hear when they think of the sound of an instructor, an authority figure?

“When students are writing for a teacher… students, in effect, have to assume privilege without having any.”

I can’t remember asking for this kind of simulation, this parody of authority.  But this is what I get.  I can hear this assumption, this gesture toward the vague sound of academic discourse, in too many of my students’ essays.  Who demands this of my students?  How has this fantasy taken hold of their minds—that they cannot, as Bartholomae might suggest, “extend themselves” into their respective subject matters to explore and discover, that they must, instead, struggle outside of their means to take command, to instruct?