I really don’t want to read 44 papers written by myself.

 Pre-class Reading Response  No Responses »
Sep 252015
 

While, for the most part, I enjoy reading my students essays, I find myself constantly wanting to comment about “what I would have done” when reading a section that doesn’t work (because either it doesn’t relate to the thesis or the misplacement of [relevant] support interrupts a decent organizational scheme). I have tried to keep these comments to a minimum, they mostly only appear when I can see that a connection could be created between the support and the thesis (especially if the support is extremely unique). However, the thought of removing the voice of my students and replacing it with my own voice makes me cringe.

The fact that many of my students really do seem to be “writing for a grade” (I’m pretty sure this appears somewhere in Lynn V. Bloom’s “Why I (Used to) Hate to Give Grades,” but I cannot find exactly where) makes this fear a possible reality. There have been far too many, “I don’t know what to do, how should I do this?” conversations between myself and my students during class for me to feel comfortable.

While I enjoy writing and revising my own work, I’m fairly certain that having to read 44 of my own essays would make me smash my face into a wall. Literally. In the correct sense. Don’t question my habits.

However, there are also those students (in my case, the singular form is more accurate) whose desire to improve their grade causes them to actually write something that is both well-written and enjoyable (I’ve found that these two terms are not synonymous). In these cases (or, well, “this case”), explaining how I would handle a piece of support to better connect to their thesis sometimes leads them to other avenues of exploration.

Of course, that fear is still there.

Due to this fear, I’ve found that implementing multiple group based pre-drafting exercises is highly beneficial. By limiting the amount of time I can speak with an individual student, the students have come to rely upon themselves and their peers. While I still get the occasional question about “what I would do,” this question doesn’t come up as often as it did three weeks ago.

Of course, that fear is still there.

Grading: Efficiency Vs. Engagement

 Pre-class Reading Response  No Responses »
Sep 252015
 

In the Writing Center, we’re given a huge amount of instruction on how to critique papers, but we’re told (almost explicitly) never to grade or edit. It’s not considered helpful to give someone a grade; partially because every professor grades differently, but also because the way we grade thing tends to be too structured for the general touchy-feeliness that the Writing Center employs. “Don’t focus on fixing the document, focus on improving the students skill as a writer!”

In the writing center, that really works. We only ever work with one paper in a given session, and the student is always physically present. We can point at specific things, offer suggestions… there’s constructive criticism here.

In a classroom setting, though, things are very… faceless. Even though we have these much lauded small class sizes, things are detached. I found Faigley’s discussion of different kinds of papers here to be really telling. All of these individualized “autobiographical” essays actually have a profound psychological effect: they make you actually consider the student as human being, rather than the student as faceless writer.

Our current model; the one where we give students a single topic to write about, inevitably results in a homogeneous wall of papers. Students don’t know how to deviate from a prompt yet, which means that the majority of papers hit the same notes, quote the same sound bites, and use very similar language. If all the papers seem the same, it’s no wonder that all of the responses seem the same. I’m not sure if this is a flaw in our pedagogy, or a flaw in how we look at grading.

In a perfect world, I would love to take the UCEW’s approach of working one on one with people. There’s just not enough time. 

 

 Posted by at 2:31 pm

The Curious Incident of the Dog and Dewayne

 Pre-class Reading Response  No Responses »
Sep 252015
 

In an attempt to answer/discuss one of the questions posed…

As I think I understand it, the issue here is why Bloom equates labelling of students with judging the worthiness of content. Isn’t there a “fundamental difference,” as Dr. Mason pointed out, between labelling a student “a B student” and labelling the content of a student’s paper “B content”?

I’m not sure I agree, but I’ll try to break down the point I think Bloom is making. I believe her point is that Dewayne wasn’t really arguing that his dog was so special and wonderful that he was an “A dog” (although that is one way to look at it). Instead, what Dewayne really wanted was the professor to acknowledge that Dewayne “deserve[d] more than a B”. I think Bloom is implying an unconscious (or at least unspoken) motivation on Dewayne’s part. Yes, Dewayne picked a subject that meant a lot to him and the issue of students’ emotional attachment to their content shouldn’t be overlooked. However, when put into conversation with Bloom’s later quote—“ ‘Love me love my paper’ “—I think it is easier to see how she is offering a student’s attachment to his writing as synonymous with that student belief about himself: “If my content deserves more recognition, then ultimately so do I. And if my writing is a representation of me, then labelling it “B” automatically makes me “B” too.” If Hero deserves more than a B, Dewayne is unaffected. If Dewayne deserves more than a B, though, that’s another issue entirely.

 Posted by at 1:46 pm

A post-class post on post-writing

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  No Responses »
Sep 252015
 

I had a thought last Friday during class about the recurrence of this idea of invention in writing; the notion that we have to reintroduce creativity and inventiveness into teaching writing by means of a heuristic model, etc. After re-reading Lauer and trying to figure out what the fuck I was really trying to say in class, I saw that I was reiterating something she had already said in her piece. Essentially, the narrative form has been the driving force behind writing since the beginning. To get rid of the inventiveness of storytelling is to diminish the purpose of writing. I think Lauer would agree with me, and she would say that a heuristic model could help to re-introduce the idea of creative/inventive writing into academia, furthermore giving it a “gauge-able” (that’s not a word) quality. This has all been summary so far, I think.

HOWEVER, I started to look at the heuristics and the emphasis on prewriting – “the art of ‘what to say'”, “the stages of creativity” – and I think the emphasis is being misplaced. Why are we spending time trying to figure out how to teach creativity? Shouldn’t we be focused on how to teach the results of creativity? This is probably a revisionist philosophy. I guess what I mean to say is, if we tell our students “Hey, be creative by doing this and this and this…” aren’t we essentially destroying the nature of their creativity? I’m suggesting a more minimalist pre-writing philosophy and a more  productive post-writing philosophy.

Commenting on Drafts?

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 252015
 

In Sommer’s essay on paper comments, she detailed the problems teachers have faced when commenting on papers. She highlighted the issues with brief comments (they can be discouraging to students) and very directive comments (the student spends the revision process focusing on what to write for the teacher instead of what to write to improve their argument).

Her conclusion is that we need to focus on different aspects of writing in the different drafts we are given. If we throw dozens of ideas at the student on both a global and sentence level, then they get lost in the revision.

My problem with this is twofold: 1. We’re not supposed to be commenting on drafts. I want to be able to spend that time moving from one style of writing to another, but I don’t know how to build that revision process when the students are meant to rely on the peer revision process. As much as peer revision can be guided by the teacher, it is still out of our hands when it comes down to the act itself. Then, 2., the problem with brief comments. We are told that we can’t overwhelm the students with comments or they will lose focus, but we can’t be brief because it will come off as harsh or apathetic. I wonder how universal that reception is, or if that idea is focused mainly on certain student personalities. Maybe a certain student with a type A personality will respond better to brief, directive comments, while the free-thinking student may need more encouragement.

In the end, I still don’t have an answer and I’m still trying to figure out what is most effective for students.

Commenting on Student Papers: Helpful or a Waste?

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 232015
 

I was a huge fan of the Sommers’ reading.  Check this out:

“The challenge we face as teachers is to develop comments which will pro-vide an inherent reason for students to revise; it is a sense of revision as discovery, as a repeated process of beginning again, as starting out new, that our students have not learned. We need to show our students how to seek, in the possibility of revision, the dissonances of discovery-to show them through our comments why new choices would positively change their texts, and thus to show them the potential for development implicit in their own writing.”

This gave me nerd chills: commenting can be helpful to students provided the comments are actually phrased in a constructive manner.

The least helpful form of commenting is when professors say vague, ambiguous negativity.  When I was in school most of my professors would say random negative things, “This doesn’t make sense,” “I don’t like this,” and “Sentence Fragment.”  Not only does this form of commenting leave the student feeling hurt, but also it gives them no idea how they can make it better.  Obviously the student would have made it better if they knew how, but with this form of commenting it’s like the teacher is standing on top of their grave and yelling at them not to be dead.

This is why I’ve tried to make my commenting in ENC1101 more suggestive based.  For example, when I start a paper off, if the student uses vague language, I’ll try to give a suggestion for how they could be more specific with their language.  “In your introductory paragraph, you need to be more specific about the word ‘problems.’  Economic?  Social?  Pyschological?  Narrow it down.”  Then later on when I say things like “vague language,” I tell the student to refer back to the example I showed them in their introductory paragraph.  Utilizing this method of constructive specificity with my commenting, I’ve had a positive reaction from students.

In my morning class, I have two students who are already doing better.  One of the students got a “D” on his first paper because he fudged his margins and used vague, generic language in order to convey the idea of saying profound things without actually saying anything at all.  In his paper I told him so with my comments.  His second essay has all of the commented areas fixed as well as improvements to other areas.  His grade for this 2nd paper is a “B.”

Comments can be helpful, but they need to be written in a way that the student can understand and make use of.  Further, commenting isn’t enough; students also need to feel like their teacher is a real person, and not just some vague authoritarian abstraction hovering over their shoulder, screaming every time they use the passive voice or make a comma splice.  Personal relationships create a sense of trust with students so that when they read teacher comments, they know and want to pay attention.  The more I do this teaching business, the more I’m realizing that it’s all about respect.

 Posted by at 6:36 pm

Is It Possible to Grade Writing Objectively?

 Pre-class Reading Response  3 Responses »
Sep 232015
 

One thought, among many, as I read Lynn Z. Bloom’s, “Why I (Used to) Hate to Give Grades and Lester Faigley’s “Ideologies of the Self in Writing Evaluation”:

Last week I asked my students to do an in-class exercise in which I asked them to give me an evidence-based response to the question:

“Based on what you presently know about the 2016 Presidential race, who would you support if Election Day was next week? If you don’t yet have a strong candidate in mind, who have you already eliminated from the race? Why?”

The results were

6 – “For Bernie” because he’s genuine, is truly a “for the people” politician and has good, common sense ideas
3 – “For Donald” because he’s a business man, we’re in debt, and we need someone to negotiate a debt settlement
2 – “For Marco” because he is open and accepting of immigrants and has good religious values
1 – “For Hillary” because she did the whip and nae nae on Ellen
19 – “Not Donald” because he’s dangerous, a blowhard, anti-women, anti-immigrant
3 – “Not Hillary” because she’s dishonest
1 – “I’m not voting, politics are stupid, this assignment is stupid and I don’t care”
1 – “None of your business, Ms. Sutton. We shouldn’t be talking about politics in class and I don’t appreciate you asking this question and trampling on my right to privacy”

As part of her/his argument, that last student, who has kept me on my toes all semester, reasoned that divulging that information to me might put her/him at a disadvantage since we can’t help making judgments about people based on the information we’re given.

And s/he’s right, in his/her own convoluted, rude way (consider your audience, grasshopper!). Right away, I formulated stronger positive opinions about some of my students and gave myself a mental high-five for being “right” about others.

 

 Posted by at 6:01 pm

Twist for the Pop: Unpacking Bloom’s Jam Metaphor

 Pre-class Reading Response, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 232015
 

Bloom’s jam issues are, as he indicates, rooted in the multitude of ingredients available—the many focuses for grading criteria. Ultimately, the grader wants to send home something reflective of the work’s objective completeness, or as close to objective as Bloom’s “disparate components” can manage. By following those critical focuses, applying them in equal portions,   an objective grade can be arguable reached, but what use is objectivity in an art form that, at times, relies on subjective interpretation (if not directly on the paper, at least in opinion formation). Blooms concern about broccoli and baloney finding the jam encapsulate this dilemma: how much is too much? The red pen needs sleep too.

The solution is to send each student home with their own kind of jam. Every paper has its strengths and weaknesses, and those majorly affected ingredients should be the focus of grading criteria: praise for plump blueberries but reprimand for buying the brown sugar instead of refined white. Addressing the whole list of malfeasant ingredients isn’t practical or constructive, as the line between constructive criticism and “you’re terrible at this” to a student can be as slight as relentless semi-colon correction.

Why comment rants happen, and other misplaced grading techniques

 Pre-class Reading Response  1 Response »
Sep 232015
 

It’s tempting to get into a punitive mindset while grading papers. For example, although we went over proper MLA citations in class, students were given additional resources on where to find citation information, and no one asked questions about this, it is still incorrect. Or even though we spent an entire class discussing organization, paragraphs wander from their original focus, and it’s difficult to find an overall structure in the paper.

The plus side to grading papers

The plus side to grading papers

We feel ignored and unheard. There is a strong urge to use comments to show what students failed to do, rather than demonstrate how they can improve.  Sommers emphasizes this “hostility and meanspiretedness” as opposed to the computer system’s “calm, reasonable language,” which is more helpful in opening a dialogue with students.

In addition to keeping language objective, we have to be careful our comments are encouraging students to take ownership over their writing. This is difficult to accomplish while giving specific suggestions, and I’m not sure I’ve mastered the craft. One student last week complained about his low essay grade, saying “but I fixed everything you told me to.” There must be a disconnect here. Comments aren’t meant to give students a “fix-it” list, but rather to help them become a better reader for their writing. Until we master this in our commenting, we’ll continue to bang our heads against brick walls and hope for the best.

Blooming Freshmen

 Classroom Praxis, Pre-class Reading Response  No Responses »
Sep 232015
 

I totally tracked with Lynn Bloom’s “Why I (Used To) Hate to Give Grades” until her last few paragraphs. The reason why is the same reason I consider this post a double-whammy in Classroom Praxis and Pre-Class Reading Response: I tried it with freshmen, and it didn’t work.

A few weeks ago I had the Bloomian inclination to have freshman ENC1101 students grade their own drafts. My thinking was partially on par with Bloom’s (in that they would shoulder the work of proof), but also around other ideas like:

  • it would force them to read their own work critically (instead of cranking it out and handing it in to me as soon as they hit the page limit),
  • they would be tricked into practicing the art of rhetoric and argument, which is arguably one of our main teacherly goals of instruction in ENC1101,
  • they would feel less entitled to A’s once they found flaws in their writing,
  • they would begin to understand, in using the grading criteria, what “standard” is used by our Department to determine their grades,
  • they would be forced to participate in a dialogue about their writing’s strengths and weakness, rather than stick to the age-old submit-and-receive relationship of grades from the teacher,
  • they might start to recognize their identity, authority and capacity to shape their own life and experience as maturing college adults, rather than passive, powerless freshmen,
  • a boatload of other idealistic reasons.

Almost all of them gave themselves A’s, though I interestingly had many students — largely female, if we want to break it down by gender — who underestimated their grade like Suzy. That might have been fine, but they had zero proof or argument as to why they deserved the grade. All this signals to me that the requirement in Bloom’s method is that you have students who are mature enough to handle the burden of self-evaluation. And it seems like that’s something they learn over time, maybe with age. On the bright side, it also showed me that there’s merit to what they’re learning in ENC: that they need to learn what argument is, and how to do it.

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