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?

I am desperately trying to determine a way to spend less time grading essays. I average 10-40 minutes per paper (really bad ones take even longer). I can’t help but ask myself if I’m trying too hard.

Donald Murray says, “I gave my students their papers, unmarked, and said, make them better.” Seriously? I can imagine that, for some students, this is a strategy that would work great. But I have far more students who (I feel) need more guidance.
One grading expert says “don’t comment so much; let them take responsibility for finding the solution to the (fill in the problem here),” while another says “leave more concrete comments; tell them exactly how to fix (fill in the problem here).
So which is it? Comment more, comment less, or don’t comment at all? If students are saying, “I wish he would listen better to what we need to know,” then how do I go about doing that? It just seems unrealistic to me when I am dealing with 22-44 students at a time.
So, I come back to the question, “Are we trying too hard?” Composition theorists have great intentions. They want to find that perfect way to teach composition. But the student population is so diverse and shouldn’t we be finding a way to reach all of those different levels of students as possible? It seems to me that locking into one mode of teaching composition will ultimately lock out many students from the joys of writing.

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.