Elbow discusses the issues we face when we have to decide whether to come down hard on a student or nurture and encourage them. He notes how our loyalty to students is to “be their allies and hosts as we instruct and share–to invite students to enter in and join us as members of a learning community…” My struggle with this point is that, while this works for so many, I still have students who do not want to become part of the learning community. As I try to encourage a sharing environment, some remain silent and unimpressed with the ideas presented to them. I had one student email me, telling me that we should focus on social issues affecting our world. This is a student who makes little to no attempt to engage in class, and who is doing everything in his power to avoid writing a complete paper.

What do we do then? How do we handle students who don’t accept our invitation to be working on the same team?

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.

I loved our reading last week on the banking theory of education.  South Korea has the ultimate CHASE bank monopoly in their form of education.  Corporal punishment was still widely practiced during my tenure at two different high schools in Daejeon.  Teachers literally beat their students with 2×4 wooden boards that had holes drilled into them.  One time I was lecturing in the middle of the day–regular, routine day, just like any other.  A male student began talking to his neighbor and sorta tickling him in his sides.  My co-teacher pulled this student out of my class without saying anything.  Ten minutes later he and the student came back in the classroom and took their seats.  My co-teacher’s face was bright red and he was breathing heavily.  The student’s face was also bright red, not breathing heavily, and he was crying.  I also noticed that the teacher had broken the 2×4 that he had used to beat this students backside.  His name was Park Tae Won and he held these broken boards in his hands with a perfectly complacent expression and listened to me finish my lecture.  Later, after class was over, he came up to me and explained that he had beaten the student “like a man” because he had been messing around in the previous class too.

The whole experience was so surreal.  I didn’t say anything in disagreement–I had to work with him on a daily basis and this wasn’t my country or culture–but my immediate reaction was to think, “how is beating a student’s backside with a board” manly?  Then I thought that if he had really wanted to “beat the student like a man” he should have given the student a board so that they were both equally armed.

It wasn’t just men that got beat there either.  Girls got beaten, though not with 2×4’s, not on their backsides, and I don’t recall ever seeing a male teacher beating a female student.  It was strictly female teachers beating female students.  The teachers used cylindrical rods about the size of a forearm in length and a finger in girth.  The girls would kneel on top of a chair with their feet tilted up toward the ceiling, and the teachers would beat the bottoms of their feet.  Or, if not their feet, the teachers would have the girls hold their hands out, palms up, and beat the interior of their hands.

Students were beaten for all manner of misbehavior, but the most common was for tardiness.  Every day I went to school, I’d walk past a line of students in the parking lot waiting to go to the gymnasium where they would be beaten and then dismissed to first period class.  It was always the same students, always the same infractions.  Other reasons beating the students included: not having the right uniform, talking, not doing homework, being disrespectful to a teacher, and getting into fights with other students.

The most unfair reason for getting a beating was not having the proper uniform.  Both of the high schools I taught at were in low-income areas of a mid-size city.  Many had single parent homes and did not have much money for food, let alone the proper uniform.  So they got beat.  As I passed these students in the mornings, eager to get there a bit early and down a cup of coffee before first period, I’d think to myself, “What sense does it make to keep beating a student when they will never have the money to buy the proper uniform?”

Tradition and conformity are strong in South Korea, sometimes for the good, sometimes not.