Sometimes, when I read the illiterate scrawlings my students turn in, those foul works masquerading as “essays”, I choke on my bile and wish for a fit of apoplexy to calm my shock and fury. Save for the usual 6% of students who can write decent essays (relatively! If we didn’t have to coddle precious snowflakes all day, those A papers would be C papers), the rest of the snowflakes have the gall to turn in these, these things that ought to be written in crayon on the back of a crinkled newspaper, for all the impression of sophistication they bring. Sophistication? That’d be the day! What an impossible dream, like reaching for the moon with my bare hands and expecting to grasp it. At least “cogent” or “free of the endless, grotesque parade of errors that make the shades of our ancestors weep for the future of humanity”.
I mean, say I teach upper-division seminar courses on Theory of Basketweaving – I just don’t think I should be spending 80% of my essay grading time helping students with the excrutiating minutiae of grammar and spelling mistakes that bubble forth at me like the vile belchings of some demonic cauldron. I tell you what, I expect that mess to be handled by the end of high school or by courses offered in the English department. Courses taken before entry into my courses.
I mean, say I teach upper-division seminar courses on Theory of Basketweaving – I just don’t think I should be spending 80% of my essay grading time helping students with the excrutiating minutiae of grammar and spelling mistakes that bubble forth at me like the vile belchings of some demonic cauldron. I tell you what, I expect that mess to be handled by the end of high school or by courses offered in the English department. Courses taken before entry into my courses.
Every day, every single day of the week, I am wounded to the core of my being at the awful and horrific wrongness of the fact that people that should be doing nothing more advanced than shearing sheep for a living are getting college degrees.
Ah, and there, at the very end of your musing, you hit upon it... Believe me, what they have not wrangled through ELEMENTARY experience, nudged closer toward the "perfect standard" through the more sophisticated READING required in their high school years--and then only if they've DONE it, they ain't gonna get. And you know what THAT means? Their asses do not belong in the seats that fill your college lecture halls and classrooms. And SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE along the line shoulda been encouraging them to figure the fuck out what it exactly IS that feeds their passion. 'Cause they all gots one. They do. And we gotta quit drumming it outta them when they are like, 7, and they are being held to some tweaky-assed standard that will ostensibly leave none of them behind and yet leaves ALL of them wondering what it's all for and if they can ever actually DO anything right again in their lives. Here's what: I teach seniors. In a freaking SOLID high school. And I am blessed to work with the very best of them. And I whisper truths to them that their parents sometimes don't like them hearing: I tell that they--even THEY, the best and the brightest--do NOT have to go on to college; I tell them they certainly SHOULDN'T go on to college unless and until they cotton to who and what they wanna be when they grow up; I tell them we have abused them in forcing upon them an ignorance and immaturity that makes them unprepared at 18 to stand the fuck up and deliver. I tell them it is NOT their fault, but that it will quickly become their fault if they insist upon following a path set by someone other than themselves...I urge them to graduate, leave school and travel--get a job, live away from home, do their own fucking laundry and pay their own fucking bills. Get some freaking PERSPECTIVE and try, try--TRY HARD!--to remember what makes them happy. I admonish them to consider: The stuff that comes easily to them is not EASY; it sources from their natural-born talents and it is easy because the fit is right.
ReplyDeleteI do my part, in my little rural high school, to help some truly precious people--people; HUMAN BEINGS!--to avoid total flakedom. But my reach is short.
It would be good--it would be grand! if youse colleges out there would STOP ADMITTING THE IGNORANT AND THE ILLITERATE.
No, not everybody is right for college. And college is not right for everybody.
By the way, I will not apologize for the rant.
ReplyDeleteMrs C.,
ReplyDeleteThere should be no reason to apologize on this blog unless you make a rude remark towards another CMer. Otherwise, feel free to rant and rave. That's what's good about CM. We can come here to rant and rave and to see that we are not alone. I teach Math at a CC and I am continually shocked at how few of my students who just recently graduated from high school know basic mathematics. It makes me want to scream sometimes. I haven't seen you post on other entries, so, I should also say, "Welcome to CM," or if I just haven't seen your comments before, "It's nice to meet somebody who feels the same way I do."
Mathsquatch out.
Should grammar and spelling be taught in college level English courses? If you're going to be angry about having to go over such basics in your own class, imagine how the English teachers feel for a moment.
ReplyDeleteThose things should be taught in developmental classes, yes. They should also be taught in college level grammar classes, but the students making basic mistakes aren't ready for those. Believe me about that last one--I took a 300 level grammar course and it was like studying a completely different language.
Your English colleagues really aren't slacking off, they're just working with the same students that you are. They're trying to teach college level writing to students who may not be ready. That's a really cruddy job.
There's a lot of conversation about whether or not every school should offer developmental classes. But if every school is going to target every student--well then, they probably should. We do, and I love tutoring the students that work hard at it and for whom lightbulbs go off in the duration of that course for. But we're not the majority of schools, and that doesn't happen for the majority of students.
I second what My Little Proffie says. I had a much longer response (longer than my earlier response to Mrs C., that is) in which I basically said that, though much less eloquently, but it was eaten by the series of tubes.
ReplyDeleteMathsquatch out.
I'm a college English instructor. In one course (the one we teach most often), I'm expected to teach students essay structure, literary essay structure, logic, research methods, MLA citation, essay criticism, and literary criticism. There simply is not time to teach grammar as well. We are supposed to assume that they all know how to write a sentence and a paragraph, though, of course, they don't. How could they be expected to do so? After all, they've only been learning grammar since elementary school (though they all claim that they've never learned it before). If I taught them what they actually NEED to learn as opposed to what the college thinks they CAN learn (ie, college level skills), I'd never get around to teaching what I'm paid to teach. In other words, I'm paid to do the impossible but if I were to do the merely possible, I'd lose my job.
ReplyDeleteNo, they shouldn't be in college. It pains me deeply that they are. Every day it pains me and it especially pains me when I mark essays. But, hey, if colleges stopped letting everyone and her dog Toto into college, you and I would be out of work. Take the pay check and buy a beer.
No, I will NOT teach grammar. Absent a documented learning disability or ESL status, I will indicate that student's grammar is not college level and send them to remedial classes and the learning center, and only then because I don't have the power to call admissions and tell them to rescind. But I didn't get a Ph.D. to tell people that every sentence must have a subject and a verb. If I'd wanted to do that, I would have just gotten a teaching credential, sparing myself an extra 3 years of grad school and 6 years on the tenure track.
ReplyDeleteIn my state, the problem is that, literally, the high school exit exam requires students to write at the 7th grade level. That is the stated standard. Which I do not get, in the least: you can graduate from high school 5 years behind grade level? While elementary schools are punished severely in my state, meaning forced to close or fire people, if they do not have a given percent of kids reading *at* grade level? So presumably in the functioning elementary schools a critical mass are reading at grade level through 5th grade? And then what? What the hell goes on between 6th and 12th grade anyway? Do they just sit there and vegetate?
Nope. Sorry. Not playin'.
they've only been learning grammar since elementary school
ReplyDeleteMaybe, and maybe not. True story, from the fashion-challenged '70s:
Our Junior High English teacher was a classic hardass. She made us diagram sentences, etc, etc. (As Winston Churchill said of his experience of English instruction--he was deemed too stupid to study Latin and Greek--we came out of that experience with an instinctive grasp of the structure of an English sentence.)
The following year (10th grade), we all took a one-semester grammar course, newly mandated by the state. The teacher was a German language major, fresh out of college.
We knew more grammar--a lot more grammar--than she did. And it wasn't just the geeks like yours truly; the slackers were correcting her as well.
It mystifies me, having studied a hatful of languages myself, how anyone majoring in a foreign language can come out of the experience with such a rudimentary grasp of grammatical terms and ideas. One of the most interesting things, to me, about studying a language other than my cradle tongue is how much it teaches you about your own language.