Most of them do not have command over basic sentence structure, and are full of fragments and run-ons. They show an incredible poverty of vocabulary
, including the vocabulary I have taught them, that for analyzing poetry. They are full of meaningless filler about how poems "contain many sounds designed to get the reader to feel the flow of their ideas," despite my having spent 10 weeks showing them how to find particular sounds and relate them to the poem's actual content. They are pages and pages short of the required length. Several are obviously plagiarized. They are, supposedly, written by students who graduated in the top 12% of their high school classes, and are now college juniors and seniors, mostly majors.I have come to the conclusion that I am simply asking them to do things that are too complicated, but I can't figure out how to simplify the things any more without just giving up and asking for anything-goes essays on how they feel about the literature they read.
Advice, support, commiseration, tall stiff drinks
are all welcome.
I have no advice because what you just wrote could be taken straight out of my rant to my department chair today about research papers I graded last night. Word for word! One student simply cut and pasted huge chunks of text in between paragraphs on a completely different topic (so it seems, but I can't quite figure that one out). Another cited only her roommate (who is supposed to be an expert on the topic of 'medical' marijuana). And another put "quote marks" around all author's names, but not around the text he cited. Whaaaaaa?????
ReplyDeleteI cannot offer advice becaues I, too, am drowning in the shallow puddle of ignorance before me. I can, however, take you on a tour of wine country if you're ever in this area!!! It helps! Immensely.
What TCC said. I'm in the same boat, too. I just graded the first batch of exams for a summer class and they were a hot mess--nobody seems to have absorbed any information so far this term, few are able to follow instructions, and some even have forgotten basic terminology from the lower-division introduction that was a prereq for my class.
ReplyDeleteWhen I taught this class before (at the same school!) there were always a few slackers near the bottom of the curve, but there were also an equal or larger number of really solid students who got nearly perfect scores on everything and kept everyone else honest. No so this time. They ALL suck.
I wish I had something more useful to tell you--but at least you can take comfort in knowing you're not alone.
I haven't collected papers just yet but I'm sure they will be on par with yours.
ReplyDeleteSo, try this out http://smittenkitchen.com/2011/05/vermontucky-lemonade/
It looks pretty damn amazing to me right about now.
I have the same experiences with my students. It's not kosher anymore to say that some people, students included, are just plain stupid -- but they are. How they manage to pass high school and get into college is the crisis in education today. If it continues like this, higher education will have no meaning or value.
ReplyDeleteIs that the pep talk you were seeking?
Same as above for me too.
ReplyDeleteThe course I taught was a requirement for the entry-level tier of a specialized sub-discipline within a well-known profession (How's that for vague????) The class was titled "Persuasive Writing." That was the agenda! The "real" stuff was to come the next tier up after these very basic skills were learned.
The students, for the most part, couldn't write. As F&T said, "Most of them do not have command over basic sentence structure, and are full of fragments and run-ons. They show an incredible poverty of vocabulary, including the vocabulary I have taught them..." That quote fit my students to a T. Most of them chose unreliable sources, despite my feedback on a working bibliography (which was ignored). Many of them skipped deadlines for simple assignments. There was rampant plagiarism and ignorance of the 2 weeks worth of practice on citation and plagiarism avoidance. Several final papers were one-half to one-third the page minimum (5 pages!). Many of the students were unable to support a thesis, let alone defend a claim. (Or worse: many presented evidence that refuted the claim they were trying to support!)
And the anger and resentment. Oh sweet Lord-a-mighty, the venom they spilled when I tried to help them by pointing out their errors during the term so they could do their best by the end. Scaffolding can only work if they learn along the way!
And I wasn't asking them to analyze some "worthless" (in their eyes) piece of poetry -- I was trying to get them to engage in ethical issues they would face in their profession after they graduate! One student, who took the class as a free elective, wrote me afterwards to share that he had no idea he'd be so sick of X profession after the class. The irony is that many of his peers complained they had learned nothing about their future profession from the class; they just wanted to learn skill Z, which was part of Tier 2 of their coursework.
Sadly, issyvoo, I think we're well-past the "If it continues like this, higher education will have no meaning or value" stage at some schools. Crappy Name U is just handing out diplomas at this point to too many of their "graduates." I should have failed one-half of the students I taught that term, but I didn't dare even try for fear of the endless grade appeals I'd have to endure.
What's really sad is how many students did awesome work but got saddled to endure coursework with riff-raff who should have never gotten into college to begin with.
In addition to their limited vocabulary, I'm finding more and more often that the words they do use are misused, showing a complete ignorance of their meanings and parts of speech.
ReplyDeleteI've been trying to learn something about digital methods of text markup in my "spare time." I must say, the systems that have been created for marking things literary scholars care about (like, for instance, rhyme scheme and meter) are very good, and the whole principle is very much the same one that underlies citation and literary terminology: that scholars need a common language to talk to each other. If anything, doing it electronically makes the whole system even more precise and painstaking, with very little room for error.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we should make students do markup for a while. They'd have to point to particular places in the text, and say what they're doing. And, by the end, they might be begging to be allowed to *just* cite specific parts of the text correctly in the old analog way.
I should also point out that I've met plenty of 20-somethings who have plunged happily, and very competently, into this very demanding work, and can also talk coherently about why what they're marking matters, and what they're trying to accomplish. So there are some smart, hard-working, patient young scholars out there -- just not enough of them, it seems.
And yes, scaffolding often seems to be invisible to the students who need it most; breaking a complicated task or skill set into component parts, which they desperately need to see done, and learn to do themselves, seems to make them view the parts as completely disconnected. I wish I could figure out what to do about that.
I find that the students I had at the beginning of the year in my remedial sequence can function on a basic expository writing exercise. They fall apart, however, when it comes to anything requiring analysis or support of their opinion beyond their friend's blog or their own brain. There's something about taking the leap from their own minds to someone else's more-credible mind that seems impossible for them. Simply FINDING (despite my having helped them for three days in class to find sources for their papers) a source that isn't a blog or on YahooAnswers or eHow.com, seems impossible when on their own.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if it's simple laziness or an inability to function on their own.
The lack of writing skills among college students is practically criminal. Do the lower grades spend so much time teaching to those infernal standardized tests that they throw basic skills out the window? I only ask this because I've never taught lower grades. The lack of vocabulary among them made finding the cheaters even easier. Certain words used in papers just smack you in the face.
ReplyDelete@Ancillary: I'm not sure if I'm really happy that I can catch them out on cheating bc they don't even do that well, or if I miss the days when they wrote as well as sources they plagiarized from. Sigh.
ReplyDelete