Ianthe on International Students.

I've been catching up with CM, and I was struck by the posts, a while back, about dealing with international students.

Now what?

I feel your pain, although I have to say that I am not in an English department or a writing center. I teach string macrame, but, for a number of historical reasons, including long employment as a science writer and editor, I frequently find myself teaching "writing intensive" courses. And these courses frequently have high enrollments of non-native speakers of English, since my institution, like many others, regards these "full-freight paying" students as, essentially, cash cows. Indelicately put, perhaps, but not untrue. Our particular population includes a high percentage of "parachute children" sent by their parents to stay with host families and attend American high schools at the age of fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen. It strikes me that these kids have a series of unique problems. For one thing, their cognitive development is hindered by having high school subjects taught in a language in which they are, at best, at an intermediate level. For another, they often get to see their families for less than a month per year. That's got to be tough on a teenager.

The institution does not want to increase the amount of support, in the form of ESL classes/writing clinics/tutoring services offered to these students, because this kind of teaching is expensive, no matter who does it. Every cent the institution spends on support decreases the profitability of these students. The institution has already cut back on services to "native" or in-state students. I can understand the administration's reluctance to spend more on this new population. They are in a bad place, since state support has plummeted every year I've been here.

No one is every going to ask for my opinion on what to do about this, so I am offering it to CM, gratis. I actually have several ideas.

1. We admit these international students by using different rules than we use for our own in-state students. Logically, then, couldn't we also graduate them using different rules? Say, for example, we institute a new degree, a Bachelor of Technology degree, for example. No general education courses, no writing courses. Just STEM courses, one after another. This would, I think prove popular with the students themselves, since they often do well in such courses.

2. If the above smacks too much of separate and discriminatory paths, maybe we could just open the Bachelor of Technology to ALL our students. I think there would be a substantial demand for such a program among our "native" students as well.

3. Both of the above are unlikely, I know. So here's a third option, the one I think has a chance of working. It covers everyone, and it saves the institution some serious money.

We give up.

We simply admit that we cannot teach writing anymore. It's too expensive, and we do it rather badly, even with our students who are native speakers of English. Even these native students write very poorly (and this is an institution that is "very selective") and have enormous trouble reading anything that is more than a page or two in length. Their vocabulary is quite limited; today I had a student ask me what "polemical" meant. (It was in a reading; evidently it never occurred to her to look it up.) Indeed, I cannot figure out how to teach people who "never read" how to write, and, from what I can tell, the English department hasn't been able to solve this problem, either.

From what I can tell, writing just is not a skill anyone values now. I look at blogs and see people actually making money on them with posts that are simply awful. I am not talking merely about the frequent misspellings and grammatical problems. Those happen to the best of us, although one would hope not with the consistency these blogs evince. However, there are plenty of blogs written by people who cannot even tell a story consecutively and understandably, let alone support an argument or argue from evidence. They have many followers and readers and (admiring!) commentators.

We could, of course, maintain some writing courses, for those students who want them. Indeed, we could even offer a "writing certificate" or a "writing endorsement" on their diplomas, after they take a series of writing courses. Departments might even require such a sequence as part of their graduation requirements, if they actually value writing as much as they say they do.

For anyone who says that our "stakeholders" and the corporations who employ our students would object strenuously to our giving up on writing instruction for all, all I can say is that in the nearly three decades that I have been teaching, I have never seen a corporation offer a student an extra nickel in salary because the student is a good writer. Corporations, we are sometimes told, vote with their money. I would say that they have decisively voted that writing is not a skill worth paying for.

Is it strange that our students do not value it either?