Like many others before me, I’ll dare to ask the exasperated question, “What, exactly, do you boneheads teach freshman in those composition classes?” God only knows what you’re doing, but you’re definitely not teaching them to write, if by “write,” I mean how to properly format an academic paper or string two sentences together without grammatical errors, let alone construct an argument or select textual evidence to support it.
“But many of them have had a deplorable education in horrible public schools!” you say.
Hello? 911? Can you send the wanhbulance, please? This is supposed to be the part where you, you know, teach them the stuff they missed.
“But most of them are stupid and shouldn’t be in college anyway!” you say.
Then flunk them. If students cannot follow basic instructions and complete the most basic of tasks, they do not belong in college. Because of you, I have juniors and seniors in my upper level literature class who look at me as if I’ve suddenly grown four heads when I ask them about thesis statements or textual evidence. Seriously, what the fuck? Given a 500-word assignment “X author is a better or more effective writer than Y author because…,” I have students turning in plot summaries of two stories by Y author, expecting an A.
We’re responsible for producing the next generation of literate adults, and so far, we’re failing. Blame Twitter. Blame texting. Blame the internet. Whatever—it’s all the same. The buck stops with you, freshman composition instructors. Say “no more.” No more to bad grammar. No more to sentence fragments. No more to contractions. No more to stream of consciousness “analysis.” NO MORE.
Have the guts to tell them that their work is unacceptable. To tell them that their ideas are bad or even outright wrong.
If you don’t, I’ll find you and kick your ass.
I think you're forgetting something important. I never taught freshman comp, but I certainly have taught intro physics for engineering majors. I did flunk stupid, lazy, innumerate, and otherwise patently incompetent and dangerous students, only to have my decisions reversed by some senior administrator, who then gave me dire warnings not to do this again. Why don't you kick his ass?
ReplyDeleteBecause I did this repeatedly, I had a real struggle getting tenure. I only did so because I was pulling in lots of external funding and involving students in research, something not many freshman comp instructors are in a position to do. Now that I have tenure, I do grade appropriately, but I trust you've heard that tenured faculty are an endangered species? My physics department still gets aggravation from the administration, for flunking too many students: as Peter Sachs noted in "Generation X Goes to College," "corrupt" is not too strong of a word to describe what higher education has become.
We don't have a required first-year writing course in the universities in our country (heck, I don't even know if most universities here offer it as an option), so all of us who teach first-year students (and second-year students, and...etc.) get stuck with trying to teach this on top of our subject matter. As Froderick points out, failing students who can't write would likely mean losing out on a shot at tenure, or even the tenure track -- on my campus, first-year courses and tutorials are largely taught by sessionals and grad students, who *need* decent teaching evaluations from students. It would also mean a massive bleeding out of our student population overall, and our institution needs the government money that each student brings in.
ReplyDeleteThe system is deeply f*cked, and I hate every D-that-should-be-an-F, C-that-should-be-a-D, and B-that-should-be-a-C that I have to give out.
Adso of Melk,
ReplyDeleteFirst, have you ever heard of the concept of writing across the curriculum? Just wondering, dude, because the idea that ANYONE could take a basically illiterate person and turn them into someone who can produce well written and critically thought out and coherent college essays on any topic in four months is, well, it's just plain dumb. All of us have to share the misery on this one.
I have tenure and I fail a LOT of folks, but not everyone can do that. I get terrible comments on the site that cannot be named, but got great comments and numbers on my student evaluations because back when they mattered to me (pre tenure) they were done in class, towards the end of the semester, after I had weeded out the losers. Now they are done electronically, and even students who stopped attending after the first two weeks can evaluate my style and worth as a professor over the course of a whole semester. And they do. So my evaluation numbers have changed since they started the whole electronic eval thing. Now they are still acceptable, but not stellar by any means. And they are supposed to be STELLAR. We WUV our students at my school. I think this might have a negative impact on the grading system at my college. Do you agree?
I have two kids in school right now, and I see more than ever that when my students tell me they never were taught about thesis statements, research, plagiarism, essay format, or grammar in high school they were wrong about that. I have a 7th grader and a 9th grader who could each easily pass anyone's College Composition class, and that is not because I am tutoring them at home. It's because they are getting great instruction at their public school. I live in a middle of the road town with what is known as an "okay but not stellar" school system. They are being taught this stuff in High School (and before that) too! It is just that some of them refuse to learn. And their teachers will get sued or fired or both if they fail them for it.
What you are seeing, Adso of Melk, are students who REFUSED to learn. They probably cheated whenever they could. My school does not use turn it in, so I have to do a Google search to find plagiarism. It is really time consuming, and I have a lot of other stuff to do. You know how it is, right? But I do it. I sit by my computer and type in suspicious sentences and phrases, and weed through what Google spits back. I have found this is an effective way to find lots of cases of plagiarism. It sometimes takes a while to catch a person, because they have become masters at playing around with their words to fool even the great Google. I have over 60 Composition students each semester. I catch and fail at least five students each semester. If I caught more than that, I am sure my dean would have a heart attack (she already does). And finding cheaters is like finding mice, don't you think? For every one you see, you have at least ten.
And then there is PROCESS, Adso of Melk. You know: drafts. I don't MAKE the corrections for them (the way some of my colleagues do) but I do point out their errors. And we have VERY helpful folk over there at the Writing Center. VERY HELPFUL. I go over there with a couple of the other nasty, tenured Composition professors and beg those tutors not to write my students' essays for them each and every Fall. They cringe when they see us coming.
So I teach exactly what I should teach. Even you, Adso of Melk, would applaud my required outcomes. I join you in the misery of it all. It's truly a sad situation, and I am not sure I see a solution to it.
"each of whom"
ReplyDeleteI see. Adso, do you flunk every one of those students?
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you'll just have to quit your whining and teach them the basics and the more advanced material. What's that? "I don't have time to teach everything." If you're the last class before these students leave college, the buck stops with you.
Where to start...
ReplyDeleteWhen I began reading this rant--the basis for which is legitimate, that students can't write worth a shit--I thought, "Ah, another non-humanities colleague complaining about how useless we are in the slums of the English Department." I'm used to this. I hear this all the time at LD3C, where professors in other disciplines require their students to write essays in their own intro courses but don't slap a beginning composition pre-req onto the courses they teach. Whatev.
And then I read this: "Because of you, I have juniors and seniors in my upper level [sic] literature class who look at me as if I’ve suddenly grown four heads when I ask them about thesis statements or textual evidence. Seriously, what the fuck?"
Oh, Adso of Melk, like so many other narratives written in the first person, yours reveals more about yourself than you probably intended it to do. You appear to teach at an institution where professors can teach only literature. This means that said professors probably never teach the unwashed masses, the beginning comp students drawn from every corner of the institution.
This also means that where you teach, such literature proffies may look down upon the lowly who teach only rhetoric and composition. The assumption is that composition is for those people to teach--you know, the ones not bright enough to teach literature, like you swanky upper-level lit proffies.
I may be wrong about what I've drawn from your rant, but the implication is the same: You, Adso of Melk, teach the literature; we, the rhet-comp proffies, teach the writing (and not the literature).
Guess what? The times, they are a-changin'. (See the post above about preparedness, my upper-level-lit-teaching friend.)
Why don't you grow a pair and fail the ones who can't write? I'm pretty sure that comp is a pre-req for your lit class; if students don't have the skills necessary to do the writing in your class, make sure that the writing assignments are worth enough to fail them. Do you have the stones for that?
I understand that you don't like the writing on the wall (ha ha ha) that you're trying very hard not to read, that upper-level-lit-proffie types are going to suffer with under-prepared students like the rest of us, and that means either 1) working on their writing skills in a class meant for the glorious (and I do mean that) exploration of literature, or b) clenching your jaw and plodding through your class even though the students are unable to do the work. That the students have diminished comprehension skills--making your class even more difficult and less enjoyable to teach--goes without saying.
I get that. It's not what you signed up for. Believe me, I know. It doesn't even bother me that you're ragging on fellow humanities proffies, mostly because I understand that place in your soul from which this rant originates.
What gets me, though, is that this rant lapses into the standard complaint that all the education "reformists" are throwing around: teacher incompetency. Your assumption is that the only variable that leads to your students' inability to articulate a single coherent thought on paper is the comp teachers they encountered before finding their way to your upper-level lit class.
Part II.
ReplyDeleteThere's another fallacy at work here. Are there lower-level lit classes where you teach? If so, shouldn't the poor slobs who teach those classes share some of your (misplaced) rage?
And if there are no lower-level lit classes where you teach, your class may be the first class in which these students have been asked to provide "textual evidence." I am not kidding. Close reading of a text--that is, close reading of a primary source, to understand that source for the source itself, in an aesthetic sense--may be something they've never encountered before. It's something I teach in every writing class, from developmental writing to essay and research, but not every composition teacher does this because it's primarily a lit thing. You may be the first person who's asked them to do this. As such, you may actually have to teach them how. Sucks, I know.
Oh–and what Bella said about grammar and students and how much they want to learn, and what Froderick said about many of us not being at liberty to fail poor students en masse, because doing so is hazardous to our job security.
Oh, please. We TEACH that stuff in freshman comp, but the same students who are staring at you pretending not to know what a thesis statement is sat in their comp classes, and half-assed it, and just barely scraped a C, or whatever it is they needed to get into your class.
ReplyDeleteThey also probably thought they would never need to know that stuff again. So maybe they wrote decent essays for us, after we hammered them about drafts and peer review. That stuff takes effort, man. Far easier to write a crappy paper than a good one.
Put a sock in it. I have tenure; I am not required to teach comp., and the last people I blame are my untenured colleagues. You cannot, in a 10-week quarter, bring people who come in without basic grammar skills, to college level writing. You can't even do it with the 25-person courses they teach, which I am not allowed to teach because the research faculty must carry higher enrollments.
ReplyDeleteWhy the admissions standards (or the standardized testing standards, or the Regents' exam, or whatever the fuck it is) are so low is beyond me. Look at the article above about graduation rates vs. college readiness rates. I have the top 12% in the state, who write at the 7th grade level.
As for me, I would love to issue a diagnostic and fail those who don't write at the college level, or tell them to drop. No can do. We in the Humanities are getting constant pressure about keeping our enrollments up -- sing, dance, give all A's, just don't let any of those 100-plus students drop your class. It's the Higher Ed version of social promotion, and it sucks. And there is no way on God's green earth to help a student solve more than one or two writing problems, in a class of 100 meeting 30 hours total.
So off my students go, practically illiterate, to their McDonald's jobs. Though these, too, are disappearing as my state sinks like the Titanic and the gov defunds us to the marrow.
Wow. I'm not going to repeat what GLG, WL, and Frog have already said, because it nearly perfectly encapsulates what I was thinking as I read this post.
ReplyDeleteI say "nearly" because I was also thinking "FUCK YOU, ADSO," mostly because you seek to lay the blame on those who teach the comp classes at your school. Really? Who died and made you perfect??
How big are those classes? Are they taught by adjuncts? TAs? TT? Tenured rhet/comp specialists? Is there supervision? Are there departmental learning outcomes that students have to meet to be able to pass? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you have no right to blame the instructors. You’re part of a department, too.
And really, what does it say about your program if you're getting students in upper level courses who can't do what you're asking? I've never met a prospective second-year English major who couldn't formulate a thesis. The students who don't want to get it usually flunk out. It's rare that a student can pass the second composition class (with a C here) without learning how to write a thesis. How do I know? I supervise the adjuncts on my campus. It’s my responsibility to make sure that the department’s learning outcomes are being met by students who pass our courses.
In the interest of full disclosure, I teach comp. I also teach literature (200-level). I'm at a two-year school that "feeds" into the four-years throughout the state. Most of my students come from the bottom half of their graduating classes—because a lot of them didn’t think they’d go to college. I have 24 students per comp class (I teach 3 sections of comp, 1 lit course with a cap of 38). We did the math the other day: that’s 24 solid hours of grading if I spend 20 minutes per paper. Many papers require more time than that, at least at the start of the semester.
I teach lit analysis in the lit courses. Maybe you should consider taking an early lecture to "re-cap" what they've supposedly already learned, instead of bitching that they "don't get it". Or you could just keep blaming your (likely overworked and under- appreciated) comp colleagues. You sound like a silverback.
As Frog pointed out, the days of "sink or swim" in higher ed are long gone--as schools lower their admissions standards to get butts in the seats (as the population plateaus and starts to decline), we deal with more and more students who need remediation, or God forbid, a little extra help understanding what’s being asked of them. Bury your head in the sand and pretend it’s someone else’s fault, or stand up and deal with it like a grown-up, like the rest of us.
Having been a composition adjunct at countless community colleges, four-year universities, and private colleges in the last decade, Adso's complaint is the symptom of larger problems that plague composition programs where I've worked:
ReplyDelete1) No teacher can fix four to six years of broken secondary teaching in sixteen weeks, roughly 48 hours of contact time, especially when you have a classroom with twenty to twenty-five individuals--each of whom is broken in their own way. In a semester/quarter college classroom population, the "magic teacher" archetype fails, miserably. Adso needs to spend a little less time masturbating to repeated viewings of Stand and Deliver and a little more time realizing the fact that learning to write well (much less fixing broken writers) is a skill that takes more than sixteen weeks to acquire, much less repair. This situation isn't at all helped by lazy cross-disciplinary professors who assign papers, then take the "not my job" approach when it comes to providing constructive feedback. Be the change you want to see, Adso.
2) I've taught at several four-year colleges with no remedial (or "developmental" these days, because god forbid a snowflake get his/her feelings hurt) classes at all. Thus, a student could have the compositional skills of a ten year old, have mommy and daddy heavily edit their high school work (including their college essays) and walk into a 1000 level class broken with no remediation path available to them. This is further complicated by the fact that composition program directors frown on teaching remedial skills in the classroom. I taught at a Florida four year where the comp director expressly forbade freshmen level comp teachers to cover remedial skills because she felt that it took time away from the class' larger objectives. Thus, comp teachers can either send struggling students to a writing center staffed by other clueless undergrads or tutor them (off the clock, since the R word and office hours don't mix) on their own time.
(continued)
3) At the community college level, remediation placement is usually decided by a computer. Students type a small writing sample into a program that tries to sniff out errors and sorts them based on how the errors line up with class objectives. There's no organic assessment to the determination of who gets into the freshman comp class and who gets into the remedial tier. Moreover, the exit criteria set for the remedial tier is painfully, painfully low. In Florida, it's a multiple choice exam (50 questions, as I recall, graded with scantron sheets) for grammar and a writing sample that is usually delivered as a generic five-paragraph essay: "In this essay, I will tell you (fill in prompt here)..." When I was grading exit exams in Florida, I saw peers pass essays that I would have given failing grades to. Why? The remedial teachers grade the written remedial exit exams. It's in their best interests to pass students on to the freshman level because they have to think about the final pass percentage in their classes. Even if the student isn't that of the teacher grading the essay, the student is that of a peer's. Since remedial classes have larger than average drop rates (based on my own observations teaching them), they need to think about passing an fair number from a population that has a dwindling curve built into it, to keep their final pass numbers in the safe zone. Essentially, the foxes are guarding the henhouse. When I sat in these grading sessions, one of the most frequent comments I heard was "now ask yourself, can a freshman comp teacher triage this student if you pass them?" Given that most of the remedial teachers weren't teaching comp, they didn't have to worry about triage--they could just say "well...he passed his exit exam. He must have had a quality degradation since my class--not my fault" if challenged on students struggling in freshman comp.
ReplyDeleteUltimately, this situation of broken students being passed along comes down to the administrators and current academic culture in the US. Since degrees are more commodities than they are measures of intelligent merit, admins need to keep as many seats filled as possible, to keep the tuition flowing. Since most undergrad classes have either a three or four strike rule (after which the failing students either lose financial aid or have to pay full price tuition), admins are under pressure to pass students along in the name of getting another semester's tuition out of them.
One simple remedy: require weeder courses to be taught by tenured faculty.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, it should be the best teachers you have teaching the freshman courses. This is the single point of contact to most of these students, and the better the experience, the better the students will appreciate your field afterwards.
But alas, it's hard work, which the silverbacks would rather not do. This is, to my mind, the essential problem: even though tenure still exists, we're not using it to cover the positions that need it.
Now I'm off to work out how to politely state that my students were idiots in my tenure package.
It's also occurred to me that if the threshold for language learning is puberty, perhaps basic grammar instruction ought to be completed by then? I know spoken and written language are not the same thing, but I wonder if grammar gets harder to learn as you age, the way language does. It used to be that 3rd to 5th grade was parts of speech and basic subject-verb-object sentences. 6th grade grammar got you to basic fluency with compound and complex sentences -- for me that was the year of diagramming sentences, and I'm not THAT old (Gen X). 7th grade was written composition, including thesis, supporting evidence, and so on, and then we were done: the rest was sophisticated argumentation and research skills. This is why I am saying my students arrive with skills at the 7th grade level or below. Perhaps if it's not all complete by age 13 or so, it gets much, much harder?
ReplyDeleteI think Frog has an interesting theory. I would also ask: if this is among the factors at work, does the increasingly lower average age of puberty perhaps contribute to the inability of students to master these skills? It's bad enough that students have little-to-no formal exposure to grammar and syntax in their early education, but perhaps the 'window' for this is also becoming smaller?
ReplyDeleteI have taught grammar/comp classes, and I found that the students were as much hampered by their awareness of their ignorance as they were by their lack of skills. There's a huge defensive wall they put up to protect their egos, and some never emerge from their fortress. But some do -- and relish the opportunity to learn "what they should already know" (to quote a former teaching supervisor). H-E-DOUBLE HOCKEY STICKS, a few of them even turned their new-found knowledge into a money-making venture, as more than one told me later that s/he had started charging friends for editing advice.
ReplyDeleteI would agree that younger would probably be better, but older and motivated can work as well.
Oh -- and a big ole HOLLA to the introduction of entrance/exit examinations!
If the students in your upper level lit courses can't do what you ask of them, then maybe you should have a little chat with your ivory colleagues teaching the lower lever lit courses. Beyond that, if you can teach students all they need to know about literature (or any branch or subset of literature) in a single semester, then I won't kick your ass. Until then, if you see me coming, you better run.
ReplyDeleteAll the above points are well taken—it’s a broken system, and whining doesn’t much help. All this is, of course, made even more depressing by the realization that the caliber of students at the diploma factory where I work is on the rise. Having talked to friends in the English department (responsible for handling the required composition course), I realize that it’s not about “teaching writing,” per se, although that is a large part of it, and you can’t teach students about analysis without having an object to analyze. The bottom line is that they’re trying to do the same thing I am—but with what results?
ReplyDeleteI don’t have a heart of stone—I feel badly for my students when they screw up, but it still doesn’t make me want to give them a D just for “effort.”
Le sigh. Back to grading.
What everybody above said. And thanks to Adso for seeing the other perspective.
ReplyDeleteI think that F&T's theory has some merit, and I'd add that, during the latent period, kids need not so much to study grammar formally, as to read lots of well-written prose employing a variety of sentence structures, vocabulary, etc. (think Tolkien, Twain, Carroll, Graham, et al -- none of them easy, and all of them somewhat different, but equally in love, and adept, with the English language). I suspect that the practice of having students read "grade level appropriate prose" (when they do read at all), has done a lot of harm; kids need to read stuff that's above their level now and then if they're to reach the next level. Of course one can learn grammar and complex sentence structure by explicit instruction (probably including the emulation of models) later on, but it's sort of like learning a second language later in life; it never comes as easily. I suspect that early experience reading complex sentences in one language also carries over into another; I have ESL students who write far better, give or take the occasional minor problem with articles or prepositions, than some of my native English speakers. And I have both ESL and native-English-speaker students who get hopelessly tangled when they try to write a mildly complex sentence (but, in my experience, the ESL students are more willing to work their way out of the maze, in part because, yes, they realize they've got a problem that needs to be solved).
It's also worth noting that many students' syntax gets tangled when they try to move to the next level of complexity in structure, thought, or both, and then gradually gets untangled again with practice. So, especially if they're encountering theory or other forms of complex analysis for the first time in a lit class, students who wrote perfectly well at the freshman comp level may produce some pretty messy sentences when writing the first paper for that lit class. That, of course, is an argument for assigning several papers, and for going over, and giving them a chance to practice, skills that are appropriate to that level (e.g. integrating quotations from primary and/or secondary sources in the context of a lit paper) in class. This can be fit in as group or individual work before or after a class discussion where appropriate texts are on the table.
Ah yes, flunk them. Then my "retention rate" goes down. So I give them Ds instead. Oh, wait. Then my "student satisfaction rate" goes down. If too many of these things go down, I don't get "re-hired." I think a C is looking good about now. Or how about a B?
ReplyDeleteOkay, sarcasm aside, the enrollments game is driving at least some of this, especially at the "these people shouldn't be in college" level.
At the institution that finally drove me away from teaching forever, composition adjucts were *forbidden* to "teach grammar." Which is sort of like teaching a class in carpentry and having to refer to "that long flat thing with a row of sharp teeth, no, the one with the handle" instead of being allowed to teach the apprentices words like "saw".
ReplyDeleteAlso, the stated object of the course was to teach the little dears how to do "academic writing." But did they get to read any "academic writing"? No, they read mostly op-eds and a novel; nothing from, say, the Journal of Asian Studies, in which an actual academic (tm) presents a thesis and supports it with evidence in paragraphs that begin with a topic sentence making a claim and end with a transition to the next paragraph. No, the kiddos are supposed to be able to write like that without actually reading anything written like that. All this by order of our a-little-less-low-than-the-adjuncts overlords.