A student wrote the following in his writing portfolio cover letter:
Dear Ms. Waters,
To be perfectly honest, when this quarter first started, I thought that English Composition 101 was going to be a breeze. I expected ABC-style, elementary writing where I would be able to knock papers out in twenty minutes or less, like a pizza joint. This class was supposed to be my easy “A.” Boy was I wrong.
The first paper I turned in was the 5-paragraph essay on the novella, “A River Runs Through It.” Assuming I was a great writer, I had a smug attitude and was looking forward to my first “A” of the quarter. When the paper was returned, however, I was greeted by a smack in the face: a “C”! Surely this must be some kind of mistake, I thought. Upon reviewing the notes and comments, I was dismayed to discover that I was not as great of a writer as I initially believed, and was, in fact, heavily flawed. I didn’t know how to properly cite sources, I was unclear in my arguments, and I was not summarizing in my own words. Worst of all, I was the next worse [sic] thing to being a plagiarizer.
[...talks about assignments he worked on and how his grade improved]
Writing is something that many people don’t understand how to do well. While the concept of explaining something in the written word seems so simple, to actually do it is something else entirely. The lessons that I have been taught in English Composition 101 are ones I will always remember. They have given me the confidence to write thoughtfully and intellectually on just about any subject. Grist for my mill, I suppose you could say [reference to G. Graff article "Hidden Intellectualism"]. In the future, I plan to use this knowledge to produce academically sound papers for my other classes and hopefully pursue a post-graduate degree once I get out of Washington State Penitentiary.
I would like to thank you, Ms. Waters, for taking the time to come to this environment and bringing higher learning into our lives. The lessons that you have taught me have inspired in me a confidence in my academic ability that I didn’t have before I took this class. I hope that you take at least a little satisfaction in knowing that you have helped a student begin his journey towards something better in his life. Wherever you end up going with your teaching career, you will always have students out there that will remain forever grateful for having been better educated by your lessons.
Sincerely yours,
[...]
I don’t post this to pat myself on the back; instead, I post it to remind myself, and I hope others, of the very high highs that come with this career.
And I’ll just add a sentence from another of his papers, which was pretty much the best line in a student paper, ever. The context is, again, Gerald Graff’s article “Hidden Intellectualism,” wherein Graff argues that students should tackle texts that are interesting to them, and that they can exercise the same rhetorical muscle with contemporary, popular texts as they can with traditional, canonical texts. This student’s response:
Sorry Shakespeare, but thou doth not standeth a chance against cars, music, friends, or girls, in any particular order, on any given day.
It’s a bit hard for me as a teacher to sit as a student in a class. It’s kind of like rafting after I learned to row: no way am I not going to be the one in charge of where the boat is going and what rocks and waves it’s going to hit.
I may, come to think of it, have a bit of a control issue.
Anyway, this is relevant because in last night’s childbirth education class, I found myself mentally critiquing the educator, which of course is ridiculously hypocritical since it’s not like I’m the most fabulous teacher to spin the magic web of rhetoric. But seriously, I give you the following situations:
1. To start with, she made a sexist generalization at the beginning of class, something about how women’s labor stories are like men’s fish stories (implying something about lying about the length thereof, I guess), and mostly I was offended because I fish, too. And I have not yet lied about my labor experience (head’s up: I WILL win), so the expectation rankled.
2. Then there was this dandy question, clearly meant to gin up some discussion in the class:
Educator: How do you time contractions?
[ten seconds dead silence]
Me: Um, with a watch?
I knew what she was getting at, although not exactly — something to do with frequency and/or duration of contractions — but when you ask an unclear question and no one answers, rephrase and clarify what you mean. Or else you get smart-asses like me answering. (Though, professional confessional time: I love smart-asses. They make class fun and keep me on my toes. Double bonus. Although I’m not sure this educator feels that way about me.)
3. This is a rhetorical complaint: Everything she says is declarative: You WILL do this, you WILL do that, you WILL like this, you WILL not like that, etc. Um, no, thank you. Being told what I will and won’t do or think works about as well on this 30-year-old as it did on this 15-year-old. I realize I’m knocking my own maturity level here, but thanks to feminism and consumerism AND SCIENCE, women have a lot more childbirth choices than we used to, and I don’t appreciate childbirth “education” being presented as a map with stations where you get your hand stamped before moving on to the next level. If that works for the next woman, great — but not me.
Tangential confession: Last night I was a little taken aback when the educator asked who all was reading books on childbirth and I was the only one who raised a hand. Seriously?! How can you approach one of the biggest events in your life without planning? (And no, I don’t think childbirth education indoctrination counts.) I mean, I know I like to plan, but … HOW DO YOU NOT PLAN?
4. Finally, this childbirth educator pronounces the word “dilated” “dillatated.” THAT IS NOT A WORD, and I know because I triple-checked it on dictionary.com so as to not be made an ass of (which happens often enough as it is). And I know I should be more worried about what it means to be 10 cm “dillatated” than how she mispronounces the word, but it strikes at the heart of her ethos and those twelve or whatever years she spent on a Labor and Delivery ward.
Ugh. Somehow in my life I have morphed from the back-row, I’m-not-here student into the front-row, know-it-all critic. What’s worse, I remember how I hated those people in college, and thus this post is halfway between a cry for help and a blubbering confession. I guess when I’m stuck spreadlegged and naked at 8 cm dillatated and wondering why my epidural isn’t working, I’ll have time to ponder this further.
A recent New York Times article by Max Roosevelt discusses how professors and students see assigning grades. To put it briefly, students think they deserve higher grades than they sometimes earn. But is the problem with the students, as the article suggests, or the K-12 system of hyper-testing, or is it with instructors’ expectations?
First, note the words used in the first few paragraphs of the article: students “expect,” “deserve,” and feel a sense of “entitlement.” In a consumer-driven education system, these are very common feelings, and at this point it can be difficult to convince students otherwise. I do make it a point each semester to get students thinking about whether college is a “right” or a “privilege,” but I haven’t yet ventured far into the discussion about “consumers” versus “learners.” A worthwhile discussion, but not one that I feel ready to take on just yet.
Second, notice one of the interviewed professors’ way of grading: students’ default grades are C (where C = average). They have to extend themselves and exercise their ideas to raise it. This, I think, is not typical of all college classes and is the area where the article doesn’t dig deeply enough. For starters, different classes grade very differently. In math classes, if you get the correct answers, you get an A. In freshmen-level writing classes, if you demonstrate the skills of writing (critical thinking, rhetorical awareness, proper source usage, revising, etc.) then you get an A. This, I think, more than the sense of entitlement or the hyper-testing K-12 education, is the problem that sets up those expectations: different classes and different professors have different ways of assessing grades.
I don’t think that’s bad, but I do think it’s missing from the NYT article, and perhaps from students’ consciousness. Different fields of study prize different abilities. Duh. That’s why it’s college and not trade school: students are meant to experience a wide range of ideas and learn lots of skills. So I would argue that the problem isn’t with students’ expectations; it’s with instructors’ and professors’ communication skills: rather than just outlining grade distribution in the syllabus, they need to explain why they grade the way they do, and what it is about their grading system that will benefit students in the end. The article almost touches on this in the last part where Prof. Bower says, “Unless teachers are very intentional with our goals, we play into the system in place.” But alas, no further discussion.
I should add that this isn’t a final opinion on the subject; it’s more of an initial reaction. I’m finding that I have few set opinions these days…thanks a lot, grad school.