In “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing,” Maxine Hairston talks about the shift occurring in what is deemed acceptable for composition. She explains that for there to be a paradigm shift, there must be issues or concerns not able to be answered by the current paradigm. Those professionals that are resistant to change often ignore the questions that the current set of conventions are not able to answer.
The majority of instructors teaching composition hold degrees in literature. Many English departments do not see the need to hire writing specialists but believe that those instructors which doctorate degrees are thereby qualified to teach writing. This assumption is based on the misconstrue notion that composition is easy.
In “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” Kenneth Bruffee starts by explaining how the teaching practice, collaborative learning, came to be. In the 1970s, many students enrolling in college were unable or unwilling to adapt to the set structures before them. Many were ill-prepared. Academic support services set up to help these students were met with resistance as many felt that they were simply an extension of what went on in the classroom As a result, teachers began to explore peer tutoring as a possible solution. This method worked better as students responded well.
Bruffee believes that in the composition classroom there must be much discourse among the students. This will create a group of knowledgeable learners. Focus must not be put on writing, rewriting or editing but on conversing.
Bruffee explains that the success of collaborative learning is related to our ability to think and thinking is conversing.
In “Shaping at the Point of Utterance,” James Britton makes a case for spontaneity and invention in the process of writing. As we are speaking, he says, we are forming words to give meaning to our intended message. Writing must be approached the same way.
These readings really hit home for me this week. In my new position at work, I am working with a composition II professor. Over the weekend I was given papers the students had written in order to grade. The professor provided me with a comprehensive rubric to help me grade the papers. I labored meticulously, constantly referring to the written assignment instructions and the rubric. The grades were not good, a couple of Bs, a couple of Ds and mostly Cs. The major issue most of the students faced was not answering the question. Grammar was the next big issue with the lack of adherence to MLA not far behind. The professor’s comments upon seeing the grades Monday morning were, “You are a tough grader,” at which point I began to feel really bad for the students and I wondered what I did wrong.
The students were unhappy. They took their grievances to the professor who backed me up. I sat down with several students, explaining to them why they got the grades they got. Most of them resigned but I changed one student’s grade from a C to a B.
Two students in particular left a big impression on me and have been hunting me since Monday. They are both English Language Learners and they each earned a C. One, was one point away from a B. However, she made many mechanical errors. I believe many of them were oversights, such as failing to space after a period or a parenthesis and improper capitalization. The professor went over her paper and told her that her grammar errors were too many to overlook.
The other student is very eloquent and participates in class a lot. He reads all of the assigned readings and is very insightful in his comments. His paper read like a book report. He summarized and hardly answered the question. He was angry because he said he worked hard on that paper and I believe he did based on his participation in the classroom. However, he come up short. Upon reading and rereading his paper, the professor agreed with me and did not change his grade.
Britton, Bruffee and Hairston spoke to me because I understand it is not fair to hold students, many of whom are ELLs, to certain standards without first introducing them to the rules. After the students left, the professor and I had a conversation in which she says that she does not teach grammar; the students are expected to go to the learning center and the writing center for help with mechanics. She is not even well-versed in certain grammatical rules. (I mentioned the terms pronoun-antecedent agreement and faulty parallelism and she had no idea what those meant, though she has internalized those rules). The system is broken. They expect students to perform at a level yet are not adequately preparing them to succeed.
Though I feel terrible, I stand by those grades because at the end of the semester, they will have to pass a departmental final which will be graded not by me nor their instructor. If their writings do not align with the rubric guidelines, they will not succeed. Though I don’t agree with putting all of the emphasis on mechanics and end product, they will fail the class if their final papers resemble those I graded. I hope they will come to me for help.
Next Monday, I start the class discussion. I was told to prepare a grammar lesson. Though I cannot overstep my boundaries, I will look to Britton, Bruffee and Hairston for inspiration.
Sarah
ReplyDeleteYour recent experience with grading is interesting and certainly relevant to this week's readings about process and product. I also read a lot of student papers at work and sometimes struggle with how to help students approach the revision process. I have one student, for example, who knows what he wants to say and gets all the information on the page, but his grammar and mechanics are horrendous. When I read through his papers I see his argument and where he is going, but all this would be much clearer if he had a firmer grasp on grammatical rules. We have gone through his papers together sentence by sentence to correct formal errors, but this is obviously not always a useful approach. It may be the instinct of many to call this student a "bad writer" but I know this is not the case. His point is often lost, however, because of his messy prose and we have been working all semester to fix this.
Iris
I know that these issues are problematic for us as current (and future) instructors and wish there was something else that could be done. The system is, indeed, broken. No surprise in that, the heartbreak in it is that it is failing the very student trying to operate within the system. I think, for me, I must remember that at the college level the student is choosing to be there, they have invested thought, time, energy and money into that thought. If I don't give them a precise education that they can build upon when they leave my class, then I am aiding them in squandering that investment. That, to me, is as great a responsibility as teaching them the skill that has been put in front of me to teach.
Peele
Students do sometimes get very upset about grades. The issue that you describe is pressing: with so many English language learners, how can we hold them to vague, we-know-it-when-we-see-it standards that they are unlikely ever to achieve? The research shows that formulaic grammar instruction is ineffective. Targeting specific grammar errors in an individual student’s work is effective, but it takes time and is very slow. Students with a lot of second-language interference will still have a lot of the same issues at the end of the semester. At the same time, these students have all been admitted to the college; it’s very easy to identify students’ writing deficits before admission, and it’s also clear that they will make only gradual progress. Why make the standard unachievable? Why grade them on aspects of writing that we aren’t teaching? We can’t continue to assume that students already know things about writing after so many years of it being demonstrated that they do not. Those of us in English composition don’t get to make the decision about what’s valued, even though we’re held responsible for students’ writing. I think over the next couple of generations, though, there will be a sea change in how language is perceived in the US. There are so many immigrants who bring with them so many varieties of English. As those people move into positions of power in universities they will bring with them different understandings of what it means to write.
Raquel
ReplyDeleteAs a fellow middle-man (tutor in my case,) I've forgotten the number of students who come to me with less than stellar grades because of things they haven't been taught in class because the teacher/system had set standards/expectations.Your unique position gives you an unique insight into the assessment side of things that I am not often privvy to. It's baffling to me that a professor would require such strict adherence to grammar when she herself hasn't taught it or isn't even really comfortable assessing why something is ungrammatical. This reminds me of what Caitlin said in her post about Williams' article: "grammar errors" are merely violations percieved by the reader (so the errors become a "feeling" or a general vagueness that results in "awkward" being throw every which way on papers), who may or may not be on the look out for errors depending on her bias. This seems, to me, to be setting the stage for inconsistent standards all around, and as you said, a broken system.