Helpful Easy Tech Tools: A List of Resources Roundtable. All Summary, No Critical Thinking - Brainstorm. I teach freshman composition nearly every semester, and I’m changing my assignments. I require 25 or so pages of finished, edited essay writing for the course to go along with 10 or 12 one-page homework exercises (such as: “Why are books dangerous in Montag’s society?”).
Usually, the essay requirement involves three or four papers that have a thesis and an argument, with lots of analysis. Sometimes, though, I’ve tried short papers now and then, 2-page assignments that require one simple method: summarize all or part of an assigned reading. From now on, my syllabus will require no research papers, no analytical tasks, no thesis, no argument, no conclusion. No critical thinking and no higher-order thinking skills. Instead, the semester will run up 14 two-page summaries (plus the homework exercises). No “why” questions and no interpretation needed. Why scale the tasks downward? Limiting the content to summary has the added advantage of focusing instruction on prose style and grammar. I Know This Sounds Weird, But Thank You, Dr. Crazy, for the C- | Reassigned Time 2.0. Oh, my bloggy friends. I am so sorry to have been checked out over the past week from the blog. Especially after so many people left such great comments to the last post about my response to my students’ shitty papers.
So many things have happened since last week, many of which have involved appointments with students. Which have been exhausting, but yes, this is the result of the style of teaching that I do. But so after I taught three classes back to back to back today (during which I read 22 drafts while students did peer review, and then I taught a Really Freaking Hard Modernist Novel, and then I explained the nuances of Marxist theory to students through readings by Lucacs and Williams), I met with five students – with 4 of those five meetings lasting at least 30 minutes.
Anyhoodle, let me back up and respond to some of the comments from the last post, by way of getting to the title of this post. I can’t emphasize enough her point about teaching students how to read. Bad writing ≠ bad writer. I've been thinking a lot about Dr. Crazy's two recentposts about student writing. They're mostly pushing back against the idea that "students today" (especially students at regional public institutions like hers and mine) just can't write, are graduating from high school with basic skills that are abysmally bad, and that there's nothing for a professor in a writing-intensive field to do but throw her hands up and grade generously since there's no hope for improvement now.
I've always been with Dr. C on the last part--one of the reasons I'm a tough grader is that I believe in my students' ability to improve (and if they don't, it's on them)--but I have to admit that I've always assumed that those students who write badly write badly because they're starting out with poor skills. I mean, it stands to reason, right? I teach upper-division English majors, and sometimes they still, unaccountably, submit writing that is wordy, awkward, ungrammatical, and BAD. Yes, English Majors Submit Crappy Papers, Too | Reassigned Time 2.0. So this afternoon I was sitting in a university-wide meeting, and I ran into a friend from another department, with whom I share a student.
Apparently, after I handed back papers this morning in the class in which I have this student, the student fled to talk to my friend and was freaking out about how she’d done. (Note: the paper is only worth 10% of the final grade, and the student was solidly in the middle of the papers, in terms of the grade. In other words, the student is fine. Not in trouble at all, in the grand scheme of things. But as my friend and I were chatting about this, the conversation then veered to me talking about how appalled I was by many of the papers that were submitted in that class, another colleague from Nursing was sitting next to me, and she said, “This is a class with majors and minors? I thought for a moment, and then I responded: “Honestly? Part of this is laziness, but that’s not the whole story. But let me stop bitching. How do I know? List: Lines from The Princess Bride that Double as Comments on Freshman Composition Papers. Freshman Composition Is Not Teaching Key Skills in Analysis, Researchers Argue - Faculty.
Composition at Hildegarde. So, the summer is winding down a little, and this book is finishing itself, and I thought that I would try, today, to answer a question from a friend of mine that I’ve been dancing around in my head now for several weeks. The question is this: what would be the best course to take to teach somebody how to write? In this case, what’s wanted is not just the mechanics (although those are important) as the ability to clearly state and develop and argument and/or an exposition. And I’m sitting here writing this post about it today because it occurs to me that I don’t have an answer.
I don’t think anybody has an answer. And that brings me to a couple of problems. Because, obviously, composition can be taught. The same is true of rational thinking. And some of us, of course, don’t. And I find myself, when faced with a request for what would be the best course to teach someone, forced to admit that I don’t know of a single course or program that actually does the job. Not one. Tea. Blogs vs. Term Papers. A Return to the 5-Paragraph Theme - Commentary. February 21, 2010 Alan Defibaugh for The Chronicle Enlarge Image By Rob Jenkins As a graduate student, I once drew a rather bad cartoon of an old schoolmarm (complete with Gary Larson-style beehive) standing in front of a class saying, "And when you finish your five-paragraph theme on 'What I Did Last Summer,' write a five-paragraph theme on. ...
" The caption underneath read, "Janet Emig in Hell. " My attempt at humor had a small audience: fellow grad students in the rhetoric-and-composition program. To get the joke you have to be familiar with Emig's 1971 book, Writing Inventions | The Coming of the Toads. Writing strategy textbooks often move us quickly through the rhetorical modes before introducing argument, where we are invited to pick a topic of interest, something we’re passionate about, but then are asked to write a research paper, as opposed to a personal essay, presumably to distinguish between mere opinion and rigorous discourse, where claims are backed by reasoned evidence and assumptions are explained. Hot topic items are sometimes suggested: abortion, immigration, addiction, gun control, health care, same sex marriage, legalizing marijuana. Following a research paper rubric, we search for articles for and against our stance. Thus the project begins in dichotomy, seemingly necessary to building an arguable thesis.
But we usually go into the research topic with preconceived convictions and deep-rooted assumptions, and we don’t learn much about the topic, writing, or ourselves in the assignment process. Why is research so important to academic progress and success? Related: A Rescue Plan for College Composition - The Chronicle Review. By Michael B. Prince The new administration in Washington promises fresh resources for our failing school systems. The need is great. Yet at a time when every penny counts, we had better be sure that new investments in education don't chase after bad pedagogical ideas.
I propose a rescue plan for high-school English and college composition that costs little, apart from a shift in dominant ideas. For the sake of convenience and discussion, the rescue plan reduces complex matters to three concrete steps. First, don't trust the SAT Reasoning Test, especially the writing section of that test, as a college diagnostic, and don't allow the writing test to influence the goals of high-school English. The news last year that Baylor University paid its already admitted students to retake the SAT in order to raise the school's ranking in U.S.
Even the manufacturer of the SAT admits that the new test, which includes writing, is no better than the old test, which didn't. How could this happen? My TWT Portfolio. Wikispaces. Fall2012 548. Fall2012 566. Fall 2012 665. My First Wiki.