From pericles@astro.temple.edu Sun Aug 6 05:29:17 2000 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id FAA32628 for ; Sun, 6 Aug 2000 05:29:15 -0700 Received: from thunder.ocis.temple.edu (root@thunder.ocis.temple.edu [155.247.166.100]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id FAA04753 for ; Sun, 6 Aug 2000 05:29:14 -0700 Received: from smaug.ocis.temple.edu (smaug.ocis.temple.edu [155.247.166.78]) by thunder.ocis.temple.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id IAA17560 for ; Sun, 6 Aug 2000 08:29:23 -0400 (EDT) X-WebMail-UserID: pericles Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 08:29:37 -0400 Sender: pericles From: pericles To: classics@u.washington.edu X-EXP32-SerialNo: 00002713 Subject: student writing Message-ID: <398E0318@smaug.ocis.temple.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: WebMail (Hydra) SMTP v3.61 I agree that student writing requires close attention. My own take on things is at an angle from Bill Harris' without necessarily contradicting it. The key things we would both stress are practice and feedback. Students need to write a lot; they also need *useful* and prompt instructor's comments, which they can use in trying to improve. We've been working fairly intensively on the problems of writing by non-native students. Temple is located in a port town, and we get large numbers of students of immigrants. The challenges they face and present are immense, but one thing we've found in interviews and studies of student work is that they often can't make sense of what the instructor is telling them, and thus cannot act on it. Mutatis mutandis, this is true of other students as well. Bill Harris' breakdown of types of instructor response is useful, but only if it is the basis for carefully phrased criticism that enables students to learn to do better. A paper larded with surly comments by an instructor may lead to no gain at all. Instructors who insist on using the argo of their field--'in light of,' etc.--risk losing all traction with the audience they seek to reach. I emphasize that many of the students we work with *want* to learn to write better, and *wish* their instructors gave them more guidance and assistance. One thing we are seeing is that an overload of instructor criticism merely flattens the student, rather than providing an avenue for improvement. Within limits, criticism that concentrates on 2-3 key features of student writing may enable the student to act in a more focused way. This of course must be phrased in a way that indicates other problems remain. The degree to which grammar and good writing intersect is the subject of ongoing debate. There has been a movement away from grammar, and a countermovement arguing for its importance. Rei Noguchi's book, Grammar and the Teaching of Writing, reviews some of the literature on this and stakes out a middle ground; Lisa Delpit's wonderful Other People's Children is based on a paper that made a substantial impact when first delivered: as an African American teacher at a (pretty good) city school in Philly (Greenfield), she found that the 'progressive' truisms she'd been trained in did not work for her African-American students. She realized that process writing in and of itself is not going to get her students into college or good jobs. Conferencing and revision are two key elements of writing instruction: this is basic. They are basic tools of the fine graduate students in English who teach much of the freshman writing at Temple; senior faculty seem less inclined to use them. _______ That said, Bill's chronology requires a few addenda. Bill does not mention the massive shift, post WWII, toward research agendas, first at major universities then by trickle down elsewhere. This had the obvious benefit of professionalization. My own alma mater, Dartmouth, benefited from it immensely. At the same time, it shifted rewards structures, so that activities like correcting freshman writing or working with or training secondary teachers lost ground, frequently being shunted off on Gastarbeitern and the like. Why should I confer with a freshman about his or her shoddy English when i could be doing my next essay on Joseph Conrad's sense of humor? (Arthur Dewing at Dartmouth, famed as the writing teacher of Budd Schulberg and others, was so fierce and good at this that he seems to have published very little: but I was recently surprised, when dining with a classmate who is now a very respected physician, to hear him say that he'd got a C from Dewing as a freshman then signed on for a second course so he could continue the wonderful training he was getting. This guy was a bit of an exception: but Dewing's insistent, sometimes hostile, critiques [he gave no A's, saying that students of A quality would have exempted out of his course] worked in that context.) It is also true that writing skills learned as freshmen quickly atrophy without system-wide support. This means requiring good writing in advanced courses, something departments often dislike doing. It may be satisfying to blame other people --the Comp instructors--but if we are not attending to what they do, reinforcing it in our own courses and then building on it, we're contributing to the problem ourselves. Lots of faculty insist they have no "time" to "teach writing" because they need to cover the "content." This ignores, I think, the cognitive gains that come from writing clearly and creatively about "content." Chronology, again: It is also true that our regrets about the old days ignore the 'massification' of American education and (according to what I read) of higher ed. in most first world countries. We are getting a lot of students who would not have attended college when Bill and I were young. We may complain about this but access to higher ed. seems to serve not only their, but their countries', interests, and education is changing under our feet. That brings frustrations, but hey, aren't we supposed to welcome intellectual challenges? Chronology, yet again: I should add that working with our writing instructors is a positive experience for me. They take student papers as seriously as one would a John Donne poem, not simply looking for what is wrong, but for what motivates it and how to improve it. The relatively recent emphasis on student learning will, I hope, lead to more of it. But there is no denying that it takes time, and requires a refocusing of educational priorities. I think classicists are in a position to do a lot of good. We respect good writing; we tend to see a lot of our students, and to build decent relations with them. Are *we* requiring enough writing in the courses we teach? I'm just back from Barcelona and don't know how much of the earlier discussion I missed. But my short response is that a lot of what Bill is saying accords with what I would say. Best, Daniel P. Tompkins Director, Intellectual Heritage Program Temple University 214 Anderson Hall 1114 W Berks St, Philadelphia, PA 19122-6090 pericles@astro.temple.edu 215 204 4900; fax 215 204 2359 After three weeks of hard riding! "It's Lance by 25 seconds over Ullrich (who gets second) - victory! LA logs the second fastest time trial (53.896 kmh / 33.5 mph) in TdF history." .