Quote from: tekla on May 08, 2009, 12:59:14 PM
Ummm, isn't that your job to make them more articulate? If they were all that smart, they would not need to be there in the first place, right?
Actually, no, it's not my freaking job to MAKE them more articulate. It's their job to do the reading and follow directions and practice their writing and respond to my margin comments and take it upon themselves to learn key points of grammar and punctuation that they should know already and come in for help when they are floundering. They are adults. I'm not their babysitter. I can't come into their dorm rooms and say, "Now, this course requires you to prep for at least twelve hours a week outside of class. Are you doing your homework?" I can only help them when they first help themselves.
I should also point out that ten weeks is not a lot of time for anyone to become noticeably more articulate, that very many of my students still can't write a coherent paragraph to save their ailing grannies (isn't that a skill they should have learned by high school? The students, not the grannies), and that it doesn't help me when some of my predecessors show their incompetence and lack of rigor and standards when they make idiot remarks like, "Oh, I never give lower than a C" or "It's WHAT they say that matters, not how they say it" or "I don't like to make negative comments on student papers; I don't want to hurt their feelings." I'm always so glad to get the students that these colleagues have passed on to me.
I wholeheartedly agree that if the students were all perfect little writers, they wouldn't need to be there. And I would be out of a job. But their level of incompetence can be quite astounding. I once went to Barnes & Noble and found a little workbook of third-grade skills and knowledge about writing and grammar--very basic stuff. I tested my freshman and sophomore college students on some of this material. As a group, they failed miserably.
Nichole, I wish our grad students were better trained themselves. They are lit people, and many of them do not know writing basics. Many of them admit their ignorance, say things like, "I've never liked grammar," and then mutter something about maybe reviewing a grammar handbook at some point--they clearly see it as a chore, something to be put off indefinitely. And yet these are the folks who work in the writing lab and give my students lousy writing advice. If they don't know anything about parallel structure, preposition overuse, or comma splices, how can these grads competently advise my students on clarity and style and articulateness?
I know I was a freaky little kid. I've been nuts for grammar, style, usage, and vocab since I was very small. So I'm an unusual case. But seriously, how can people justify NOT knowing the very thing they've been hired to teach? It boggles my mind.
I don't think things are getting worse, by the way. Writing well is hard work for most people. I have every reason to believe that comp teachers have been in the same boat for at least the last sixty-five years. It would just be nice to have more students who follow basic directions and actually look up a key word that they don't know and take seriously my contention (shown to be accurate again and again) that once they produce a draft, the work has just started. Stuff like that.
And now back to the topic at hand: which spelling should we use, "->-bleeped-<-" or "->-bleeped-<-"? I prefer the former, myself.
