Three students from my technical writing class came to see me during my office hours a couple of weeks ago because they were unhappy with the grades they received on their first assignment of the semester and they wanted my help in rewriting it for a better grade. The assignment, which I give every time I teach technical writing, is pretty straightforward. Students are instructed to imagine that it is the end of the previous semester–which in this case would be Spring 2009–and they have gone to the English Department office, where they are told that registration for Technical Writing is by instructor’s permission only, and so they need to submit to me a letter of application. In writing this letter, they are allowed to use any source material they think is relevant: the syllabus I have handed them, the college catalog, my faculty and/or personal website, my ratings on ratemyprofessors.com–anything–as long as what they write contains the following:
- An explanation of the course’s relevance to either their career goals or their academic careers;
- A discussion of what they perceive to be their strengths and weaknesses as writers;
- A discussion of what they believe they have to offer the class.
The assignment is difficult, especially given the fact that my students are, overwhelmingly, college freshmen or sophomores. Not only have most of them never had to write a real letter of application before–and good letters of application are damned hard to write–but even seasoned writers can find it difficult to articulate their writing strengths and weaknesses. More, it is rare that an 18-, 19- or 20-year-old has the maturity to write persuasively about either her or his character traits or plans for the future. Indeed, one of my goals is that, by confronting students with just how difficult it is to write about themselves in a way that is both persuasive and professional, the assignment will spur at least some of them to think a little more deeply about who they are, what they want to do with their lives, the place of writing in their lives, and how and why they choose to present themselves in writing the way they do.
The first student who came to see me, a woman from Senegal for whom English is a third language, received an F on her paper because it was filled with so many grammatical, editing and proofreading errors that, had it been an actual letter of application, I would have stopped reading after the first half of the first sentence. Truly, it read like she’d spent, at most, fifteen minutes typing, unfiltered, whatever was in her brain and then handed to me the piece of paper that emerged from her printer without giving it even the most cursory of second glances. Almost the first thing she said to me when she sat down in my office was, with her eyes starting to tear up, that maybe the best thing for her to do was drop my course. Clearly she was a horrible writer, she said, and she did not want to end up with an F on her transcript. I asked her if she was a good writer in French, the language of instruction in her country, and she said yes. I asked her what grades she’d gotten in high school on the essays she’d written in French, and she told me A’s and B’s. The problem, then, I explained–and I am paraphrasing a much longer conversation–was not that she was a horrible writer. Literacy skills transfer from a first to a second–and even a third and fourth–language. The problem was that she hadn’t taken the time to do her best work, and when I suggested that maybe this was because she’d figured writing a letter would be easy, she smiled and nodded. Now that she knew better, she said, she would at least give rewriting the assignment a chance before deciding to drop the course.
I’ve been teaching in the English Department of the community college that employs me for twenty years now, and I am still surprised–though perhaps I shouldn’t be–that it’s the students who are used to getting good grades with whom I have to have the above conversation. Not that these students are the only ones who fail to take assignments seriously, but they tend to be the ones who come to my office either, like my student from Senegal, more or less destroyed by the poor grade I have given them or convinced that what they need is to get from me my personal “Student Road Map to the A.” Student who are looking for the latter tend to argue that my standards are not just different from those of all the other teachers who have graded their work in the past; my standards are much, much tougher. This was what the second student who came to see me said. An African-American man who wants to be an inventor and a consultant, his first words after he sat down across from me were, “I don’t understand what you don’t understand about what I wrote.” It’s a fair question, and one I usually look forward to answering because it can lead to real dialogue and real learning on the part of the student, except that–at least at first–this student was more interested in persuading me that the strategy he used in his letter should have gotten him a better grade than the C I gave him than in hearing my explanation for why it didn’t. I explained, giving several examples to illustrate my point, that his letter was neither well-focused nor well-enough substantiated and organized to convince me, were he truly applying, to admit him to my class. Each time I paused to see if he understood what I was saying, though, he responded by explaining in turn that his goal in the letter was for me to get to know him as the impressive person he is–that is my paraphrase of what he said; he was not, in fact, arrogant enough to say it like that–because that knowledge, he felt, ought to have been sufficient for the letter to succeed. When I suggested that asking me to read five paragraphs of often irrelevant detail about himself before he even mentioned the fact that he was applying to my class might be asking a bit too much, he explained, again, how important it was for me to get to know him. “I still don’t understand why you don’t get this,” he said.
So I went over one paragraph with him in extreme detail. I showed him how adding specific examples to support the claims he was making about himself, while at the same time taking out the irrelevant information, would make his letter persuasive. He understood, or at least seemed to understand, but instead of taking this understanding and going back to rewrite his letter, he tried to push me into doing the same thing with every other paragraph. When I told him I would not do that, that he needed to take what he’d learned and try to apply it–to do, in other words, his own work–he said, “I’m beginning to understand what you want from me, and so what I need to know now is how to get you to give me an A, and the only way I am going to learn that is if you go over each paragraph with me.”
What I need to know is how to get you to give me an A. I recognize that students want good grades; I acknowledge the emotional validity of feeling like, if you are paying for an education, part of what you should be receiving is a roadmap to the grades you want to receive; and I certainly appreciate that there are students for whom the practical value of their grades outweighs, legitimately and reasonably, whatever value I might place on some ideal notion of what teaching and learning ought to be about. As I see it, though, my job is not to show students how to get A’s. My job is to teach, to help students learn, which means that, on one level, it doesn’t really matter to me if a student moves from a D to B, or from a C to a C+, or from a B to an A. What matters is that they have moved, that they are better writers when they leave my class than they were when they entered. It’s not that I am indifferent to students’ desire and/or need for good grades, but learning to write is not like filling in a blank or coloring in a circle on an exam where there is only one right answer to each question and so the formula for getting an A is clear. Rather, learning to write is a lot like growing up. No matter how much advice and guidance we get, the fact is that we all grow up in our own way, at our own pace, and some of us never manage it at all.
Not that people who cannot write well, or who never learn to write well, cannot, or have not, grown up. Of course they can; and of course those who have, have. Nonetheless, to write well is, ineluctably, to pursue, to continually rediscover, to embody a connection between one’s facility with language and the content, intellectual and otherwise, of one’s character. I do not mean this in an absolute moral sense. I do not mean that people who cannot write well have no character or that writing is the only way in which people can show their character. I mean, simply, that you cannot write well if you do not make this connection, and it does not matter whether you are writing a poem, a newspaper article, a business plan, a blog post, a novel or a research paper. If you are unwilling or unable to connect the process of who you are–or at least the process of who you are that pertains specifically to whatever you are writing–to the process of expressing yourself clearly and persuasively in written form, your writing will always be less successful than it might otherwise have been.
More to the point, even if every student in every classroom in this country were to work assiduously to become an A writer, even if every one of those students were to get precisely the right kind of attention from her or his ideal teacher, only a portion of those students would get the A they were striving so hard to achieve; and if I were to allow my role as a teacher to be defined solely as gatekeeper–and whether he meant it or not, my student’s request for my personal “Road Map to an A” means that he defined my role as such–I would be doing a grave disservice to all the B, C and even some D students in my classes, whose hard work might not have earned them an A, but the lessons of which they will carry with them into the rest of their lives; and as anyone who has ever worked for a living knows, perhaps especially if you have employed others, being successful in one’s career–and, in a technical writing class, my students’ focus is inevitably on the connection between writing and career–is often more about one’s ability to work in a disciplined and principled way than it is about whether or not that work would have received an A in a college classroom.
Not that grades are not important, not that there are not meaningful differences between an A paper and a C paper, or between the writing abilities–and perhaps, perhaps, the thinking abilities as well–of the students who wrote those papers, but to focus on the grade solely for the sake of the grade, ultimately, is to focus on the surface of learning, on what it means to be able to display an A as opposed to a C. It is to avoid–or, worse, to dismiss as irrelevant–the work of holding yourself accountable for the quality of your own thinking. In terms of writing, after all, that is what revision is: the process of holding yourself accountable for the quality of your own thinking; and here, again, we come up against the connection between writing and character, because your willingness truly to hold yourself accountable for anything is as strong a measure of maturity and character as I can imagine.
I am thinking as I write this about a woman who was a student some years ago in an honors section of the advanced essay-writing class that my department offers and who received C’s on every paper that she wrote during the first two-thirds or so of the semester. I don’t remember precisely when she started to come to my office to talk about her grades, but almost every time she did, she cried. “I don’t get C’s,” she would sob into the tissues I handed her. “I can’t get C’s; I am an honors student. I’ve always gotten straight A’s.”
We talked a lot at these meetings about writing, about what she wanted to write and why she wanted to write, and I kept explaining that she was getting C’s because her essays were very safe, each one a traditionally structured, five paragraph argument that was designed to tell me what she thought I wanted to hear. Indeed, her voice in these essays resembled that of a classroom parrot expecting to earn the crackers she craved by repeating the things she’d heard her teacher say more than it resembled the voice of an intelligent and articulate young woman exploring through language the subject she’d chosen to write about. She was not, I told her, saying on her own terms what she had to say, and learning how to do that was the point of the class. Intellectually, she understood what I was telling her. Emotionally, however, and psychologically, she was so attached to the tried-and-true formula of repackaging-for-an-A what her teacher had already said in class–a strategy quite common among the honors students I have taught–that she couldn’t believe I would find her own voice, her own way of saying things, anything but inappropriate for a college classroom. She was too frightened to risk the possibility of getting an even lower grade than she already had because of that inappropriateness.
Finally–I don’t remember why–I asked her if she kept a journal. She said yes, and I asked her if she would let me read some of it. Again, she said yes, and so at our next meeting, she brought her journal in. The passages I read were so brilliantly and beautifully written that I told her if she could write just one essay like that for me, I would forgive all the C’s she’d received till that point and give her an A for the semester. At first, she didn’t believe me–which is a topic for a whole other post–and on her next assignment handed me again one of her “safe” pieces of writing. When she got it back with another C on it, she decided she had nothing left to lose and wrote her next essay as if it were an entry in her journal. It was a gorgeous piece of prose, more than deserving of the A I gave her; and this A so excited her that she went back to her other papers and, on her own, rewrote them. Every single one of her rewrites also deserved an A, and that was the grade she got for the semester, though it would have been her grade even if she hadn’t done the rewrites. First, I’d given her my word that one paper in the style of her journal would be enough, and I like to keep my word. Second, though, and at least as importantly, the way in which she’d learned to hold herself accountable, the chance she’d taken on herself as a writer and a thinker, was, in my opinion, worth the A I gave her.
I can imagine people wondering what grade I would have given this student if the essay she’d produced while trying to write as she’d written in her journal had earned only a B, and it’s a fair question. The easy answer is that I’m not sure. Part of me thinks that perhaps she would still have deserved the A because the nature of the learning that would have taken place, independently of the specific essay she produced, would still merit it; part of me thinks that, to be fair and consistent, I’d have to give her a B, since that is the level she was able to reach in her writing; and part of me is very aware that what actually happened–no matter how much good it might have done her as an individual–was unfair to the rest of the class, since not everyone was given the same opportunity to have her or his lowest grades dropped.
This line, between treating students as the individuals they are–who learn at their own pace, in their own way; who bring, inevitably, the entirety of their lives into the classroom and the work they produce, and who deserve to have those lives if not accommodated, then at least respected; and for each of whom the grade they receive will mean a different thing–the line between this and establishing the classroom as a level playing field, where everyone gets the same fair shake in terms of access to teaching and how the work they produce is evaluated, is a thin and difficult one to walk, perhaps especially for teachers of writing–or, more accurately, teachers of subjects in which student writing necessarily touches on the fundamental questions they are facing in their lives.
Concerned as it is with efficient and effective workplace communication–with, in other words, writing that is explicitly not about self-exploration and mere self-expression–you wouldn’t think that technical writing is such a subject. If you think only about the kinds of documents the students in my technical writing class need to produce–memos, letters, reports, proposals–it clearly is not. On the other hand, though, being an effective technical writer requires knowing yourself, or at least certain aspects of who you are, quite well. Almost every technical writing text I have read, for example, encourages students to know their own communication styles, confronts them with exercises designed to foster ethical self-awareness, and insists on the importance of understanding and accommodating cultural difference, which means you need to understand your own culture pretty well. Similarly, responding to an assignment that asks you to talk about your career goals in a way that persuades an instructor to allow you into his technical writing class demands that you to reflect in a non-shallow way on what you are thinking about doing with your life, even if you don’t yet have a clear idea of what that might be.
Not knowing what she wanted to do with her life, however, was not the problem that the third student who came to see me brought with her to my office. She knows precisely what she wants to be, a social worker, and she wants specifically to work with juvenile delinquents. Half a moment’s thought will reveal the relevance of a course in technical writing to a career in which the ability to produce effective reports and grants, among other things, is crucial. So when I read this student’s letter, I found it odd that she mentioned her career goals only once, in a single sentence. Instead, she spent about a third of the letter telling me about the professional experience she’d acquired working at a law firm and asserting, without ever fully explaining why, that her experience there had left her with the desire to do whatever she could to improve her writing skills. Moreover, the letter was peppered with expressions and syntactical structures suggesting that she was trying very hard to sound–and to impress me with the fact that she sounded–more like a law student than an undergraduate with an interest in social work.
The B- she received–a respectable grade that was, nonetheless, lower than what she was used to receiving on written work–was due largely to the vague and awkward writing that resulted from this strategy, but when I pointed this out to her, suggesting that her letter would have been stronger if she’d written more as and about herself and what she wanted to do with her life, she looked down at her essay, shook her head and said, “This is really strange.” It wasn’t, she explained, that she didn’t understand what I was telling her; now that I’d pointed it out, she could see how much of her letter sounded false and stilted. Rather, my suggestion that she write as herself was precisely the opposite of the advice she’d received from her high school English teacher, a man whom she had adored because he took her writing seriously. He’d advised her, once she’d started showing him the admissions letters she was writing to the colleges she wanted to attend, that she should write so she sounded precisely not like herself. She didn’t want her readers to know she was “a little Black girl from the suburbs.” She told me that even when she was in this teacher’s class, she’d heard rumors that he might be, “You know, racist,” and she whispered that word as if she were afraid someone who knew him might be listening, the way white people when I was younger used to whisper the word Black when referring to Black people, even when no Black people were around, as if Black people didn’t know they were Black or as if there were other, non-Black people who didn’t know that Black people were Black; and she told me also that this teacher had tried to discourage her from going to Howard University because, “Why would you want to go to an historically Black college when you have so many other choices?” (I should be clear: I don’t teach at Howard; she is taking courses at the school where I teach so she can transfer them back to Howard.)
For a brief moment, I thought I had misheard her, but when it was clear that I had not, I pointed out the obvious: that she was a (not little) “Black girl from the suburbs” and that not only was there nothing wrong with writing as who she was, but if her experience as an African American woman from Long Island was relevant to the letter I’d asked her to write, it would only have made the letter stronger if she’d included it. Unfortunately, we did not have time to continue the conversation because my office hours were over and I had another class to teach, though I don’t know what else I would have said. I do wonder, though, what else she might have had to say and perhaps we will have a chance to talk about that after I read her rewrite. What interests me now, though, as I sit here in my office writing these words, what fascinates me, what has fascinated me ever since I became a teacher–is, in fact, part of the reason why I became a teacher–is how you can follow almost any branch in a person’s education and it will eventually root itself somewhere in who that person is; and I am also thinking about how, if I had not given this student a B-, we might never have had the conversation we did; and this is not about me, about how wonderful and progressive a teacher I am, because there are any number of teachers out there with whom this student could have had that conversation. Rather, it is about my responsibility as a teacher to be ready to have whatever version of that conversation is necessary when one of my students is ready to have it; it is about the fact that, if what I cared most about as a teacher was whether or not my students could follow some “Road Map to the A,” there is no way I would or could ever be ready.
Just wanted to let you know that I found this post fascinating, the whole way through. It really encapsulates all that I love and hate about schooling. The way you draw the line the line between the “Road Map to the A” and actually getting the student to open up about themselves, has always been a dividing line between the great teachers I’ve had in my life and the ones I’ve merely had to “get by” in order to move on with my schooling. The teachers who implement this “road map”, who regurgitate information and ask more of their students than to basically repeat information back at them, are continuously loathed and forgotten by me (and no doubt, other students as well). I’m taking four business/marketing classes this semester at community college, a field that oughta breed creativity atleast in some small way (particularly marketing, which I’m heading into career-wise). For the most part though, all of these classes (and I’ll through in the speech class I’m also currently taking, which DEFINITELY should allow the students to bring themselves into the classroom) are the same boring, “checklist” learning I’ve come to expect from a majority of teachers I’ve had, at all grade levels.
Teachers such as yourself though, who allow the students to bring themselves into the classroom, are definitely long admired and remembered long after I’ve left their rooms. Teachers who don’t grade on a bullet point scaled rubric meant to generally get across a bland message to a large group of people, but individually address each student and let their learning come naturally to them, are an unfortunately rare breed from what I’ve experienced. You, sir, (along with this article) are clearly top of the line and certifiably “getting it right”. Thanks for the read, and keep up the good work. I can only hope I meet atleast one teacher like yourself from here on out in my college studies.
Thanks for the kind words, Joe. It brought a smile to my face on a day of hard teaching.
This is such a great post. I’ve never taught writing formally, but I’ve helped a lot of people revise their writing, most recently one of my cousins as he was applying to college. The first draft of the essay he sent me was so … I am not sure what is the right description: “bad” or “poorly written” aren’t quite right; more like a combination of “inauthentic” and “technically mediocre.” Despite its being about his relationship with another of our family members, it did not sound like him at all. And yet I did not want him to just dump out the stream of consciousness he produces on AIM chats.
I feel like the massive increase in written communication for this generation (the kids born in and after 1990) has created such a strangely distorting effect on their writing. When it’s not good, it’s not good in a way that does not resemble how my classmates who were poor writers produced not-good writing, which tended to be a product of unfamiliarity with self-expression in written form. Those who liked to write for self-expression — who wrote journals or love letters — were basically decent (or positively good) writers who just needed to learn proper capitalization, punctuation and grammar. They generally already knew how to interest a reader, how to organize their writing so it would make some kind of logical sense. Those who didn’t write for self-expression were deeply puzzled by assignments that required them put anything of themselves into the writing, i.e., that required more than pure description and summary. Technical writing does require self-expression: it almost always necessitates some analysis, and when presented with a new set of facts, you can’t regurgitate an analysis made for a different set; you must write something new and thus somewhat individual.
The kids whose childhoods coincided with texting and IMing and MySpaceing and the good Lord knows what all (and I am well aware that this is an extremely Andy Rooneyish comment I’m writing), are certainly accustomed to expressing themselves in writing. But their communications with each other are so utterly informal and unpremeditated (in a way that my classmates’ journals and love letters were not), that they don’t seem to provide any useful training for situations in which they write to someone other than a peer. The only phrase that I could come up with to reply to my cousin is that his essay felt seized up, paralyzed with concern about the reader’s judgment.
The only solution I could come up with was to have him start over and try writing it as he would have a conversation with one of his friends if he were trying to describe our aunt to that friend. We could go back and fix the technical problems together, but I couldn’t do anything to fix the basic awkwardness of the essay.
I love this post. So much in fact that I’ve journaled about it and may be the inaugural post on my blog. The 34 year old me wishes the 17 or 20 year old me could have had that assignment with you and the follow up discussions. Unfortunately the 34 year old me also knows the 17-20 year old me would have gotten a B-/C+ and been content with mediocrity. Stupid 17-20 year old me.
I wanted to thank you for this. I teach math at the high school level, and so many of my students do not understand that the only goal in my classroom is to improve their understanding of mathematics. They become fixated on grades, on homework, on their utter loathing of what they do not understand, such that they render themselves unable to understand. I have been cursed at by a student because I was not grading the homework in a manner that was satisfactory to him, because all his life, to him, homework has been a punishment, not a tool for his own learning.
Very few of my students make the connection between work and improvement; as if knowledge of mathematics is bestowed, unearned and unlooked for, upon a lucky few, and it will forever elude the rest of us. They want, as you say, a roadmap to a grade that will satisfy either themselves or their parents; they seak the adequate rather than the impressive.
(I am a new teacher. I get bogged down in the tedious- issues of behavior and book-keeping, for instance. So much of the time I am uncertain how to impart to them what I feel is the truth and worth of my subject. Of the languages that can be written down, math is one of the few that is almost entirely universal and honest; there is a terrifying beauty in its ability to describe the structure of our everyday reality in terms as intelligible to a speaker of Russian as a speaker of Maori, though there are some fascinating differences in how minds molded by different linguistic structures process mathematics…)
Caitlyn:
This is so important when it comes to math! In some ways more important–in an immediate, practical sense–than when it comes to things like grammar and writing. Before I decided to pursue literature as a major, I thought seriously about something heavily math-based, and my degree required me to take transformational grammar, which is a kind of calculus–and I loved it, but even my eyes glaze over occasionally when people start talking statistics, and it’s not just because statistical talk is so often so boring/poorly done. It’s also because it’s work to understand it and there are times when I just don’t want to do the work. But to find a way–here’s a pedagogical challenge!–to demonstrate to students using real-world examples how not knowing math, or poor mathematical thinking, can not only screw up our lives as individuals, but also has been at the root of some really poor public policy, etc. decisions, that would be a phenomenal classroom to be part of in high school.
You do important work.
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this. I am a student teacher in English contemplating the purposes of writing in the classroom, and your blog gave me some excellent food for thought.
One thing I’ve noticed: the value of a diploma is obvious, but the value of education is much less obvious. I can illustrate this with a science-fiction-esque dilemma:
John and John-Prime are two alternate universe counterparts of each other. After graduating high school, John went on to attend Harvard University, majored in English, and graduated with honors. John-Prime, on the other hand, spent four years working as a waiter. The two of them suddenly find themselves in each other’s universe. John now has a complete Harvard education, but, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he never attended. John-Prime, on the other hand, has a Harvard diploma, but none of the education. Twenty years from now, which of the two is more likely to have a successful career?
Thanks so much for this Richard. As someone who has just started teaching writing (I’ve done an academic writing paper two trimesters in a row), this speaks so much to what I want to be able to do. After marking a particularly dispiriting couple of texts, I’m going to re-read it to remind myself what I enjoyed about teaching this year.
@Doug S –
You present an interesting puzzle that caught my attention. It’s hard to say who would do better – I realize they’re both the same person, but it seems like the fact that John went to Harvard rather than stay in the same job for four years shows a commitment to education that John-Prime lacks. After the switch, if it’s still possible, what would stop John from going again to Harvard? Or any other school? But John-Prime probably learned a lot of useful skills and things about people in his waitering job that will serve him well. At the end of the day, IMHO an education is just a piece of paper that lets other people assume you know what you’re supposed to know. There are other ways of proving that through experience, but the paper definitely gets you in the door at a higher pay rate.
Harvard in particular is one of those schools where a significant part of the advantage comes from making connections with other people who are/ will be successful and who in turn know other powerful people. This is true at less elite schools as well, of course; I got my first job out of college because one of my economics professors recommended me to the alumna who was doing the interviews, and he prodded me to interview with her (I interviewed with no other businesses, and was planning to work for either a nonprofit or the government).
If John and JohnPrime are switching universes, then the usefulness of John’s Harvard connections also will be obliterated because the Harvard alumni in the PrimeUniverse won’t know who John is.
@PG:
Indeed! Yet another reason why education, as such, is probably overvalued. Technical fields excepted, college is often more about signaling and the “old boys’ club” than about what’s actually taught in the classroom. Credentialism also turns into an arms race; when fewer people got a high school diploma, a high school diploma was more valuable. As more and more people start going to college, the bachelors’ degree is also beginning to be devalued, and you have to get a masters’ degree to open the doors that a bachelors’ used to open. Education turns into a signaling arms race; what matters is not that you have a degree, but that you have a degree that others do not.
This effect is much less pronounced in technical fields, because you really do need an engineering education in order to do what an engineer does. If John had studied a technical field at MIT instead of English at Harvard, it would be much easier to determine who to bet on.
DougS,
You’re probably right overall, but not entirely; one can become skilled in a technical field without an engineering degree just as one can become skilled at reading and analyzing texts without an English degree.
PG said:
Though it is accurate to say that one can educate one’s self without getting a degree, the problem comes not from the knowing, but the evidencing of the knowledge in order to get a job.
Despite my own over-education, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a flawed system.
How do I prove to a potential employer that I’m capable of performing the duties required by the job when those duties involve engineering? Theoretically, I can do a bunch of work to build up some kind of resume that proves my capacity by way of creating engineering analyses and marked up plans and whatnot… But chances are the employer will not pay any attention to any of that. Instead the employer is likely to dump my resume in favor of the person that is able to put: M.A. Engineering completed at Puffenstuff University, 2009. (This is an example… I have no skill or education in engineering in the least. My focus is much more literary.)
Actually, as was mentioned above about John and JohnPrime’s university contacts, the employer is most likely to hire the applicant that has the degree and knows the employer through some contact or network (whether friend, family, or just plain “mutual alumnus” status). Next would come a qualified applicant with a degree. And last and still not very likely: the poor schmoe with the knowledge but without the paperwork.
And this is even more the case in a situation where liability of any kind might come into play. If you take two companies that build a bridge and that bridge later collapses, it’s the company that used the person without the degree paperwork that is more likely to get sued successfully and for more money for “failing to use qualified personnel”. Even if it was a problem that a “properly educated” engineer would have been just as likely to miss.
And a question I want to direct to Richard:
How do you rectify your refusal to be the gatekeeper when the fact of the matter is that, by way of your professorship and our current system of academics, you are, in fact, a gatekeeper (moreso when you give a “bad grade” rather than a “good one”) to that student’s ability to move from a community college to a four-year institution and get that degree that s/he desperately wants to pursue her/his lifelong dream?
I’m not intending this in the fashion that it may be coming across. I respect the desire to maintain your integrity when it comes to not awarding grades beyond what is earned. But the fact that students get accepted and rejected (and, in the case of grants and scholarships, funded or not funded) on the weight of those grades, you must admit that it’s a lot of weight to put on one community college writing course.
Yes, you can get a technical education without actually attending school. What I mean to say is that technical programs actually do important job skills, and that if you have the credential without the education, it won’t help you for long. You study engineering so you can do engineering, not to win a credential arms race. The same applies to medical school and law school. (At least I hope it does!)
On the other hand, most HR departments don’t really care what you learned while studying anthropology or communications, just that you have that piece of paper that proves that you’re the kind of person willing and able to jump through arbitrary, difficult hoops for four years.
See also: http://www.milkeninstitute.org/publications/review/2002_12/49_72mr16.pdf
MisterMephisto:
Of course I am, of course every teacher is, a gatekeeper on some level. It’s being defined primarily as a gatekeeper that I find problematic. Beyond that, though, I confess that I do not understand what you are asking me.
I suppose I’m asking how you rectify the disconnect between the ideal and the actual.
Using one of your example students: The student that had wonderful journal-writing skills, but was stuck writing “professionally” according to the “formula”.
She was writing in the formulaic fashion because it is, in fact, what most universities and professors out there expect and want (even if it is uninspired and not terribly convincing). Which is probably why her previous teachers taught her to write that way.
As much as I’m glad that she was able to embrace her true voice and express it in her writing, it is likely to be something that she may be punished for by future professors that do not appreciate that element in written assignments. It’s been my experience that this is moreso the case in science and engineering courses than in general humanities courses, but, at least when I went to university, it was an acknowledged and acceptable bias in all departments.
Another example: When I was getting my post-grad degree, I (like every other post-grad student at my school) was required to take a “Graduate Essay Test”. I was the only person in my department to score a “perfect score” on the GET that semester, despite the fact that my department was “English (TESOL).”
When asked by one of the professors (during a class specifically focused on teaching essay writing) how I got that score, I replied: “I know that this isn’t going to be a popular answer, but I wrote to the formula. And I did the same thing during my undergrad degree when I had to pass a similar ‘standardized’ essay test.”
I acknowledge that the flaw is in the tests and not the teaching here. But the fact of the matter is that the students who are going to be the writing professors of the next generation of students are required to pass a test that really only measures their technical and formulaic performance in a written text. And whether or not they are “successful” writing teachers is going to be measured in turn when their students must take (and pass) the same kind of tests.
And whether or not those students are allowed to graduate in whichever field they study in is dictated by whether or not they can pass those tests, the ones that measure not whether the writer found his or her voice but whether the writer was able to exemplify a technical mastery divorced from what both you and I would like to think of as “real” writing.
I ask, mostly, because this was a disconnect that I was not able to rectify. Which is one of the philosophical reasons that I don’t feel qualified to be a teacher/professor despite the fact that I have all the necessary paperwork.
MisterMephisto:
You ask a complicated question, and I am not sure that I have a clear answer. I do, however, disagree with your premise that there is necessarily a disconnect between finding one’s voice, writing as oneself, and writing professionally or within the formula (of whatever discipline one happens to be talking about). Rather, the challenge is to find one’s voice within that discipline. To go back to one of my examples, the woman who was told that she didn’t want to sound like a Black girl from the suburbs: It would be totally inappropriate for her to write the letter I assigned in a “Black persona,” for example, by which I mean a voice that would be more appropriate to a personal essay or a work of fiction, just as it would have been inappropriate for her to recount–no matter how professional it might have sounded–instances of racism that were not directly relevant to what she was saying to get me to admit her to my class. Her challenge was–and I still haven’t read her rewrite–to speak professionally out of the identity in which she understands herself as an African American woman (and of course that identity would include more than just those two characteristics).
In the same way, the woman whom you referenced in your last comment, was still writing essays that had thesis statements and arguments–recognizable ones that any professor would recognize. She was just doing it in a way that allowed her to “speak” in her own voice. She was, I hasten to add, an exceptional student, and it is true that not every student can do that, nor would it be fair of me to expect every student to do that.
There are clearly times when you need to write the formula “to” the test. Mostly thought that is when you are taking a test or if you have a professor who demands that. I don’t deny the value of being able to do that; but it is, in my experience, a skill with a limited application, especially when it comes to writing in the real world.
This is only a partial answer to your question, though. More will have to wait. I need to put dinner on the table.
Another “thank you” for this post. I’m a college student and this, in particular, has been the Semester of Endless Essays. I’m also a person who has called myself a writer at various times in my life and had other people tell me that I’m not terrible at it (though they could be lying). Obviously the fictional stories I tell myself and an academic essay are two completely different things, but I don’t feel like they *should* be — I mean, I don’t think *I*, as a person who loves words and language and blabbing about my thoughts, whether they be rational argument about xx subject or a fantasy story, should see them as completely separate animals. I should be able to write an A (or B) essay while still maintaining an authentic style and voice.
But I can’t. Partly it’s a lack of time/energy — writing a formulaic 3 page essay is a lot easier than writing an *honest* 3 pages about anything — but it’s also a fear of failure. If I take this essay to the places that I want to go and tell the stories that I want to tell (all within the confines of the assignment, of course), my choice of an unorthodox style may very well earn me a failing grade. Many of my professors learned how to write a “good” essay through the same process I did.
Which, FTR, was not in an English class at all but writing an “original oratory” for forensics. It was all refreshed in my college English 101 course, but I was not surprised when I was pretty much the only student who had any idea of the general structure of an academic essay. High school does not cover this AT ALL.