Sunday, March 13, 2005
Student Writing Crisis
Well, I thought I was going to finish my blog on Boomer versus Gen X, but the stack of papers I had to grade over the weekend begged to differ.
Simply put, I have a student writing crisis, and I've had to spend the bulk of the weekend making extensive comments on the batch of essays I've been grading as well as constructing a lesson plan for Monday that will, I hope, address the worst of the problems I've encountered and help my students understand what it is they just don't seem to be getting.
I think what I'll do is break my Boomer observations into chunks and start posting them ASAP.
In the meantime, any suggestions from those of you who teach writing how best to hammer into these kids' heads that a thesis statement needs to argue a point and that paragraphs need to support that argument and not just provide a summary of the work being written about?
I'm not sure how many more times I can repeat myself before I pull an William Hurt in Altered States in the middle of class.
Simply put, I have a student writing crisis, and I've had to spend the bulk of the weekend making extensive comments on the batch of essays I've been grading as well as constructing a lesson plan for Monday that will, I hope, address the worst of the problems I've encountered and help my students understand what it is they just don't seem to be getting.
I think what I'll do is break my Boomer observations into chunks and start posting them ASAP.
In the meantime, any suggestions from those of you who teach writing how best to hammer into these kids' heads that a thesis statement needs to argue a point and that paragraphs need to support that argument and not just provide a summary of the work being written about?
I'm not sure how many more times I can repeat myself before I pull an William Hurt in Altered States in the middle of class.
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Winston--
Most of my freshmen seem to have at least some trouble with wanting to substitute their own thoughts about literature with plot summary. Some have more touble than others, though. It doesn't seem to matter how many times you tell them. I think that's how they're trained to think in high school, and they're not used to answering questions, yet, that aren't supposed to have one definitive answer. I actually took a required course last year in teaching composition, where I did a pretty extensive study of psychologist William G. Perry's developmental scheme of college students. It seemed to me, to go a long way towards explaining a lot of the things my freshmen do.
On the other hand, I do get some who try to tell me "well, to me, this poem means X" without paying any attention at all to the words on the page that make up the poem in question. This is just as sticky a problem, but it is a much rarer one, in my experience.
Sometimes, though, it doesn't matter how often or clearly you explain a thing. If they decide not to listen to you, they won't get it. As evidence, here's the text of the e-mail I got from a student today that made me bite my stress ball in half (the paper the person is talking about is due tomorrow morning):
"Is it alright to not put citations in the paper if i did not use direct quotes. For my ideas I used the book and sparknotes.com. Is it alright to put sparknotes.com in my works cited but never quote them in the paper?"
I have explained to them over and over how this works. Most listened. A few didn't. But I will get e-mails from all the ones who didn't, asking if they have to cite sources they didn't quote directly, whether they have to include something on the works cited page that they didn't cite, or about some great idea they want to write about that they got out of sparknotes.
I've never seen Altered States, so I don't know what Hurt does there, but I think it's ok to have a "come to Jesus meetin'" every once in a while when they're not paying attention to you or to what they're doing. They might leave class that day thinking, "Gawd, what a jerk," but if it makes even one or two of them get on the ball a little bit more, it'll be worth it.
Most of my freshmen seem to have at least some trouble with wanting to substitute their own thoughts about literature with plot summary. Some have more touble than others, though. It doesn't seem to matter how many times you tell them. I think that's how they're trained to think in high school, and they're not used to answering questions, yet, that aren't supposed to have one definitive answer. I actually took a required course last year in teaching composition, where I did a pretty extensive study of psychologist William G. Perry's developmental scheme of college students. It seemed to me, to go a long way towards explaining a lot of the things my freshmen do.
On the other hand, I do get some who try to tell me "well, to me, this poem means X" without paying any attention at all to the words on the page that make up the poem in question. This is just as sticky a problem, but it is a much rarer one, in my experience.
Sometimes, though, it doesn't matter how often or clearly you explain a thing. If they decide not to listen to you, they won't get it. As evidence, here's the text of the e-mail I got from a student today that made me bite my stress ball in half (the paper the person is talking about is due tomorrow morning):
"Is it alright to not put citations in the paper if i did not use direct quotes. For my ideas I used the book and sparknotes.com. Is it alright to put sparknotes.com in my works cited but never quote them in the paper?"
I have explained to them over and over how this works. Most listened. A few didn't. But I will get e-mails from all the ones who didn't, asking if they have to cite sources they didn't quote directly, whether they have to include something on the works cited page that they didn't cite, or about some great idea they want to write about that they got out of sparknotes.
I've never seen Altered States, so I don't know what Hurt does there, but I think it's ok to have a "come to Jesus meetin'" every once in a while when they're not paying attention to you or to what they're doing. They might leave class that day thinking, "Gawd, what a jerk," but if it makes even one or two of them get on the ball a little bit more, it'll be worth it.
# posted by 
: 3/14/2005 2:01 PM
: 3/14/2005 2:01 PM
Winston--
Most of my freshmen seem to have at least some trouble with wanting to substitute their own thoughts about literature with plot summary. Some have more touble than others, though. It doesn't seem to matter how many times you tell them. I think that's how they're trained to think in high school, and they're not used to answering questions, yet, that aren't supposed to have one definitive answer. I actually took a required course last year in teaching composition, where I did a pretty extensive study of psychologist William G. Perry's developmental scheme of college students. It seemed to me, to go a long way towards explaining a lot of the things my freshmen do.
On the other hand, I do get some who try to tell me "well, to me, this poem means X" without paying any attention at all to the words on the page that make up the poem in question. This is just as sticky a problem, but it is a much rarer one, in my experience.
Sometimes, though, it doesn't matter how often or clearly you explain a thing. If they decide not to listen to you, they won't get it. As evidence, here's the text of the e-mail I got from a student today that made me bite my stress ball in half (the paper the person is talking about is due tomorrow morning):
"Is it alright to not put citations in the paper if i did not use direct quotes. For my ideas I used the book and sparknotes.com. Is it alright to put sparknotes.com in my works cited but never quote them in the paper?"
I have explained to them over and over how this works. Most listened. A few didn't. But I will get e-mails from all the ones who didn't, asking if they have to cite sources they didn't quote directly, whether they have to include something on the works cited page that they didn't cite, or about some great idea they want to write about that they got out of sparknotes.
I've never seen Altered States, so I don't know what Hurt does there, but I think it's ok to have a "come to Jesus meetin'" every once in a while when they're not paying attention to you or to what they're doing. They might leave class that day thinking, "Gawd, what a jerk," but if it makes even one or two of them get on the ball a little bit more, it'll be worth it.
Most of my freshmen seem to have at least some trouble with wanting to substitute their own thoughts about literature with plot summary. Some have more touble than others, though. It doesn't seem to matter how many times you tell them. I think that's how they're trained to think in high school, and they're not used to answering questions, yet, that aren't supposed to have one definitive answer. I actually took a required course last year in teaching composition, where I did a pretty extensive study of psychologist William G. Perry's developmental scheme of college students. It seemed to me, to go a long way towards explaining a lot of the things my freshmen do.
On the other hand, I do get some who try to tell me "well, to me, this poem means X" without paying any attention at all to the words on the page that make up the poem in question. This is just as sticky a problem, but it is a much rarer one, in my experience.
Sometimes, though, it doesn't matter how often or clearly you explain a thing. If they decide not to listen to you, they won't get it. As evidence, here's the text of the e-mail I got from a student today that made me bite my stress ball in half (the paper the person is talking about is due tomorrow morning):
"Is it alright to not put citations in the paper if i did not use direct quotes. For my ideas I used the book and sparknotes.com. Is it alright to put sparknotes.com in my works cited but never quote them in the paper?"
I have explained to them over and over how this works. Most listened. A few didn't. But I will get e-mails from all the ones who didn't, asking if they have to cite sources they didn't quote directly, whether they have to include something on the works cited page that they didn't cite, or about some great idea they want to write about that they got out of sparknotes.
I've never seen Altered States, so I don't know what Hurt does there, but I think it's ok to have a "come to Jesus meetin'" every once in a while when they're not paying attention to you or to what they're doing. They might leave class that day thinking, "Gawd, what a jerk," but if it makes even one or two of them get on the ball a little bit more, it'll be worth it.
# posted by : 3/14/2005 2:03 PM
: 3/14/2005 2:03 PM
If I remember Altered States correctly, Hurt's head explodes--literally.
We spent the entire week in all of my classes working on writing skills, talking about thesis statements and how they control a paper, paragraphs and topic sentences, etc.
Truthful or no, my students claim to have not heard about 75% of what I was teaching, and those who had heard what I was talking about hadn't heard it since grammar school.
This is all pre-interpretation stuff, really. I just want them to be able to write an organized paper.
I've created several handouts this week and we've spent time that was meant to be spent working on the actual course content, instead of writing skills.
And you're write, Juvenal--I've probably wasted a great deal of time when it comes to a number of my students, who will have learned nothing from my lectures and exercises. In fact, those who wrote the worst papers were those who were paying the least attention when I was talking about the problems the classes were having and how those problems might be solved.
Sometimes I just want to mow lawns for a living.
We spent the entire week in all of my classes working on writing skills, talking about thesis statements and how they control a paper, paragraphs and topic sentences, etc.
Truthful or no, my students claim to have not heard about 75% of what I was teaching, and those who had heard what I was talking about hadn't heard it since grammar school.
This is all pre-interpretation stuff, really. I just want them to be able to write an organized paper.
I've created several handouts this week and we've spent time that was meant to be spent working on the actual course content, instead of writing skills.
And you're write, Juvenal--I've probably wasted a great deal of time when it comes to a number of my students, who will have learned nothing from my lectures and exercises. In fact, those who wrote the worst papers were those who were paying the least attention when I was talking about the problems the classes were having and how those problems might be solved.
Sometimes I just want to mow lawns for a living.
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