Plagiaris...WAC (writing across the c

[C. Petersen]

That's a really interesting perspective. I edit the papers my students
turn in pretty extensively but I don't take off many points for grammar
due to the large number of exchange students I have in my class, and I
haven't been able to arrive at a good way to justly deal with differences
in background. Usually I just take points off for not labeling graph axes
or having all web sites in the bibliography or completely misstating
something.  In general, I think writing is a really important and valid
activity to incorporate into assignments though - you'll need it in about
any white collar job type, if one considers college to be vocational
training, and essays are more better than multiple choice tests, which is
more the norm. I read a zine or newspaper that this collective of
anarchist leaning teenagers and people in their 20s put out in Sacramento
called 'Dropout' which advocates alternative education and self teaching
and so forth, and i agree with a lot of their critiques of the education
system, especially k-12. But when I came into my job as a TA, I quickly
found that it is extremely difficult to successfully use 'progressive'
techniques in the context of normal college or high school education. For
instance, I don't feel that students should need to turn in lab reports
promptly within one week, so I initially gave very flexible deadlines and
told students that I trust them to manage their own time and try to turn
things in in a timely fashion, but I think 85% of people require a
deadline in order to get anything done and they didn't do any of the work
before the last possible minute, so I had to change what I was doing.

   It's also pretty difficult to try to facilitate a class discussion on
concepts that we're covering in the context that the students actually are
interested in the subject itself rather than being forced to take the
class as a prereq., which is largely the case. In order to make students
participate I sometimes start drifting into a sort of socrates method of
asking a question and then calling on people, who sometimes look a bit
pained at being forced to contribute, and then I step back and look at
myself and I don't know if I am being like one of these autocratic
teachers that these teenagers in Sacramento are always criticizing -
although I think they are really focusing more on middle and high school
where students are forced to be there rather than competing to be there. 

 
On Thu, 24 Dec 1998, Carrol Cox wrote:


> JayHecht at aol.com wrote:
> 
> > There is a drive at my school to do "writing across the curriculum."  In both
> > my Securities and Investments and Banking courses I assigned papers.  I grade
> > for content, style, presentation, grammar etc.
> 
> Consider, in some way or other speech is part of our biology -- that is speech or
> its forerunners must have had some Darwinian survival value. But biologically
> modern humans were speaking (probably very effectively) to each other for 100,000
> years or so before writing appeared. I really think that writing skill should
> almost be considered an aberration, like perfect pitch or the ability to twitch
> one's ears. And in any case it is an absolute fucking outrage to measure human
> worth or intelligence by competence in writing, and especially by the
> "grammaticalness" of  written work. Whatever one thinks of Chomsky's whole
> linguistic theory, he is certainly correct in his empirical point of departure:
> with the exception of those with neurological difficulties, every human being by
> the age of 7 or so has an essentially perfect command of his/her native language.
> (One almost never *hears* grammatical errors by speakers -- illusions to the
> contrary are based on confusing grammar with etiquette).
> 
> And if you examine a good deal of the bad writing of students closely you will
> find that those horrible sentences or non-sentences are *not* what the brain
> produced; rather they are the broken fragments of essentially perfect sentences
> which could not reach the written or typed page. (A member of the ISU English
> dept. who I only know through the department maillist backed me up on this in a
> cyberbrawl a year ago. It seems that she, but no one else in the department, knew
> of a substantial body of research --*NOT* carried out by writing teachers by by
> psychologists, neurologists, etc.-- that backed up the hypothesis that "writing"
> was in many ways more a physical than a mental skill: some almost mechanical
> barrier between thought and its appearance in written words.
> 
> I earned my living for most of my life by teaching writing to college students,
> and for over a quarter of a century I became more and more convinced that writing
> courses were a crime against humanity.
> 
> Carrol
> 
> 
> 
>