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| Inspiration Corner |
December 24th marked the third year of my retirement after 30 years of teaching at a community college. Okay, let’s say I quit, rejecting Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s proclamation to “carry on.” I would have liked to teach longer, but I couldn’t imagine grading one more student paper, especially the god-awful, college-driven--research paper.
I’d often told colleagues we should do away with the death penalty. Instead, legislatures should enact a law forcing murderers on Death Row to learn to grade research papers and assign stacks for grading every day for the rest of their lives. Not that I am blaming students, the real culprit is American higher education, and its view of “good” writing.
I once asked students in various college classes how many of them read the professor’s comments after their papers were graded and returned. In one class, out of 25 students, two or three students said they read most of the teacher’s comments. Fifteen students said they read only the teacher’s remarks on the final page, ignoring the ink scratches in the margins. The remaining students said they never read the comments and only looked at the grade. So, why do teachers spend evenings and weekends reading and often meticulously grading student essays?
Students told me they find essay writing boring, and, most, figured they were going to receive low scores, anyway. And this was at Santa Monica, one of the better regarded community colleges in LA county. Though, that is open to debate.
Ken Robinson, noted educator and social critic, said a major problem with higher education is that many professors teach as if their students are all going to become professors. At the time, Robinson’s simple observation came to me as an epiphany, for not only do professors teach as if their students are budding academics, they also expect student papers to be written as dissertations, even short three-page papers from remedial students.
I was at a conference having dinner with a group of educators. One young, newly tenured political science professor said, his voice stressed, “I almost decided not to attend the conference. Only two weeks are left in the semester, and I still have five chapters to cover.”
I asked, “How many of your students are political science majors?”
He answered, thoughtfully, “None that I know of.” He laughed, reaching his own conclusion. Why worry?
When I passed him on the quad some years later, he told me our brief exchange had changed his way of teaching. Now, he wanted his students to take from the course whatever they thought they could use or what they found interesting. The problem was the department. It wanted professors to cover every chapter, whether the students understood the information or not.
In English, professors rate the best student essays according to a formula, the correct use of grammar, syntax, diction, structure, and content, not unreasonable. Professors create the standards.
I remember waiting for a colleague outside his office one afternoon while he finished talking to a student. In the hallway, I noticed a student paper pinned to a bulletin board. The extra thick A+ gleaming at anyone passing by, and nary a teacher’s marks in the text, a sure sign of excellence.
I started to read. A correctly underlined thesis statement, strong sentence structure, sophisticated vocabulary, effective structure, and clear focus; yet, when I reached the bottom of page two, completely bored, I had to stop.
A few weeks earlier, I’d met with a group of writing teachers. Our task was to evaluate five student essays, scoring them from the best to the worst. “Here is the most engaging essay in the bunch,” one teacher pointed out, most of us agreeing. A teacher who had given the paper a low score called out, “Engaging is not in the rubric,” and she pointed to a complicated chart diagramming what constitutes good and weak writing. She, then, noted the more obvious writing errors in the student paper. Her argument swayed many of the teachers to her side. The rubric ruled.
Since university professors determine the formula for good essay writing, teachers in K-12 must follow the mandated formula, a sort of academic “trickle down”. It is a system created over a hundred years ago, and it is difficult to break free, a near-tribe mentality. Who said university teachers are liberal? Entrenched might be a better word.
To earn any college-level degree, students must conform to a style (or lack of one) of “academic writing”, or academese, as I call it. I don’t want to confuse this with the expository essay, at its best, one of the most beautiful works of art, to me, anyway.
It is one reason I chose to forgo a Ph. D. I could never navigate the strict writing formula, and, with an interest in creative writing, I feared too many years of academese might stifle any natural style I’d still managed to preserve.
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| Waiting ten years for an office with a view |
This isn’t to say I didn’t work hard, burrowed between library stacks late at night as I sought nuggets of wisdom in the books surrounding me, just like many students who’d passed through my classes over the years. As a teacher, I chose to bend even if I didn’t break. Though sometimes, like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, I wanted to say to hell with the “rivets” and delve deeper in the wilderness, freeing myself and my students of the “formula.”
Expository writing was once at the heart of academic writing, about the turn of the 20th century. Some professors have taken expository composition and turned it into a narrowly constructed, jargon littered literary form, abstract, obtuse, pretentious, and often vague. A friend once asked me if I’d read the draft of his dissertation. I tried, I really did, and though I was familiar with the subject, I couldn’t understand the writing.
Another colleague, a respected writer, widely published in both fiction and non-fiction, blurted in a department meeting, after a long discussion on the importance of a thesis statement, “I don’t care if a student can write a thesis statement as long as the writing is clear and makes a point.” Teachers in the room gasped. Sacrilege! Anathema! Heresy!
He didn’t care what others thought, Mr. Kurtz loosed in the halls of academia. Afterwards, he rarely attended faculty meetings. Yet, he remained one of the most popular teachers on campus, sent many of his students on to universities, but he was, gulp, suspect.
Another friend, a sociology professor, once asked, “Look at this student paper. It’s a good paper. But can you find the thesis statement. I can’t give him an ‘A’.”
Casually, and half-jokingly, I suggested to the department chair that we “blow-up” the writing paradigm, implement new standards, even change the name of our department from English to Reading and Composition. In not so many words, she intimated, it would cause a department rebellion.
So, when I hear professors say, “Students can’t write,” I think to myself, they can’t write the narrow, limited form academia requires, academese, and if students who attended elite, private high schools had difficulty with the form, how much more difficulty would first-generation students from working-class backgrounds and public school educations have?
I decided to try an experiment. On the first second of class, I asked students to write an essay on the most dangerous situation they ever faced. The first question, “Can we us the ‘I’? The papers they submitted covered all aspects of what educators and artists refer to as the “human condition,” topics ranging from rape to death to extreme challenges, tragic and inspiring papers. Even though most contained common writing errors, the stories left me mesmerized.
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| Where a lone Zapatista stands the post |
Effective analysis requires objectivity, hence, academese. Yet, in the human animal, complete objectivity does not exist. When some people talk about “art for art’s sake,” I think of George Orwell's proclamation, “All art is propaganda.”
In fact, Orwell is a perfect example of an essay writer whose thesis shines through, even if a readers can’t identify a thesis statement. Ironically, academics themselves have made Orwell one of the most widely assigned writers in college classrooms, from English to sociology, anthropology, and political science.
When one reads his essay, “A Hanging,” there is no doubt about Orwell’s position on capital punishment in the English colonies. Or in “Shooting an Elephant,” his ideas of colonialism and acculturation are stretched naked in the Burmese mud for readers to ponder.
College English teachers want their students to write as they wrote in grad school, mimicking Ph. D. dissertations, an anonymous voice, strict writing form from the opening paragraph to the conclusion, encompassing a specific jargon and sentence structure, of which Orwell observed, “…sentences tacked together like sections of a pre-fabricated hen-house.”
In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell warns against those who use language to manipulate the public. Even today, seventy years later, we listen to governments and politicians engage in verbal jousting, bombarding us with phrases like “alternative truth,” deadly “Peace Keeper” missiles, and “collateral damage.” If a lie is told enough times, people begin to believe it.
Of five examples of weak writing, Orwell cites in famous essay, are the work of, at least, three professors. The reason for such type of writing, Orwell muses, is that “Pretentious diction, words used to dress up a simple statement…give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements.”
Is this how writing teachers really want students to express themselves in writing or in speech?