Higher Education – Page 6 – College Ready Writing 1.0

It’s OK to Fail

Today, I had my usual second-class lecture on the advantages of active reading and how students usually read for pleasure/emotion and thus need to change how they read “school work” in order to engage their brain. It always goes over well, as students realize that basically staring at words on a page for two hours every week and then living off of energy drinks and little sleep for a week while they cram for finals is really not a pleasant, effective, or ideal way to spend four years and thousands of dollars. But today, I added a little unplanned and wholly instinctive wrinkle to the second-day lecture: I don’t expect perfection and it’s ok to get the answer wrong.

I mentioned this at first in regards to their in-class free writes and homework: they get credit for making an effort to understand and engage with the materials, regardless if their engagement takes them in wildly strange directions. It might seem really touchy-touchy to reward effort, and I always shudder when students cry about a bad grade on a paper, claiming they worked so hard on it, but when we’re talking about the process of learning, then mistakes and misdirections are as important as eventually getting it right. Their mistakes are as important to me in my process of helping them learn so I can adapt my teaching in order to meet them where they are.

I’ve always tried to set up my classes in such a way that if the students give an honest effort, they will produce work that is of good enough quality to have earned them an A. We read and reread. We discuss and debate. We write, revise, and rewrite. We give and get feedback. I am the first person to admit a mistake when a class or assignment clearly didn’t work the way I had envisioned. I’ll meet them where they are, but I’ve got to know where that is. And that means I need them to be honest about what they are learning and what they aren’t.

In other words, they have to be ready to possibly fail the first time they try something. They don’t want to think too hard about what they’ve read in case their reading is wrong. They don’t want to try something different in how they read/write/study because it might not work and thus their grade will suffer. They don’t want to put too much effort into something that might not pay off. I think a lot of students’ current apathy or laziness stems from fear: fear of being wrong, fear of wasting their time, fear of looking foolish. I told them today that if they learned something, even if that something is “this really didn’t work”, then they are further ahead than when they started.

I try to remember that lesson myself when I teach. It’s never going to be perfect. And sometimes it will fail. But as long as I am open to recognizing and then fixing whatever went wrong, then I think I’m doing ok. I hope to get my students to understand that, too.

PS You have just read my 100th post here on College Ready Writing. Thank you so much for reading, sharing, commenting, and generally participating in my ongoing conversation about teaching, higher education, and beyond, mistakes and all.

Work/Life “Balance”

That’s right, I used scare quotes. I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about the work/life balance in higher education. I think about how many of my female academic role models were childless, never-married, or divorced. About how unreasonable the expectations are when it comes to the “life of the mind” in academia. (Check out this excellent post on expectations and priorities and this one on the two-headed problem). I usually think that I’ve done ok with the work/life balance, and I end up feeling pretty good about myself.

And then I have a day like today.

As I have written before, I left a tenure-track position so that my husband could take a better tenure-track job. I now have a full-time instructor position at the same university as my husband, so most days, I’m ok with the sacrifice. But at the end of the day, his job and his career takes priority over mine; I don’t have to do anything except teach, so whenever there’s a conflict in our professional activities, his take precedent. In other words, my ability to go to conferences is wholly based his schedule because of our two very young children. We live in a small town, far away from family, so childcare is basically one of the two of us.

And because conferences, regardless of discipline, all seem to fall on the same weekends, I typically have to pass up opportunities in order to take care of our kids. Last semester, I had to teach with my then-almost two-year-old son strapped to my back. Other times, I had to cancel classes because there wasn’t anyone to take care of the kids and my husband had something he HAD to do. Today, he announced to me that he was probably going to apply for a summer fellowship that takes place the same weekend of a conference I am presenting at. We may have agreed that this was a conference I would attend, but if something better comes along for him…

Now, my husband has been incredibly supportive most of the time; he’s brought our son to meetings with him because I was teaching, he moved across the country for me when I took my tenure-track job, and he agreed last semester that what was best for our son was for him to stay home with him while I was teaching (my daughter was attending preschool). But when it comes to the more “professional” side of my career (conferences, research trips, professional development), he has trouble. I don’t have to do any of these things for my job; but I want to do these things because while I am not on the tenure-track, I haven’t stopped being an academic.

When it comes to work/life, it’s not a question of balance, at least not a simple question of balance. Think of it as balancing on a stability ball; it’s always moving, shifting, and you are constantly adjusting. I am continually negotiating my work and my life, modifying my perspective and expectations. There are good days and bad days. There are days where I miss the city, miss having a career just so I can have an excuse to do those activities outside of teaching that I want to do, miss being able to call up family and say, you take the kids, please!

I’ve consciously avoided writing too much about my life and my kids on this blog. But I realize that I need to start talking about the sacrifices and compromises I make in order to keep things together and keep things working. How wearing my son to teach made me feel like I was being judged as both a poor teacher and poor mother. How I was somehow able to teach five classes while also taking care of my son 65% of the time and publish two papers. How it’s not easy, but it isn’t impossible either.

The following appeared as satire in the Times Higher Education:

Targett [fictional administrator at the fictional Poppleton University] also pointed out that female academics were “more likely” than their male colleagues to have a range of outside interests such as cooking and child-minding. He believed that to burden them with further duties might be tantamount to discrimination.

This cut a little to close for comfort for me. Higher education often tells aspiring academics, men and women, that outside “interests” such as family are not acceptable. I think I internalized this attitude and it is manifesting itself in what I choose to write about on this blog. No more. While you won’t hear about every snotty nose and cognitive milestone, I will start writing about how my family impacts my work, for better or for worse.

First Day of School!

Yup, I finally started teaching today. Finally. The syllabus was done yesterday afternoon while the children napped. I used a great deal of “Readings: TBA” in part so I can be more flexible as the semester moves on and in part because I really have no idea what we’re going to read. Yet.

The good? I was able to move all of my classrooms into rooms with a smartboard (I still don’t know how to use one, but maybe I’ll learn this semester), a computer, and Internet access. I also found out that there is a computer lab that I can use with my students. Time to revise papers on the spot! I am very excited about this.

The bad? Blackboard was acting weird, and so I had to actually go over the syllabus in more detail than I would have liked because my course was still reading “unavailable” and thus the students couldn’t access anything I had put up there. It’s fixed, but it’s still annoying.

The ugly? The textbook I selected for my 100-level class, the one without readings? Turns out, we could have selected the one with the readings, and that is the version that the bookstore brought in, charging the students more money than they needed to spend. I didn’t even know we had the option. So now my students have “wasted” money, or I have to change my syllabus (hey, Readings TBA, right?). Or, some students may have bought it with readings and some without. Ugh.

Live and learn.

But it’s great to be in front of the classroom again. This semester, I’m a lot more confident about the courses I’m teaching; when my 200-level students’ eyes glazed over when I said that we were going to be discussing education reform, I knew with a decent amount of certainty that I will have won most of them over by the end of the semester. You know, why high school sucks.

Now if I could only get a chair in my office that puts me in a good position to type and work on my computer…

My (Virtual) Experience at MLA ’11

I didn’t go to the MLA this year, at least not in person. There are a number of reasons: I’m not on a job search, I wasn’t presenting, I spent Christmas at home in Canada with my family instead, I couldn’t really afford it because we have just bought a house and moved immediately before the holidays, etc. But the truth is, I didn’t even submit an abstract to be on any panels; each previous year, I submitted PILES of abstracts and my rate of acceptance is dismally low. And when the abstracts were due, I thought I was kissing my academic career goodbye (I’m pretty sure I’ve kissed any hope of the tenure-track goodbye, but anyway). All of this to say, I wasn’t planning on having anything to do with the MLA this year, or perhaps any year after this (unless by some miracle, it comes to Kentucky, which I doubt).

I don’t like the MLA. In fact, I don’t really much like academic conferences at all, big or small, despite my writing to the contrary. And I don’t like them for reasons that are unique; I am completely incapable of interacting normally with my fellow academics. I get so nervous that I end up blubbering and babbling and gushing and sticking my foot in my mouth. I act overly-familiar or too distant. I don’t know how to make “friends” and I never really know anyone and no one really knows me. I work in a weird field (Haitian-Canadian/Caribbean-Canadian writing, among other things) and teach in a completely different area (composition). I’m usually a very social person who is at ease in groups of strangers. But when those strangers are my intellectual “superiors,” I turn into a mess.

When #MLA11 turned up in my Twitter timeline, I was sucked in. I followed along and got involved in the discussions about Digital Humanities and how technology is changing the profession (#openprof and #newtools). I asked questions that I may have been too shy or blubbery to ask otherwise (seriously, 140 characters is a blessing for me). I read blog posts about other presentations (a big, big thank you to Dr. Davis of Teaching College English for being such a diligent blogger). I learned a lot, was challenged and I think was able to pose some challenging questions in return, especially in regards to those of us off the tenure-track. I made new “friends,” got some new followers, and basically got over myself through the semi-anonymity of the web; you can’t see my blush online.

Now, I want to meet all of these fabulous people I follow on Twitter or whose blogs I read. I want to have my own discussion group/panel (maybe about using social media to improve our teaching/creating PLN in higher education – #FYCchat plug!). I want to go to Seattle next January and, for the first time, enjoy an MLA conference because I don’t feel intimidated or like I don’t belong. I’m sure I’ll still stick my foot in my mouth or ramble on too long with someone I’ve greatly admired from afar. But, hey, I’m looking forward to it now.

So thank you MLA Convention for having Wi-Fi and to that handful of Tweeters and bloggers. You reached at least one person and convinced them to join the party next year.

On The Outside Looking In on the Digital Humanities

*I wrote this about a month ago and it was meant for the University of Venus. But given the “debate” going on at this year’s MLA Conference (specifically the panel #openprof and #newtools, and in particular the post on the Chronicle Brainstorm blog), I thought I would share my own perspective as an “outside” looking in (and trying to figure out how I fit in).

When I started my PhD, there was a new program just getting started, called Humanities Computing. Students in the program pursued Masters degrees, taking a mixture of HuCo (as it was called) classes and classes from their “home” humanities department. There were a few students in Comparative Literature who were pursuing a Masters in HuCo. The rest of us had come from traditional literature departments, and we viewed our HuCo classmates with curiosity. What, exactly, are you doing?

One student analyzed a short story according to how many times certain words occurred in the story and at what points. He proudly showed us the graphs he plotted and showed that the graph exactly pinpointed the climax of the story. We all nodded impressively, but wondered to ourselves if you couldn’t figure it out with a good close reading. We also wondered how this could possibly compare to the complex theoretical readings we were doing, which was obviously more intellectually strenuous.

One thing stuck with me, though. When I asked the HuCo student what he could do with his degree, he told me that he had already received a number of lucrative job offered. The technological and analytical skills he was acquiring was in high demand. So much for our intellectual superiority.

There has been an explosion in interest in the digital humanities. Say what you will about the decline in traditional print media, but it still stands to reason that when the old Grey Lady, the New York Times, features something, it means it has hit the mainstream. And so it would seem that the digital humanities have hit the big time, such as it is. (And yes, I do see the irony in this).

Despite my initial condescension towards (one) idea of what digital humanities is, my own dissertation benefited from the increased digital availability of electronic archival resources. I would never had known about the various archives I visited, in which I found never-before analyzed letters and drafts, had it not been for the electronic availability of searchable archive databases (and Google). And, while I loved going through the old letters and manuscripts, if the materials had been completely digitized, I would have been able to avoid taking out a $10,000 line-of-credit in order to pay for the travel to the archives so I could complete my research.

But some skepticism still remains. Recently, a video made the rounds, questioning the sanity of any student who would look to do a PhD in Political Science. The student wants to study politics; the professor warns that the student will spend his days doing “regression discontinuity.” My husband has a PhD in Political Science and I know first-hand the pressure he faced to do more quantitative research, rather than the qualitative work that he loves. I worry that this is the direction that the digital humanities will take all of the humanities.

I love the idea of making documents (aka data) of all kinds more accessible to interested parties (and not just “scholars”), as well as discovering more innovative ways of presenting the data. But I hope that we haven’t moved into a “post-theoretical age” in that we go back to a time where simply making an observation was good enough, even with the help of a computer. We still need the theorists to help us interpret the increasing amount of “data” we are able to access and reorganize. As was asked here on Inside Higher Ed, where are the humanities in the digital humanities?

Finally, I worry that there will be an even larger generation of “lost scholars” than there already is. We know the number of tenure-track jobs in the humanities is dwindling. What happens to academics whose traditional academic training has left them entirely ill equipped to compete for the new (if still tiny) number of jobs that are available. Do we go and get another PhD? Try to radically reframe our research interests to fit a rapidly evolving field? Or just give up?

For me, I have the luxury of being able to try to adapt. Can I create a website/database that allows readers and researchers to more fully explore the inter- and intra-textual references that an author has across their writing and other artistic output, one that is crowdsoured? I have no idea. I am still on the outside of the digital humanities, trying to hack my way in (haha). But I have some stability in order to explore the theoretical questions and technical aspects of the project. What of the adjunct teaching an overload of classes at multiple institutions? I hope there’s space for all of us at the increasingly small table.

Gotcha! How Open is too Open?

I’ll admit it. I made a mistake this past semester. It’s the kind of mistake that seems trivial at the time but can quickly escalate into a crisis. And I should know better. I’ve been warned repeatedly against making the kind of mistake that I made. I’ve read about other professors who have made the same mistake and paid dearly for it. Yet, there I was, unable to stop myself, only seeing the error of my ways after it was perhaps too late.

I talked about politics with some of my students.

My students are chronically unable to find my office, so twice a semester, instead of class, I have informal meeting time in my classroom where students can come and talk to me about the paper I have just handed back, the assignment they are working on, and their progress thus far during the semester. I get more students than just my office hours, but not much. This past semester, a few students hung around the classroom and started talking about politics. Let me reiterate that this was not a formal class nor was I offering a lecture. I joined in their discussion about politics. I explained the Canadian parliamentary system. We compared the Canadian Left and Right to the American Left and Right. We had been talking about education reform, and so discussed the various politics of the current wave of reform.

I admittedly said some inflammatory things but made sure that a) I made it clear that this was only my opinion and b) I backed up those opinion with some pretty solid reasons. I played devil’s advocate with my students and their ideas and opinions, regardless of their political views. This is my job as their teacher; to help them improve their critical thinking skills by, in one way, challenging them. They, in turn, challenged me and taught me about American and local politics. I was enjoying myself and enjoying the opportunity to get to know some of my students and to have them get to know me.

One of the students, however, was continually playing with his iPhone. It didn’t alarm me; students are almost always doing something on their phones, even when I’m lecturing, let alone when I’m having an informal discussion. But I did think it was strange that he kept holding it up periodically. Trying to get a better signal? It only dawned on me after everyone had left and I was walking home that he may have been recording me on his phone. Recording our discussions on politics. A recording that could be edited and posted on web.

Shit.

If you are at all paying attention to higher education, I don’t have to go into the recent scandals involving professors who have been video recorded and then dragged through the mud online (like him or as described here). There have been questions about how much “freedom” a professor has in their classroom, especially with organizations such as FIRE ready to pounce (and rapidly disseminate) any evidence of bias or academic misconduct in the classroom. All I need as a contingent faculty is to have my face, voice and (probably misrepresented) politics all over the blogosphere.

So far, so good. I’ve set up google alerts for any variation of my name and my university’s name (it’s only damning if it names names) so I can (maybe) be one of the first to know if it hits. And I might just be acting paranoid because of all of the attention lately to the illicit video taping of professors. But it scared me. And it made me wonder if I would have to fundamentally change who I am as a teacher.

I have written elsewhere that what I always admired in my favorite former teachers was their openness with us; they were human beings who shared with us their personalities and showed us a little bit of their lives outside of the classroom. I want my students to know me so they feel comfortable taking chances, offering opinions and even challenging me in my class. How can I ask them to trust me if I don’t trust them? But with the risk of being taped and misrepresented, how open is too open now for me with my students? I include time in my office and when I run into them outside of class or even off campus (it’s a small town) because who knows who is watching or listening?

I can’t let the fear of being caught (caught doing what? Offering opinions? Asking questions? Being human?) change how I teach. But I will definitely now think twice before opening my mouth to talk about politics. At least when a student is paying a little too much attention to their phone while holding it up like they’re trying to take my picture.

*I wrote this post before Christmas. Last night, I participated, on Twitter, in the MLA panel “New Tools, Hard Times: Social Networking and the Economic Crisis” (check out the backchannel here). Apparently, I’m already too open by blogging as myself. The take-away from the rise in technology in higher education? Don’t be yourself. Sorry, Academia, I can’t, I won’t, do it.

Loyalty or Desperation, Revisited

In honor of the job numbers coming out of the MLA regarding potential jobs for all of us PhDs and ABDs, I want to reexamine an idea I put forward this summer. Last July, I wrote about how loyalty to a university can just as easily mask desperation in contingent faculty (the university that I mention in the post is not the same university where I am currently working). But I have been rethinking the ideas of loyalty and/or desperation in faculty members as it relates to the students I teach. I hope and wish that my institution would show loyalty towards me because of the loyalty I feel towards its students.

I have moved around quite a bit during my career. Being one half of an academic couple has lead to my traveling to multiple universities for work. But I am tired of moving around, tired of learning and relearning a new academic culture, and, most of all, I am tired of never knowing how the students I have taught have done in their academic careers. Teaching developmental writing, especially, creates a type of bond for me; I have invested a great deal of time and effort getting to know these students and trying to help them be successful in college. And I want to be there for them if they ever need me during their four or five more years in college. I want to be readily available to write letters for them if a reference is ever needed. I want to help my student who wants to get a PhD in Economics achieve that goal, even if it is just cheering him on from the sidelines. And I want to be there at graduation when they cross the stage and finally achieve their goal of getting a degree and becoming a teacher, a nurse, a vet tech, or whatever else they are hoping to do with their education.

But I can’t do that, at least not easily, if I am not employed at the university. I told my students that even if I didn’t have a job on campus next year or beyond, chances are I’d still be around because my husband is on the tenure-track and we have just bought a house in town. But how much weight would a letter carry from a former instructor, versus a current one? How easily could they track me down to ask for help, guidance, or a pep-talk, or would they even bother, if my campus email was shut down and I no longer had an office? I hope that I am still an employee, even as an instructor off the tenure-track, for many more years, not only for myself, but for the students I have taught and will teach.

My loyalty is to them. Many of them have come from very difficult situations, and I really want to help them succeed, or at a minimum smile proudly when their names are called and they cross the stage to receive their diploma, knowing I had played a small role in helping them achieve that goal. So, to my institution I say, your students have won me over. Now, are you going to show me a little bit of loyalty in return?

What Can We Expect From Freshmen?

I asked, in a recent post, what do we expect from Freshmen? I was responding, in part, to the criticism, that I had expected too much of my students in their final assignment. And then, today, I came across (or rediscovered) the following essay by Alfie Kohn, explaining “How to Create Nonreaders.” In it, he radically proposes that we empower students and allow them to shape the curriculum in their language arts/reading and writing classes at the K-12 level.

Now, imagine if we did that in our Freshmen Writing or Introduction to Literature classes. Based on the comments on my blog post about allowing students to propose a fictional course, I don’t think that it would go over very well.

Here is the paradox that Kohn points out and that can be extrapolated even further into higher education:

The sad irony is that as children grow older and become more capable of making decisions, they’re given less opportunity to do so in schools. In some respects, teenagers actually have less to say about their learning – and about the particulars of how they’ll spend their time in school each day — than do kindergarteners. Thus, the average American high school is excellent preparation for adult life. . . assuming that one lives in a totalitarian society.

We expect even less of students in college classes. Part of it is the institutional tradition: students come to higher education (and pay a lot of money) in order to benefit from our (the professor’s) expertise. If they wanted to direct their own learning, they are free to do so, for free. You get what you pay for, and they are paying for my wisdom, experience, and knowledge. But why does it have to be that way? As Kohn points out, the instructor is not removed from the equation; they are important guides in the process of shaping the educational experience. Why does our experience have to be shared with students in a top-down approach?

When I ask the question, however, what can we expect from freshmen, I don’t just mean what could we reasonable expect a freshman to do in a class. I don’t think that it would be entirely unreasonable to immediately ask a freshman to take control and ownership of their education in order to prepare them for not only the next four years, but their professional lives beyond their degree. No, I am also asking what are we allowed to ask of our freshmen.

Kohn talks about how it’s important that students are given “voice and choice.” Why? Two reasons:

The first is that deeper learning and enthusiasm require us to let students generate possibilities rather than just choosing items from our menu; construction is more important than selection. The second is that what we really need to offer is “autonomy support,” an idea that’s psychological, not just pedagogical. It’s derived from a branch of psychology called self-determination theory, founded by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, among others. To support students’ autonomy is to meet their need to be in control of their own lives, to offer opportunities to decide along with the necessary guidance and encouragement, to “minimiz[e] the salience of evaluative pressure and any sense of coercion in the classroom” and “maximiz[e] students’ perceptions of having a voice and choice.”[10]

How can we allow students to generate possibilities when the instructors themselves aren’t allowed to generate possibilities, allowed our own autonomy? Instead, we are limited to a selection of pre-approved texts, mandated assignments, and set learning outcomes? My fellow University of Venus colleague Afshan Jafar has written quite eloquently on the McDonaldization of higher education and why it is taking place, but I am interested here in examining the effects on the teaching and course development process. For Mary Churchill, the assembly-line teaching mentality caused her to choose administration over academia. For me, it means that I can’t at least try to empower and challenge my freshmen writers.

This next semester, I am teaching Freshman Writing at my institution for the first time. I’ve taught the course elsewhere, but of course, I have to re-learn a new textbook, fit in all of the mandated assignments, and this semester, the added pressure of being one of the courses whose papers will be evaluated for accreditation and evaluation purposes. Could I, would I, come to class on the first day with the long pre-formatted syllabus with all of the requirements, course goals, learning outcomes, and assignments already in place and pre-selected textbook, and say to the class, here are our guidelines, now we make the class together? I do have the flexibility to assign specific readings, come up with homework/in-class exercises, and a small number of major assignments, as well as the specific schedule for the semester. Could I, would I, hand over the small amount of choice and freedom I do have as an instructor to my students?

I worry about my job. I worry about the perception of me as an instructor. I worry about my students learning. I worry (in my most optimistic moments) that I will upset the expectations of other professors who later have my students, students who now expect a degree of autonomy that they will not receive in other classes. I worry about our accreditation; I have now been at two schools that have completely overhauled their Freshman Writing because of the demands of the same accreditation board. Of course, the accreditation board didn’t demand specifically that Freshman Writing change, but they did demand that there be put in place a program that would impact all students. Freshman Writing it is.

I have about three weeks to decide. I’m not going to lie; I’ll probably take the “easy” and safe way out, developing my syllabus myself, mostly dictating the readings and assignments, according to the limitations that have already been placed on me. But like I did in my 200-level class this past semester, I’ll push the envelope; blogs, self-directed reading and research, and at least one assignment that upsets everyone’s assumptions, students’ and professors’, as to what a freshman can do. It might not be much, but it’s a start. It is, literally, the least and most I can do.

What Do We Expect From Freshmen?

I’m not breaking my Christmas vow to focus on engaging with the comments on my blog/writing; this post, in fact, is a long response to my recent University of Venus post, “What is a Course in Higher Ed?” One particularly negative comment focused on how I live in a fairy-land and should never be allowed to teach again. Never mind that the course focused on education and its role in our society, and that the assignment was warmly and enthusiastically received by my students. And while some of my students didn’t do as well as I had hoped, when do they ever?

But that isn’t what this blog post is about. No, my fellow University of Venus blogger Mary Churchill dealt quite well with the issue of instructors and professors being openly discouraged from trying (and potentially failing) in the classroom here.

I want to focus on the critique that I expected too much from my Freshmen in the class (never mind that most of my students were, in fact, Sophomores or higher). One of the comments read:

Freshman are not educators; most of them do not even know how to do critical thinking, much less create a course that develops it. Freshmen are supposed to be somewhat self-centered with a limited worldview. Changing that is the purpose of higher ed. While, along the way, imparting skills and knowledge.

True enough, they are not educators, but they have all chosen to attend an institution of higher education, at great cost to themselves and/or their families. But is it also true that they are “supposed to be somewhat self-centered”? This goes back to the central question of my post, what is higher education? Is its purpose to produce well-rounded, critical thinking individuals? And is it the only place where this could and should happen?

In the West, most people still do not attend college, let alone complete a degree (note that I’ve said college and not community college or technical schools). We are a democracy, and we rely on a population that is capable of making informed decisions when they vote. Why, then, is critical thinking the sole responsibility of colleges and universities? Why has that role been taken away from or fallen away from the high schools? What about the significant numbers of the population who have not gone to college?

We spoke at length about education and its role in our society both with my more advanced 200-level writers, about whom I wrote, and with my developmental writers, who were all Freshmen. All of them agree that their college education, in fact, all of education, is motivated by economics. It was very difficult for them to even contemplate or imagine education serving any other purpose. Why then, I asked, was education historically reserved for the wealthy who didn’t need any sort of education in order to perpetuate their (mostly inherited) wealth? Why did the emerging merchant class insist that their children receive a classical education when their trade was, well, trade?

I don’t think any of us ever came up with a satisfactory answer. Is this a failure on my part as an instructor? Well, I could have told them or lectured them on their self-centered, capitalist worldview, which would have gone in one ear and out the other. Instead, we read, we wrote, and I let them create. And, really, at the end of 15 weeks, is it too much to ask of a student to apply what we have read, discussed, and learned, regardless of what level they are at, Freshmen or Seniors?

I think in our disgust with the level of K-12 education, our increasing course loads/student numbers, our push to standardize courses, and our general disdain for the motivation of our students (or lack thereof), we have severely underestimated their abilities. They don’t want to be challenged; they’re not ready to be challenged; I’m too busy to challenge them. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Most Freshmen, heck most students, will rise to the challenge, if you are willing to go there with them.

Back when I was naive, I taught a developmental writing course in California, at one of the state schools. The need for remediation was so strong that they created two levels of developmental writing, one that was one 10-week quarter and another that took place over two 10-week quarters. The only requirement was that the students had to study (read, write, and discuss) a non-fiction book, one that makes an argument. I, in my naiveté, chose Manliness by Harvey Mansfield. The students, I thought, would love it. And they did, eventually.

We spent the final 10 weeks on the book. I told them ahead of time that it would be the most challenging book they’d probably ever read, but if they trusted me, worked hard, we would get through it and they could be confident that they could get through anything college threw at them. It was the hardest 10 weeks of my life and probably the students’ (intellectual) lives. But we did get through it and at the end of the semester, I was more proud of the results they produced than I ever have before or since. Why? One reason is because I never had the opportunity to teach the book again. But another reason is exactly because it was so hard for me as their instructor and thus a deterrent to ever teaching something that challenging to Freshmen or developmental writers ever again. Why should I be surprised at their uninspired writing and ideas when I give them (or am required to give them) uninspired things to read and write about?

My idea to have all of my students, regardless of their level read and write about education and education reform has produced the most satisfying results for me as an instructor since I taught Manliness. And, it was my most challenging teaching experience since then, too. Were all the essays stellar examples of critical thinking and college-level writing? No. But, they all showed evidence of at least an attempt at both critical thinking and college-level writing. It didn’t earn them an A, but it did reinforce my belief that much of the time we expect too little from our students, Freshmen or otherwise.

For Part II, I ask, what can we expect from Freshmen?

What’s the Point of Freshman Writing?

This post is in response to a question asked on the Phi Beta Cons blog.

I am sorry that you don’t see the point of courses like Freshman Writing. But you’ve never met my students. You’ve never met the students who come to the non-selective institutions of higher education in this country, in other words, the majority of them. And you most definitely have not gone through the K-12 system that currently values standardized test scores over real writing skills. Look at the statistics. The majority of students are not prepared for college work. They need remediation (look at California and New York’s numbers). Well then, give them remediation, you say. After one semester, have these students really overcome 12 years of educational deficiency?

And, really, even those who don’t need remediation. Are they really that far ahead of their peers in remedial or developmental courses? Are they ready to face the demands of a college degree, the level of writing that will be required of them? Not really, given the tyranny of the standardized test and the standardized essay. They do the five-paragraph essay over and over again. And then they are expected to succeed in a college humanities class?

These are not students who have parents who have paid for academic coaches, SAT tutors, and admissions councilors. These are often students who are the first in their family to finish high school, let alone attend college. They are not the best and the brightest. They are often not the ambitious and highly motivated. But they are all motivated by the same goal: to build a better life for themselves. And the way to do that, they have been told repeatedly, is to go to college.

It is the end of the semester, and I am saddened by the number of students who have written to me that I am the first teacher they have had who has given a crap about them, their writing, and their education. I am the first teacher who has tried to explain to them how to properly use a comma or what a sentence fragment is. That they learned more in my 15-week class than four years of high school. That they never believed that they could write until they came into my class. I have taught at three different public universities in three different states. I received the same kinds of comments from the majority of my students at all three.

As for the class refer to at UNC, I think you need to take any student’s description of a class with a grain of salt. It actually sounds like the instructor tried to engage with the students in a way that was relevant to where the future of humanities is going (whether we like it or not): the digital humanities. Also, instead of droning on and on and on in a boring lecture format, the instructor invited the students to step outside the classroom and explore educational events on campus. Freshmen especially need to know what resources are available to them on campus, whether they think they are going to be interested or not. To then ask students to work together and shape their own learning experience? The nerve, forcing the students to be active, independent learners. I hope she didn’t trip over her sense of superiority while she overlooked an opportunity to engage in some creative and critical thinking, something that is no longer valued in high school.

I am not absolving the instructor for not giving the course as advertised and failing to provide more guidance to the student in question (did she even ask, however?). But notice how I avoid talking about the instructor as a professor; that is because it was made clear that the instructor of the course was a PhD student. This is one of the biggest problems with how Freshman Writing is taught in many institutions, both selective and non-selective. Professors are too busy with their research, graduate students, and upper-level courses to teach Freshman Writing, so instead it is passed off to underprepared graduate students or over-worked adjuncts (often, but not always, they are one and the same). If professors aren’t willing to take the courses seriously enough to teach them (even though it was they who demanded that the courses be offered because, presumably, they noticed that students couldn’t write well enough), then how seriously will a graduate student take them, when their sole goal is to emulate their professors?

Perhaps Freshman Writing is a waste of some students’ time, but for the majority, it is a necessity to make up for years of standardized testing and sub-standard teaching. As for poor teachers of Freshman Writing or poor course/assignment design, blame a system that doesn’t prioritize teaching. There are many, many of us out there who do try to teach it well, and most of us are off the tenure-track. Reading your post and the student’s post remind me of how thankless and disrespected a task I chose to take on. Reading many of my students’ thanks, I am reminded of why I love what I do.