I have a class of just under 20 freshmen and with one exception, their writing and grammar skills are good to excellent; even the exception is a massive improvement over what I have seen since I started working in higher education about 10 years ago. The difference is quite profound, and, I hope, a nationwide lasting trend. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who deals with people coming out of the public school system what their impressions are.
In my experience, you’re a fluke. The professors that I know, from my father to vivalostwages, generally see the skill of their students going downhill.
I, OTOH, have dealt with numerous complaints about freshman writing all semester long, as well as complaints about their off-the-charts entitlement. Probably small sample size, in both cases.
I’m seeing more lousy writing coming from 12th graders. I think some of it comes from standardized assessments where the scorers are looking for specific elements and students are learning how to write to those elements without considering the essay or paper as a whole. It’s kind of like gymnastics or ice skating; it’s not enough to be technically proficient at the individual elements of a routine. The gymnast or skater has to be able to make a cohesive whole. English teachers are being forced to teach writing to make the assessment scorers happy, but this is at the expense of learning truly good writing.
I have a question.
I volunteer for my local alumni club by volunteering at college fairs that the university can’t send their representative to. We don’t look at the writing portion of the SAT (technically, they will only look favorably at a good score - they ignore poor scores), since it’s still new and no one’s come up with a standardized way of weighing it.
- When will the writing section of the SAT start meaning something?
- What does it consist of - is it being scored on grammatical correctness, coherence, etc.?
- Is it being completely ignored by students?
Angel is it possible something has changed about your school’s applicant pool? For example, if your school is lower priced than similar school, or considered a “good value” for whatever reason (recent change in ranking?) then maybe you are drawing off more competitive students than in the past, with money being tight and all for so many families.
I know that being lower priced than schools of similar caliber has been a huge factor in my alma mater going from “pretty good for a state school” (when I attended) to being #6 among all public schools in the US.
I hope it’s part of a trend, but given what I see I don’t think so. I work at a CC and the students are often depressingly clueless. A good number of them want to do well, but have no idea how to get there. They’re mostly nice kids and all, but I don’t know what will become of them.
I’m a librarian and I help college kids with their research all the time - no. They are not improving. Trust me.
Heh, sorry, almost forgot about my thread after it looked like it would sink.
MsRobyn, it doesn’t seem to be a case of just learning where to put elements like nouns and verbs in relation to each other; they seem to actuallly be able to construct a paragraph, develop ideas and explore criticisms and come to a conclusion. Additionally, some of them have what I can only call style and are enjoyable to read. Sorry if this isn’t what you meant. Also, I’m not an English teacher, and my master’s is in a “professional” field, but, having said that, I want to emphasize again how wide the gulf is between what I’m seeing this year and just in the last. The “grammar” and “writing” were so atrocious, I’m surprised the ink didn’t get up and leave the pages in a huff. I remember one guy who started every LINE with a capital letter.
Hello Again, I’m not sure off the top of my head. We are the fastest-growing in our system in the state. (2-system state). There have been tuition raises, no suprise - I think tution varies among those in the system but we may be a relative bargain.
For n=16, I’m pretty impressed. If it’s a fluke, glad it happened to me. I don’t think I want to teach again though. Most of them do have the bored, somewhat entitled attitude.
Maybe you get a lot of students from the same school and they got a new teacher recently, or you’ve gotten a sudden influx from a school with very good composition teachers from which you didn’t use to get students for some reason.
A few of my HS teachers are so good that their reputations changed the grades of their ex-students from “failed for cheating” to “A+ and can I add more pluses please” when the college professors heard the student in question was from that HS; one of them had a small tutoring agency and he’d get people coming over every weekend from half the country away for his tutoring - people who had not been his HS students but who had heard about him from these. While teachers like that are truly exceptional, they do happen.
Wow, I also teach college freshman English, and I definitely do not see an improvement in grammar and writing skills. Quite the opposite. It’s scary, to be honest.
As a college freshman myself this fall I was surprised (and frankly somewhat disappointed) to find my writing, which I considered to be underdeveloped and seriously lacking, was praised by all of my teachers as exceptional. Granted I am going to a community college, but I slacked off in high school, often didn’t bother turning in English assignments, then spent 4 years in the army (hardly a hotbed of intellectual betterment). If I am an exceptional writer I find it hard to believe that students are improving.
I’ve taught business classes at a local 4 year college for about 12 years (part time adjunct) and haven’t seen any noticeable difference.
Some students write well and some don’t. One consistent response I get when students’ grammar or sentence structure problems are pointed out is “but this isn’t an ENGLISH class!”
Funny.