Aw, jeeze! Correction: The last sentance should read, “Sadly, most** of the papers** are barely competent.”
I’m afraid ya’ll will think I was saying that most of the *posts * were barely competent.
Of course, it only takes a couple of teachers with their own issues to convince a whole crowd of students that immediate feedback is a bad idea. I suspect that the majority of instructors I’ve had would have been receptive to a respectful question regarding procedure in a class. On the other hand, I would not have known how receptive they might have been on the first (or even second) occurrence of taking a class with them. Why? Because we had a couple of instructors who treated any question regarding the protocols of the class (even when the questions simply sought clarification) as a personal assault on themselves, their spouses and their mothers and responded by making the life of the student with such effrontery hell. We needed to watch the instructors a bit before we ventured any suggestions.
In a school that has been making the evals an open publication for some time, most students should probably be smart enough to check out the temper of the instructor ahead of time, but for schools where the evals are a closed book (or back when I and my fellow ornithischians were in class), providing immediate feedback is (was) a very chancey proposition.
Thanks for your post Lissa. You said what i should have said, except that i was pissed off at dewizeowl’s pretentious and dismissive attitude.
You are certainly right about the level of writing ability in the population at large. While we sometimes have SDMB threads devoted to correcting grammatical and usage errors made by other Dopers, it is worth remembering that the level of written expression on these Boards is probably considerably above the national average.
The funny thing is that some college students don’t even seem concerned about their inadequacy in this area. I have had undergrads complain when i correct their spelling and grammar in papers, arguing that i should be paying attention only to content. Well, sorry, but if you can’t express yourself in a comprehensible fashion, then this has an effect on the content of your argument.
It’s astounding how many otherwise intelligent people can’t use apostrophes properly, can’t get basic subject-verb agreement right, and don’t understand the difference between a restrictive and a non-restrictive clause. Even more troubling are those who apparently have no idea what the purpose of a paragraph break is, and who don’t understand the concept of the topic sentence.
It is true that some academic writing can be pretentious, verbose, and even obfuscatory, but much of it is not. And you won’t convince me otherwise by pointing to a few extreme examples like Jacques Derrida.
[makes obligatory scan for evidence of Gaudere’s Law, then hits “submit” and crosses fingers]
Or, for that matter, ANY kind of feedback. I personally know of two college professors who don’t much handle any sort of feedback or criticism from undergraduates very well… and, as tomndebb have pointed out, tend to interpret this as anything from “disrespect” to “an attack.”
I’m a teacher. At the university I attended, my instructors paid very close attention to my attitude and demeanor, as well as my work and grades. I was under scrutiny, you see. Was I FIT to be a teacher? One instructor, in particular, spoke at length about how many students she’d downchecked over the years, because she didn’t like their attitude.
Getting downchecked is very bad. This means you get an instant conference with The Dean.
More than once, and your teaching career may well be over before it ever gets started.
The main thing I learned at my alma mater was “determine what the professor wants. Synthesize it, and give it to him. Sift lectures, discard bullshit. Get on with life.”
A pathetic excuse for education? Sure. But that’s what there is.
I majored in history, and I actually had a couple of conservative professors, a couple of outright liberals, and one who was a complete libertarian. The rest seemed more or less centrist to me. The History department had a reputation of being mildly liberal, but not as much as English, and the different ethnic/women’s studies programs. The Political Science people were a little more conservative, and the Economics faculty were all laissez-faire Republicans.
I remember taking a Texas History course, with a rather middle of the road professor. At most he may have been a moderate, old fashioned New Deal liberal. I still remember after one class on Texas’ Mexican heritage overhearing a fellow gripe that the had an “agenda of making Texas part of Mexico again”, while another fellow who took that class in the following year complained to the dean of Chicano studies department that he was “Anglocentric” and an “apologist for anti-Mexican racism” - raising a mild stink.
How they each came up with those interpretations from the same lecturer had me stumped. All I heard from him was a rather reasonable survey of events that occurred in the history of Texas.
History is always in danger of being politicized. But which is worse, the current litany of “evil white men”, or the old version that places them all on a brass pedestal?