Pearls of insight on assessment test essays

The BBQ Pit
21

Well, of course I write them down. How else do you expect me to keep track of them?

I have a lot of company: Google

Here’s the real definition of “pathetic”: Being unable or unwilling to enjoy some harmless humor and then begruding others their enjoyment of it.

Whine all you wish. The gems will keep on coming.

22

But – but. :frowning: I LIKE the gem threads!

23

It does seem kinda snobbily passive-aggressive, but whatever. I’m an enthusiastic proponent of people not reading threads that rub them the wrong way.

That said, I wanted to point out for the record that your hobby is apparently only half as popular as “cat porn”.

24

Count me as another one who enjoys vivalostwages’s threads and always looks forward to a fresh batch. (Also, as a freshman comp instructor and occasional AP exam reader, I agree that reading some of these essays will drive you crazy if you don’t find the humor in them.)

25

Sorry—I was just rewriting the sentence. It wasn’t actually pointed at you.
Please do open all the gem threads and feel free to spread the humor everywhere. That’s what all my email contacts do. They keep asking for more, so I keep giving them more. Supply and demand, right?

26

Precisely. Aside from a few snacks and cups of coffee, it’s the only relief we get during a three-hour reading session.

27

This made my day. :slight_smile:

28

I don’t think vivalostwages is laughing at people, but at the essay written. I also don’t sense any spirit of meanness or such in how she presents the content. Nothing smacks of personal attack.

I think it’s all right to find some fun in your job when you could. Programmers have dailywtf.com.

29

Just like verbal crack!

30

I have learned valuable lessons from these threads. For example:

I will no longer let life’s lemons bludgeon me.

31

[QUOTE=vivalostwages in other thread]
They are incoming students who are to be placed in various classes–ESL, English, or Remedial.
[/QUOTE]

Ah, so some of these gems we’re enjoying represent the foibles of ESL students? You’re a class act.

[QUOTE=Crowbar of Irony +3]
I don’t think vivalostwages is laughing at people, but at the essay written. I also don’t sense any spirit of meanness or such in how she presents the content. Nothing smacks of personal attack.
[/QUOTE]

I’ll agree that the individual linked thread isn’t egregious in its contempt for students, but the search function reveals that it occurs in the context of well over a dozen of such threads over the past few years.

Furthermore, a significant portion (likely the plurality) of vivalostwages posting is comprised of material intended to answer the recurring topic around here: “are the [college students/high school students/youth/kids] of today lesser examples of humanity compared with the shining lights of my generation?” with which she’s usually besides herself to rush to the conclusion that the kids today are fucking retarded. Her own career is mediocrity personified yet she seems to find no greater joy in life than eviscerating the abilities of her students. Here are a few examples:

[QUOTE=vivalostwages on the topic of the kids these days]

Many of them can’t even write coherent sentences in college without extensive remediation…
Darn right. And they never explain “too,” which is, after all, a relative term. “Too much reading” as opposed to what? The first line of Goodnight, Moon? “Too hard” as opposed to putting a new app on a Facebook page? …
Absolutely spot-on. I AM the cc instructor who cannot get FT work; the chances of getting that now are darn near nil. There are some bright students in the ccs and the unis (I’ve taught in both systems, and there is no difference between the students that I have seen), but for the most part they are lazy, uninterested, heavy on the attitude, etc…
I think back on Nancy’s upbringing and recall all the times her parents gave into her rather than have her throw a fit, how they gave her all that she ever wanted, horseback riding lessons, a cat and a dog (which she failed to take care of), an iPod, and so on. They did so much for her that she is barely willing or capable to do for herself. …
Heck, the colleges and universities where I’ve been working for the past 20 years have let in anyone who could find a way to pay, qualifications be damned, illiteracy be damned, etc…
Cell Phone Girl: You never see her without it…
As a college prof who regularly receives students (even native ones) who can barely manage a coherent sentence, I’m thinking it wouldn’t hurt to have all the kiddos in K-12 do some old-fashioned sentence diagramming…
She endorses as “damn right” the following: “This is a real problem for me. If I insisted on college-level reading and writing, not to mention thinking, the majority of the class would get a C or below.”…
I have noticed a definite increase (over the past 19 years) in obnoxious, juvenile, rude behavior that I’d expect if I were teaching third-grade brats…
've also seen a real decline in reading comprehension and writing skills in general. I also work in assessment and have been placing more students in remedial classes than ever before; I started assessing five years ago…
Students who “write” like that deserve no response…
Yet another goofy student email…I’ll give you all kinds of extra credit points if you can figure out what she really meant by “laments.”…
I have to keep reminding myself that many (certainly not all) h.s. students have not been taught how to think, don’t want to think because it’s “too hard,” have not been required to stretch. It doesn’t do them much good when they arrive in college without such skills…

  1. There are many, many students graduating from high school without being able to write coherent sentences. Maybe that’s where the problem truly lies, though I’d venture to say it goes back farther than that. Anyway, when they arrive in a college like the one I work for, they take a placement essay test. Then we place them as accurately as we can. Other students are international and have different skill levels in regard to writing. Some will attempt to go to regular English right after ESL even when they’re not ready, because they just don’t want to take the time to do it right. And so on.
  2. I doubt very much that sentence diagramming takes place any more. I wish it did. I’ve had plenty of native speaker students who didn’t know the damn difference between one part of speech and another. …
    I have been teaching CC students for sixteen years, and there has been a drastic decline not only in performance but in attitude and attention span.
    I’ve heard from other professors this semester telling me that nearly their entire classes were flunking, that people are still making the same errors and omissions they were making fourteen weeks ago, that the students are more interested in their iPods and camera phones than in doing even the minimum amount of work required for a passing grade. After a while, you just give up and stop nagging them because they obviously don’t care.
    [/QUOTE]

Ultimately, if the intellect, integrity, and writing ability of the students at her community college or those taking this placement exam falls below her standards I would advise her to decamp for a better institution, but for some reason she has not availed herself of this option as of yet.

32

Yeah, there are academic jobs just falling off the trees for anyone with an MA or PhD to snap up at will. :rolleyes:

Also, Og forbid she actually stay in the place where she currently works and actually HELP these students improve. Whatever you think of the threads, they tell us nothing about vivalostwages’s abilities or commitment as a teacher. For all we know, she does her absolute best to ensure that everyone under her care actually improves their writing abilities so that they no longer run into the problems discussed in these threads.

33

Funny thing…a former student just wrote to me on FB to say thanks for all the support and for the scholarship recommendations.
I don’t see any sense of joyful evisceration emanating from the laundry list of quotes in post #31. There’s frustration, certainly. (BTW, “Cell Phone Girl” is a person who walks around in my neighborhood. I have no idea if she’s a student or not and never said she was.)
The gist of this whole pitiful rant seems to be that I should stop posting about work, about students, about any problems with the latter. Hey, maybe it’s time for someone to shut down the RateYourStudents blog too, since that place is chock-full of instructors venting frustrations.
Richard Lederer (Amazon.com : richard lederer) has made some money off of collecting and publishing bloopers. So has Anders Henriksson (Amazon.com : anders henriksson). Why not go after them?

Two instructors at another college collected bloopers from ESL students* (no names) and printed up copies of a book/planner filled with them. One of my colleagues wants to team up and do the same. Inside their book cover, they write that “they shared their secret obsession with collecting humorous student errors made in comp. and in conversation or on tests. They discussed ways to share some of their ‘treasures’ with others who might see the humor in students’ innocent errors…it is their sincere hope that you will appreciate both the struggle and the humor in the all too human effort to communicate.”
They donated the proceeds to charity.

The gem threads are simply a means of sharing some fun. Most of the people on this Board can understand that concept.

34

WTH’s got you knotted? Did you flunk out of community college or fail your ESL class? It’s harmless, anonymous fun. You’ve been following** viva** around like a little black rain cloud regarding this topic for some time. Why not just skip the threads? I have a feeling that you yourself made an embarrassing mistake on a student essay and cringe at it still. Welcome to the world. And why would she move on? She probably does her students a world of good. If I had to choose between a teacher who could still see humor in absurdities and one who had a stick up her ass, I’d choose the former. I think most people would.
I would also hope that there are teachers of French and Mandarin and Hindi etc that get a chuckle out of English speaking people struggling to learn their written language. There’s no malice involved: simply a recognition that meaning depends on so many factors it’s a wonder at times that we manage to communicate at all.
Plus, they’re hilarious. Sometimes I wonder if the entire essay is constructed from sentences like those posted or are they just randomly inserted into more clearly written works. Some of them are so outlandish, my mind boggles at the writer ever making their argument successfully.
Here’s something to chew on: what do you think nurses talk about in their lounge on break? Stew on that for awhile.

35

Gasp You mean to say that nurses gripe about patients and doctors and paperwork and each other? The nerve! Those mean-ass meanies! :smiley:

While writing a story years ago, I discovered that one of my sentences contained a dangling modifier. I shook my head, laughed at the boo-boo, fixed it, and went on with the show. Now I wish I’d saved it so I could add it to the list of gems and let everyone know that I can screw up just as well as anyone else can. Can’t we all?

Seriously, the OP’s got to have something to stew about, evidently, and she happened to choose me and mine. Honestly, can you imagine how much time it must have taken her to search obsessively for all those posts, pick out quotes, take the one about the Cell Phone Girl completely out of context, and parse the hell out of them so she could make the sweeping and incorrect generalization that I disdain EVERY student I’ve ever had over the past 20 years? It’s mind-boggling and somewhat stalker-ish.

I think she needs to get some professional therapy and move out of Bitter Mode already. Staying out of the gem threads should be part of the therapeutic regimen.

36

eleanorigby: I just PM’d you something pleasant.

37

Dude. Lighten up.

Every language learner is going to eventually make mistakes. Occasionally hilarious mistakes. I’ve got a laundry list of my own. It’s much better, much healthier, to laugh off those mistakes and celebrate them as an inevitable part of the process than to act like they’re something to be ashamed of. Kids say the darnedest things and all that.

38

If you can’t laugh at your students, what good are they?

39

Or the OP could shut the fuck up and give up his imaginary job of protecting of all gods special little treasures who should never ever have to be embarrassed or insulted and making sure we all conform to his obviously superior moral compass.

Go fuck yourself twit.

40

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Gfactor
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