To my freshman English teacher:

The BBQ Pit
21

My writing tutor boss had an interesting story. When he was in grad school, apparently his Lit department had an exchange with the Engineering department for a couple of weeks: the litkids would learn how things work, and the gearkids would learn how to write.

The engineers really struggled with their exchange, but the litkids did great in the engineering department: those professors were astonished at how intelligent the litkids were, how quick they were to grasp new concepts.

In retrospect, my boss said, they weren’t any smarter than the gearkids at all. But the professors evaluated what they’d learned by reading their papers, and the litkids were much, much better writers than the gearkids were. The professors concluded that they’d learned much better.

I figure it helps everyone to learn to write.

Daniel

22

Hear hear! It’s so true that I’m quoting it so people can read it again. I’m sure you thought your essay was great, robert, everybody think their essays are great. I’m sure you think you are being original, going against the grain, wowing the class with your brilliant analysis…and there’s a time for that, but Freshamn Comp (or Lit) isn’t the place or time.

23

I dunno, pepperlandgirl. A good prof should make sure that a student knows the basics (how to form a coherent, defensible, interesting thesis, and then defend it, for example), but if a student can do this, the prof ought to engage with the student wherever he’s at. If the student is at the point where he can argue obscure points interestingly, or where he can present his thesis in the form of a narrative essay, then the professor ought to encourage that and work with it. A professor who cannot do so probably ought not be teaching composition.

Daniel

24

Well, Daniel granted I’m not a prof, or a teacher, but I do tutor quite a bit and more often than not, the student is either wrong, wrong, wrong with their analysis of the work, or their analysis of how the teacher graded them, or alternately, just haven’t learned that no matter what class you are in, you write for the Professor. He/She is your audience, and as key as it is to write creative, original essays, it’s also key to learn who your audience is and write specifically for that person.

25

I guess I’m another of the lucky ones–I mostly had professors and instructors and tutors who encouraged originality and dissent. As long as you could defend it and back up your statements with solid examples proving your point, your paper would get a good grade.

But note I said “mostly.” There were one or two exceptions, and one particularly comes to mind. I well remember the day that he pulled me aside and said pretty much what Futile Gesture said, and pepperlandgirl repeated.

But then he went on, and I’ll paraphrase: “But your arguments, even if they go against what I’m teaching, are well-thought-out and defended. Don’t lose that ability, Spoons; there will be other classes you’ll take after mine where that ability is welcomed and rewarded. And there are jobs where it is needed. The real trick lies in figuring out which situations call for it, and which don’t.”

I’ve never forgotten that. In the end, he was right; it has come in handy, both in school and in business, although one does have to learn when originality and dissention are acceptable.

I originally thought of my teacher what robertliguori thought of his, but my teacher at least had enough class to recognize his attitude. So I played along and got acceptable grades, knowing it was just until the end of the year. And interestingly, by the end of the year, the teacher and I were joking in class about which of his theories I would diasgree with next.

Anyway, I thought I’d toss that little story out, for what it’s worth.

26

This is very true in my experience. A friend of mine went all the way through University on a Science degree without being required to write a single paper that wasn’t 90% equations. In his final year he had to write an essay, using words. He, really, really struggled to get to grips with what was expected from him and despite knowing everything needed to pass easily, his paper sucked. He just hadn’t been required to learn the skills of effective essay writing.

There’s nothing wrong with originality, or being interesting. Great things. But that’s not the point of undergraduate essay papers. They are soley for the purpose of demonstrating that you have studied and understood the course work. The course work, it is to be hoped, will have helped you form opinions on the subject matter, and these may even be brilliantly original opinions. But at that particular point your opinion counts for zilch. First you must demonstrate that you understand the subject as advocated by those who have studied it for far, far longer than you.

I’m afraid to ignore that and produce a paper that merely expounds your take on things is just a sign of immaturity and youthful arrogance. Who knows, you may go on to rock the academic world with your insights, but in the meantime you’ve failed the task in hand.

27

In my undergrad and grad experience with professors, there was generally a direct correlation between tolerance of dissent and intellectual security. The WORST offendors were those who got their tenure based on an original idea they had years ago and spent the rest of their academic career madly defending it against all comers.

Incidentally, the most intellectually secure people I ever met were physicists, who were also some of the smartest people I ever met. In conversation, they were not afraid to ask questions about my field (anthropology) and admit what they didn’t know.

I actually saw the “original idea years ago” mentioned in a novel (damned if I can remember which one), so I can’t really claim credit for it. However, it was in a book so it MUST be true. :smiley:

28

Reading this thread makes me remember Dr. Brengle with fondness. I took him for freshman literature and the only A I got on my papers (I got an A- for the course) was on a story by Singer. He wrote: “I totally disagree with your premise, but you argued it so well that I gave you an A.”

Too bad more lit professors aren’t like him.

29

See, I worked as a tutor too, and while I agree that a lot of students mistake incomprehensible gibberish for brilliant insight, not all of them do.

I think a freshman English course should work to improve the writing skills of the student first and foremost. If a student is competent at regurgitation, the student should be challenging herself to go beyond regurgitation, should be working on synthesizing new ideas, should be working on nontraditional essay formats.

An example from my past:

My best essay I ever wrote in college was in response to the question, “What are the three biggest challenges facing sustainable agriculture?” Rather than answer it in a traditional format, I wrote a narrative essay about a road trip I and a few friends took to go to a Department of Agriculture public comments section on the proposed Organic Standards (this was in 1998). I used various incidents over the course of the road trip to illustrate challenges that sustainable agriculture faces, and managed to line up the chronology of the trip with the urgency of the challenges. I took the paper to a writing tutor before turning it in to make sure that my answer to the question was clear; he assured me unequivocally that it was. (He also offered me constructive feedback on streamlining the essay and clarifying a couple of my points – it’s not like he was just toadying up to a fellow tutor).

The professor told me I’d written an interesting paper, but that I hadn’t addressed the central question.

In this case, the professor’s failure to read the essay carefully resulted in a poor evaluation for me, and it pissed me off. I thereafter tended to ignore what that professor said about my writing: all I’d learned from him was that he didn’t have much to teach me about writing, compared to the other resources I had available.

Again, I know that there are plenty of college students who can’t write their way out of a paper bag. There was the fellow who came to me wanting my approval for a paper whose thesis was, “This New Age Guru just wrote the Best Book EVAR!!!” There was the guy whose English made Justhink look like Hemingway. There was the woman who genuinely believed that if, instead of writing on the assigned topic, she wrote about how irrelevant college was to the Real World, she’d be fulfilling the assignment. And when these folks brought me papers, I pulled their leash short, believe me. Some folks thanked me; others didn’t.

But if somebody understood the basics and were wanting to stretch their abilities, then I would (unless their prof was a tool) encourage them. I’d challenge their ideas, point them toward resources they’d not looked at, sugest how they could restructure their argument to strengthen it, and so on.

Sure, some professors aren’t willing to let people practice analytical thinking or experiment with form. And if you get those professors, you’re best off jumping through their hoops. But that doesn’t mean they’re doing a good thing.

Daniel

30

This reminds me way too much of my sophmore year HS english teacher… Not the regurgitation issues, but the sheer hatred involved. She is the only teacher, in a long line of teachers that I hated, that I still hate with such a passion as to make me physically ill when talking about her. I mean, 6+ years later and I still dream of keying her car, putting nails behind the tires, and cutting the brake lines. As a final disgrace to me, after many fucking disgraces, she gives me a C- on a perfect (grammatically, at least) creative writing assignment, simply because SHE DIDN"T FUCKING LIKE IT. Now, what made me really sore, was she published everybody’s paper into a little book, and had us read them all and vote on our favorite. Guess whose paper the class picked, by a wide margin. Guess the title of the paper that she felt was unduly ignored, so that she ignored the class and decided to focus on: Miracles in Fucking Minivans, written by some church-camp councillor, about a poor family getting food from their church. The topic of my paper: a horny detective tracking down purple-people eaters, wearing a leather speedo and bowtie. Fuck her!

31

Intro to Shakespere. Freshman year. I aced all the exams, got A/A+ on all the papers, participated well in class, including twice the professor himself admitted that I had come up with a thesis idea that was easily defensible that he had never heard argued.

End grade in class you ask? C. After he threatened to fail me and I got a Dean to bitchslap him for being an insensitive asshole. His reasoning? I missed too many days due to emergency surgery. (And I didn’t warn him ahead of time. Almost dying at 3 am wasn’t planned into my syllabus either, bastard.)

32

I’m probably biased because I have seen way to many students with, according to them, brilliant essays that weren’t even worth Cs. I mean, in all my classes, I write what I want to write. Most of the time, it’s not reguritating the facts. I’ve never received anything less than an A, because I know how to write essays. That’s why when a student complains that the teacher sucks or doesn’t “understand” their work of art, I tend to be a bit leary of them and give the benefit of the doubt to the teacher.
You should be learning how to write in Freshman Comp…but I think the emphasis needs to be on the mechanics of writing, and that may be why “new original ideas” aren’t welcome, because it’s not the proper class.

33

[semi-hijack]

I’m a writing tutor at my university; a huge amount of the students here are engineering majors, and no offence to them, but there are many who can’t write their way out of a paper bag (although ironically another writing tutor is a Mechanical Engineering major, go fig ;)). Every major (from Engineering to Architecture) here requires three Lit classes and two Philosophy classes with at least one Lit/Social Science elective after that.

Just this Tuesday I had to help a girl figure out what a sentence is. She had a 2 page essay and literally 75% of the sentences were fragments. She honest-to-Og couldn’t understand why something like “How he came to win the race.” was a sentence fragment. I had to just cover basic subject-verb-predicate things, and even did a few sentence diagrams for her.

Thing is, I’m not an English tutor, I’m a writing tutor who’s just supposed to help with writing papers. It was hard for me to try to explain grammar on the fly; I’ve known proper grammar since grade school, so sometimes I’m tempted to say, “it just is.” I don’t really know the exact reasons for some of the grammar elements, I just have absorbed them to the point where I know them intuitively.

I am a dual major: Computer Science and Humanities. I actually detest Computer Science and I’m much more suited to English and History and Languages. I was kinda forced to go to this school though, so I figured Comp Sci would be okay (it would be if the department wasn’t completely messed up, to the point where they were hiring people to teach the important foundation programming courses who didn’t even know the programming language!). Personally, I’m gonna graduate, finish up my German and French (as in seriously work on them to become fluent; I believe I can be if I work at them) and go into grad school in Linguistics.

[/semi-hijack]

34

Must…contain…remark…

35

Yes, because the essays I turn into my professors are analogous to a remark I make on a message board that takes me less than five minutes to compose. Well, maybe it is for you, and that’s why you did not get the grade you “deserved”.

36

The rules of grammar and spelling did not arise naturally. They were imposed by a body of scholars over the course of the last 300 years or so. The idea was to standardize the language so that clear communication was possible, and maybe even easy.

Read that again. Grammar and spelling are artificial constructs that share a purpose: to make clear communication easy. pepperlandgirl’s spelling was obviously good enough for you to understand what she was trying to say; otherwise, you couldn’t have spotted the oversight. So on what grounds are you justified in pointing and laughing at her typo?

What I’m trying to say is, you’re being an ass.

37

I always took it for granted that you figured out the teacher’s philosophy on their subject matter and then handed it right back to them, covered in your own bullshit so they wouldn’t smell theirs too easily.

My dad actually lambasted me for this in my first year at “real college,” after two semesters at a junior college. I was taking a Feminist Film Theory class for English credit, and my first paper was on the misogynist nature of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I thought it was total BS, but I cranked it out anyway and she loved it. A+. My dad said I was “selling out,” but the way I figure it, you sell out the moment you enroll in college, so why fight it? Neither the class, nor the paper, really changed my opinions, but it sure as hell proved that I don’t have to believe my own thesis as long as the prof does.

A college degree, to my mind, is nothing more than tangible proof that you can finish what you started. College is not where original thought is born; anyone who thinks college is the breeding ground of originality and profound thought hasn’t taken very many classes yet. :smiley:

Give 'em what they want and then make your point in an arena where it’ll count…the real world.

38

Oh, come on. You all don’t see the irony in a basic grammar error in a post bragging about one’s writing skills?

39

Not really, especially when there’s only one grammar mistake after making several posts. It’s a message board, I doubt most people spend their free time checking and rechecking their posts for absolutely perfect grammar and parsing all the time (especially in the Pit). And if they do and one slips by, so what?

I know that one of my parenthetical asides in my last post in this thread had absolutely horrible structure. The meaning could still (hopefully! ;)) be gleaned, but it could have been phrased more elegantly. I left it. The general idea could be seen and understood; I’m not about to put dissertation-level concentration into a message board post.

40

Pepperland, I agree that a lot of students have a vastly overinflated sense of their own writing abilities; I, too, have horror stories about students that didn’t know what a verb was when they came to me, or students that thought sentences like, “Upon the depraved river carried to me the essence of bird singing in my ears,” were legitimate inclusions in expository essays. (FTR, the above sentence was supposed to mean something like, “I could hear birds singing above the noise of the polluted river.” I had a helluva headache by the time I was done with that student.)

Thing is, I also had wonderful students, student who could write subtle, powerful essays on the themes of isolation and self-doubt that permeated mid-20th-century cinema as exemplified in the following three films, students who could write beautiful narratives about the history of white skin as an aesthetic goal for Japanese women, students who could write gorgeous pieces about Dostoyevsky’s Jesus and its influences on later Russian authors. God, how I loved working with these students. And God, how glad I was that their professors would let them work wiht challenging ideas.

The funny thing was, a couple of my best students were ESL students, and their English was pretty bad. The Korean guy who wrote about themes in experimental cinema didn’t understand how articles worked in English, and I had to explain to him why we say, “Milk can go sour,” but, “The milk has gone sour.” Oy vey! Not an easy thing to explain.

But he was extremely intelligent, and he was willing to work on both the basic grammar issues at the same time as he worked on the high-level conceptual issues. I figure, what the hey, it’s his money and his education, and if he’s smart enough to deal with them both at the same time, more power to him.

If he’d been a vague thinker who wrote about depraved rivers, mind you, I would’ve forbidden him from dealing with complex themes until he learned to write. I would have appraoched his papers as remedial writing exercises, no more and no less.

But if somebody has the basic mechanics of grammar and composition down (and in an ideal world, that’s the stuff you learn in junior high, not in college), then I think it’s a waste of time to make freshman comp classes consist of rehashing these basic principles. People are paying good money for this education: let them enjoy an education.

Daniel