paradox

Just tell me what you want.

We want you to have some ideas you didn't get from a book, or from us. We want to push you beyond what you already know how to do. We want you to try things that are just beyond your abilities. We want you to experiment. We want you to make mistakes. We want to see growth, creativity, interesting failure. We want your reach to exceed your grasp; we want you to strive to do, and agonize to do, and fail in doing, not to tone it all down to yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. We want the jagged, awkward edges of a first effort, the unpredictable eruptions of discovery.

But then we have to put a grade on it. God damn.

Translations, Part V: What the Grades Really Mean

A+: This is the very rare paper that makes me dance around my apartment and shout. Also, it means I can knock off grading for the rest of the evening, because why spoil the glow?

A: This is genuinely very good indeed.

A-: This is interesting and insightful, but not polished. Or it is very polished, but not at all interesting. Oh, who am I kidding? It's really more of a B+, but see below.

B+: No good can come of this grade. Try not to assign it.

B: This has some facets that I can genuinely praise, but as a whole the paper is not quite ... there ... in ways that I will find almost impossible to articulate, and will write about half a page attempting to explain. The student, however, will be satisfied, and will not read that half-page.

B-: This is a strictly average paper, masquerading as an above-average one. But at least the student is genuinely trying very hard.

C+: This student may also be trying, but has hit a glass ceiling because the writing mechanics are so appalling; OR, this is an A student who is not trying at all.

C: A below-average grade masquerading as an average one. The paper has some vague glimmerings of promise, but a lot more wrong with it, which I will spend at least a full page attempting to explain. None of my comments will be read, and the next paper will be exactly the same.

C-: This is really more of a D, but I would greatly prefer not to have this student again next semester.

D+: This is more or less the right length, sort of on topic, and not plagiarized. It has no other redeeming features whatsoever.

D: This is way too short, but NO NO PLEASE DON'T MAKE IT LONGER.

D-: This is the kind of paper that makes one want to add insult to injury.

F+: A special grade, reserved for a paper that would have earned a B, but was turned in nine days late.

F: The easiest grade to assign, since the paper either was never turned in, or was copied from Shmoop.com. In the former case, the student will not argue; in the latter, there will be a long and complicated story about how the paper was typed at the student's great-aunt's house and the great-aunt sneaked in while the student was asleep, added the plagiarized bits, and then uploaded the whole thing to Shmoop.

Sonnet for a new semester

Some time back, I asked my lit survey students to define a sonnet on the final exam. One of them wrote -- this was her entire definition -- "Fourteen lines syllabus."

So I wrote a poem. Which I would now like to share.

Fourteen Lines Syllabus

Come to class – or not – but if you come, stay seated.
You with the iPhone, time to get offline!
The revolution, folks, will not be tweeted;
There are no phones in 1789.

Well, yes, you really have to buy the book,
And read, and think ... Why, yes, I am a nerd.
Hey, business major with the pissed-off look:
The Blessed J. H. Newman wants a word.

Exams, grades, course goals, papers, all that stuff:
Please read those sections over at your leisure.
“There will be time indeed, and time enough.”
For now? I’d have you take some time for pleasure.

Oh! Welcome, all, to English 202.
That’s it! Read Blake before we meet anew.

Unfortunately, I think this might be better than my actual syllabus.

Composition atheist

You know something? I don't think I believe in composition.

I mean, obviously I believe it exists, because it's difficult to spend six hours a week teaching a subject that doesn't exist. But I am, like a clergyman in a nineteenth-century novel, Having Doubts.

I think these particular doubts began back in grad school, when I elected to teach second-semester composition in the fall semester for reasons that I now forget. The class comprised a mixture of first-semester freshmen whose SAT or placement-exam scores were high enough for them to place out of the first semester, and sophomores who had either placed into Basic Composition in their first semester or failed one of the courses later in the sequence, and were therefore a semester behind the rest of their cohort. And believe me, as soon as you read the first papers, you knew which were which.

It was at this point that I thought: Wait. If the composition sequence actually worked the way it's theoretically supposed to work, surely these two groups of students should have been indistinguishable? Or at any rate, the differences shouldn't have been so glaring.

The second comp course in the sequence at Misnomer U. is actually a junior-level course, taken by students who already have at least 45 credits under their belts, and at that level, the differences are even more glaring. Perhaps four or five of my 32 students are writing thoughtful, subtle, intellectually engaged essays. For them the course is, I think, a waste of time and energy that they might be using to learn something new, but otherwise harmless. (Unfortunately for these students, there is no way to place out of this course.) And at the other end of the scale, there are a dozen or so students who write like the weakest of first-semester freshmen; three to five semesters of coursework have plainly done nothing to bring their writing skills up to an acceptable college level, and I don't seriously believe that my class is going to make a difference for them either. It might make a difference for some of the ones in the middle, I suppose -- I might at least be able to teach them a few useful tricks for writing introductions and conclusions, or get them to remember that citations go outside the quotation marks -- but I'm not even sure of that. I don't believe I can transform them into writers of forceful and elegant prose. That has to come from within, and it has to be learned much earlier than junior year of college.

In theory, teaching composition is supposed to be the most useful work that English professors do. Hell, it's how we justify our existence to the rest of the world. I wish I were more convinced that this work had any value or meaning -- or, alternatively, that I had the courage to speak openly about my doubts, instead of mumbling my way through one more Sunday sermon about thesis statements.

Sigh. Maybe it will be better next week, when I hold individual conferences with the comp students; or maybe I'll be able to approach them with renewed faith after spring break, which seems far too long in coming.