This summer, I've been teaching two sections of a first-year college composition course, and currently I'm reading through a stack of rough drafts for the last paper of the semester. My progress has been slow. No, it's not because of the heat; I wisely placed my desk next to the AC and have been quite comfortable--strategic fan placement has also helped. It wasn't until just a few minutes ago that it dawned on me what the problem could be.
I'm trying to help them while fighting the urge to make them write like me in the process.
Without realizing it, I've been struggling within to keep from marking up drafts with an overabundance of specifics. I sit down to read each paper and am seeing exactly what I think is wrong and implicitly what I would do to fix it--if it was mine. As an instructor, I should have a pretty good grasp on what makes a scholarly, professional-grade paper, but polishing up these drafts to get to that level is not my job; my job is to guide by suggestion so they do the work, so they learn from the experience.
I guess I'm learning something as well, because it's much more of a challenge than I thought to find that fine line between telling them what to do as opposed to pointing out what they've done and nudging them in the right direction. Off the top of my head, there are a couple issues I can see with this.
First, if I give them a diagrammed walk-through on their edits, the papers come back with minimal errors (assuming they followed directions), and everyone passes with flying colors. Great and good, but I question how much would be learned by just following the recipe in order to get done. I can't help but think that the writing in subsequent classes may suffer as a result. Call me a pessimist, but I doubt it would be long before administration starts to investigate why the average grade in my class is so high and then crashes right afterward.
On the other hand, if my comments are too general, then revisions will most likely be minimal due to confusion and/or frustration, and worse yet, no one has learned anything except that writing sucks because it's so hard. And possibly that the instructor is a jerk because he gives bad grades for no seemingly no reason.
I hear seasoned veterans, those teachers who've been in the trenches for a while, say that it takes time to find a routine. They say it gets faster with experience. I'm not saying I don't believe them; I'm just hoping I don't get to the point where I sway too far one way or the other for the sake of speed.
2 comments:
I think, given that you're aware of the problem and also that you're aware of the traps of "efficiency", you're probably in a better position than most to be a great instructor.
Being aware is the first step to recovery? And, I think there's a typo in the last sentence of the sixth paragraph.
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