{sigh} It’s 5:30. For the third time today, I think I’m done reading the current raft of travesties student papers that are pouring in as the semester ends. Most are still in the draft stage, so I will have the privilege of reading it all over again in the next week—much of it unchanged from the so-called draft.
You know, I really do enjoy students. They’re invariably interesting human beings. Most of them seem to be fairly bright. Some are funny, some are sweet, some are teeny-bopper obnoxious, some are scared, some are bold, some are earnest, some are full of beans. As a group, they possess a great deal of charm.
There’s that about teaching.
And I really do hate wasting my time. Few things annoy me more than feeling that I’ve devoted a great deal of time and effort to something for naught.
There’s that about teaching.
And therein lies the fundamental conflict. Few activities can delight an instructor more than dealing with students, and few things can waste more of an instructor’s time than dealing with students. It is a pursuit that at once pleases and infuriates.
A bouquet of comments (in blue, so as not to evoke blood by writing in red ink) from today’s readings:
Mr. Boxankle:
A college-level paper is organized into blocks of copy called “paragraphs.” Each paragraph treats one and only one topic. In the block above [which comprised the entire jumbled 750-word essay, except for a couple of sentences], you’re trying to deal with a bunch of different topics. Try making a topic outline. A “topic outline” is organized like this:
A. Thesis
1. A paragraph discussing a topic related to the thesis, containing the thesis statement.
a. Detail supporting or developing this point
b. Another detail supporting or developing this point
c. And so on, for as many details as are needed2. A second paragraph discussing a topic related to the thesis
a. Detail supporting or developing this point
b. Another detail supporting or developing this point
c. And so on, for as many details as are needed3. A paragraph discussing a closely related issue, and so on, to accommodate as many points as needed
B. A major issue to discuss relevant to the subject
1. A paragraph discussing a topic related to the issue
a. Detail supporting or developing this point
b. Another detail supporting or developing this point
c. And so on, for as many details as are needed2. A second paragraph discussing a topic related to the issue
a. Detail supporting or developing this point
b. Another detail supporting or developing this point
c. And so on, for as many details as are needed3. A paragraph discussing a closely related issue, and so on, to accommodate as many points as needed
C. Another major issue relevant to the subject
1. A paragraph discussing a topic related to the issue
a. Detail supporting or developing this point
b. Another detail supporting or developing this point
c. And so on, for as many details as are needed2. A second paragraph discussing a topic related to the issue
a. Detail supporting or developing this point
b. Another detail supporting or developing this point
c. And so on, for as many details as are needed3. Another paragraph discussing a closely related issue, and so on, to accommodate as many points as needed
The items marked with capital letters (A, B, C) represent major sections of your paper. In some instances the items marked with capital letters might also represent single paragraphs; items marked with Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3) would always represent paragraphs.
So, let’s see how this might look as applied to your subject:
A. Thesis: Public high schools should provide condoms to students, by way of preventing the spread of disease, forestalling unwanted pregnancies, and lowering drop-out rates. [PARAGRAPH]
1. Need for condom distribution
a. About 10% of girls aged 15 to 19 become pregnant
b. Many such children drop out of high school or perform poorly in school.2. Acknowledgement of & summary of response to controversy
a. Even though the issue is controversial, more harm is done to teenagers by ignorance of safe sex and by unwanted pregnancy than by exposure to sex education and availability of contraceptives.
B. Condoms protect their users from sexually transmitted diseases [PARAGRAPH]
1. These diseases include (name them)
2. Rates of STD among teens are (find out what these are, discuss)…
a. Syphilis
b. Gonorrhea
c. Chlamydia
d. HPV
e. HIV3. Condoms have proven effective at preventing the spread of these diseases
a. Studies show that condom use cuts disease rates by x, y, z (look it up!)
C. Condoms protect against pregnancy [PARAGRAPH]
1. Success rate is comparable to hormonal pills
a. Pills fail at XXX rate (look it up)
b. Condoms fail at YYY rate (look it up)D. Clearly young women who avoid pregnancy have a brighter future than those who give birth at an early age [PARAGRAPH]
1. XXX % of teen mothers do not complete schooling
2. High rate of pregnancy childbirth complications among teen mothers (get figures)
3. High rate of health problems for infants of teen mothers (get figures)
E. Objections to condom distribution: Moral
1. Some religions forbid use of contraceptives [PARAGRAPH]
a. Catholicism
b. Judaism (particular concern about condoms, as opposed to pills)
c. Extreme conservative Muslims2. Rebuttal: not all followers of these faiths agree with this [PARAGRAPH]
a. Percentage of Catholics who practice birth control (it’s something like 90% — look it up)
b. Exceptions in Judaism
c. Islamic thinking (http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/islamethics/contraception.shtml)3. Rebuttal: The U.S. Constitution strictly separates religion and secular government institutions, including schools; thus religious dogma should be kept out of public school policy. [PARAGRAPH]
F. Objections to condom distribution: Practical
1. Some secular conservatives believe making condoms available will promote promiscuity. [PARAGRAPH]
a, b. Quote a couple of pundits holding forth on this idea
2. Rebuttal: a large percentage of teenagers are already sexually active, whether or not condoms are easily available [PARAGRAPH]
a. Show statistics proving this
b. Try to find stats showing that the absence of condoms has little effect on teen sexual activityG. Objections to condom distribution: educational
1. Many secular and religious conservatives believe teenagers should be taught abstinence, not informed about sexuality or given tools to control the consequences of sexual activity. [PARAGRAPH]
a. Explain their point of view; provide a quote or two from these people
2. Rebuttal: abstinence-only has been proven ineffective [PARAGRAPH]
a. Provide statistics (look it up!) to show this.
H. Conclusion [PARAGRAPH]
1. Summarize pro’s and cons
2. Reiterate or emphasize your point of view
This is why outlining your ideas and facts is important! Whether you do so before you start to draft or after you’ve barfed out a draft on paper, you should always outline your material, so that you can organize it into coherent paragraphs.
Can you believe this? A graduate of 13 years of Arizona’s fine public schools does not know how to organize a three- or four-page essay into paragraphs. Or maybe, like Bartleby, he prefers not.
Poor little guy doesn’t stop there, though:
Works Cited
“Condom Conumdrum: Should condoms be available in schools.” Health Psychology Home Page. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2011. <http://healthpsych.psy.vanderbilt.edu/condomConumdrum.htm>.
Why do you think there’s no date on this? When I go to the page, I see this, right at the top:
Condom Conundrum: Should Condoms be Available in Schools?
Michelle Reising
Date: 11/16/2005
Note that this information includes the author, the date, and the title, correctly set in caps & lower case (In MLA style, we don’t type titles in all lower-case). Another glance at this page reveals that there is indeed a publisher: Vanderbilt University. Please look up MLA style at the Purdue web page. This is another issue that a writing coach at the Learning Center can help you with.
Emihovich, Catherine. “Condoms in Schools: Debatabase – Debate Topics and Debate Motions.” IDEA: International Debate Education Association – Debate Resources & Debate Tools. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2011. <http://www.idebate.org/debatabase/topic_details.php?topicID=235>. What’s this? No reference to it appears in-text.
FOR REVISION: Organize the paper into paragraphs; get enough research data to support the points you want to make.
FOR REVISION: Make sure all in-text references appear in the Works Cited and that the only things that appear in Works Cited are items to which reference has been made in the text.
FOR REVISION: Get MLA style right for both in-text citation and Works Cited.
FOR REVISION: Check facts; be sure your assertions are accurate.
Moving on… Ms. Wallbanger submits a paper advocating euthanasia. She neglects to mention that some people might object to practice.
Ms. Wallbanger:
Okay, now you need to add to this a consideration of THE OTHER point of view. And there are some good reasons to oppose euthanasia. The one that makes the most sense, if you’re not the religious type, is that some people are suicidal not because their ailment couldn’t be treated and made bearable but because they are pathologically depressed. In these cases, when the depression is treated, the patient often changes her or his mind.
For people who are religious, suicide (assisted or not) is a mortal sin. It condemns you to eternity in Hell. Thus we are morally obliged to discourage our fellow human beings from committing suicide, even if the person doesn’t subscribe to our religion (which we know to be the revealed truth).
Another issue you could address is the question of whether assisting a person to commit suicide makes the person who does the assisting a murderer. Under our present laws, it does. How exactly are the laws of 50 states and the U.S. government to be rewritten? Or should they be? There’s always the possibility that someone who stands to profit from a sick or elderly person’s death will choose to hasten things along. Same could be true of people who simply don’t like a relative.
[Peer Reviewer A] and [Peer Reviewer B] question the strength of the thesis statement (or even what it is). I see it as this: “Not practicing euthanasia at the request of the dying person is violating a person’s rights, creating an economic burden, interfering with a doctor’s job, and increasing suffering.” It’s OK for a thesis statement, I think, tho’ the wording is a little clumsy & verbose. Try something like “Denying a dying person’s request for euthanasia violates the person’s rights, creates…, interferes with…, and increases….” Whenever possible, use strong verbs and write tight.
FOR REVISION: about a third of your essay needs to respond to the thinking of people who have a different point of view. You can accomplish that by cutting some of the polemic, presenting the points in favor of euthanasia in an objective way, considering the other point of view and responding to it in a reasonable way, and then winding up with a satisfactory conclusion.
Heh heh heh heh… See, this is why we call it an “argument”…
And of course, this is why we call them “students”: They’re still learning.
🙂
It would be nice if they would learn from some of the things we’ve discussed in class.
Every now and again, a surprisingly good piece of writing surfaces from these characters. One young man has written an essay that verges on publishable. The topic is powerful, the content is well organized and well researched, the style is excellent for a writer at this level…or for any writer.
The thing that’s amazing about these community college classes is the enormous variety of skill and preparation among a student body that mostly consists of alert, bright, and motivated people. I would be very surprised if the author of the paper that shows no sign of instruction in basic organization were dyslexic, learning-disabled, or at all stupid. The author of the second effort is not unthoughtful. And the writer of the startlingly excellent paper is really no brighter than his classmates.
What is the explanation?
Some are numbed by boredom. Some have managed to slide through 12 years of Arizona’s version of K-12 education without having to develop any study skills (an IQ in the very low triple digits will allow that), and so they don’t know how to read effectively, they don’t know how to take notes, and they have no clue how to base a piece of writing on even the simplest research. Some spend so many hours working that they have neither energy nor time to do more than triage their classes. Some are immature and are simply goofing off.
About 80 percent of them have been shortchanged at the education check-out counter. Maybe 10 to 15 percent of them shortchange themselves. And another 5 to 10 percent arrive fully prepared and fully engaged.
I don’t know…maybe that just reflects human nature.
Do you write comments like that on every paper????
@ frugalscholar: Only for students who I believe are about to fail (or on final papers that are failing). These are drafts, and so the students still have a shot at producing something that will at least earn a passing grade.
Remember, as an adjunct I have no tenure and no standing of any kind. I’m lucky enough to have a highly supportive chair, but that, in my experience, is something of a fluke.
When you fail a student (which I do with some frequency), he or she is likely to complain to your chair or dean. The claim will be that you are unfair. If she or he is a member of a minority group, you will not only be charged with unfairness, you’re likely to be told your grading is discriminatory. These claims may come weeks or months after the paper was returned to the student.
When you’re grading hundreds of papers, weeks or months later you’re unlikely to remember your basis for failing a paper, unless you’ve written it out in detail. You may not even remember exactly what the assignment was. This will mean that way, way after the fact you have to pore over the student’s awful drech again, trying to figure out what you asked him or her to do, what she failed to do, how exactly you responded to it…and do this in a way that will make a case in your own defense.
For $2,400/16-week semester.
To avoid that scenario — and to head off a fair number of complaints that would have been lodged had I not detailed the paper’s faults in excruciatum, I do fairly extensive CYA commentary.
The comments on Mr. Boxankle’s effort are pure CYA.
The comments on Ms. Wallbanger’s paper are partially CYA, of course, but they also reflect a belief that she might succeed if she could somehow break free of the box of ignorance in which our educational system has placed her. You understand, she genuinely does not KNOW that “argument” means addressing both sides of an issue. It’s not that she’s just a kid (which she is); it’s that in 13 years of K-12 time-wasting, no one has taught her this. She probably does not know that one tenet of the church that enrolls the majority of Christian believers worldwide says that suicide will condemn a soul eternal damnation (large numbers of my students believe that Catholics are not Christians). It’s very likely that she has not heard that many terminally ill patients who express a desire for assisted suicide change their minds, or at least delay the decision, when their pain and depression are treated. And she has not been trained to think about the large implications of a proposed change — such as how our laws will have to be altered to accommodate approval of assisted suicide, and what that will mean.
In addition to the fundamental unfairness of giving her a low grade for her weak logical thinking skills (aided and abetted by the shameful lack of basic factual information the schools provide) without explaining in detail why, not to let her understand what she needs to know to make things better is only to cheat her further. And IMHO, she’s been cheated enough.
The buck has to stop somewhere.
In the “does not know” department, let’s also note that Ms. Wallbanger’s study skills indeed are such that she does not know she needs to read the textbook to understand how to write an argumentive paper. Even though three chapters associated with this project were assigned, unless the instructor calls on a student to read a key paragraph and then stands there and leads the class through a discussion of what the paragraph means, she will not read it. She relies on the instructor to go over the reading assignments, paragraph by paragraph, in the classroom, thereby freeing her from the need to read the stuff during the hours when she’s flipping burgers or waiting tables.
She has learned this in high school, apparently. They all come into the classroom assuming that if the instructor does not go over the book, page by page, during class hours, then they do not need to read the book. Many of them will not buy the book at all — they will either come up to you and ask if they HAVE to buy it, or they will use the grace period in which students may return a book for full price to observe whether you expect them to bring the book to class so you can hash it over with them and then, if you do not, they take it back to the bookstore.
Nor has she learned the skill of listening and taking notes in class. In any given class of 25 students, at the outside three will ever take a note on your lecture.
So, even though I’ve gone over the structure of an argument several times, and even though we’ve discussed Aristotle’s and Toulmin’s approaches to argument in class, she either has not listened or has not understood, and neither she nor any of her classmates has ever asked even one question on the subject.
These are not symptoms of stupidity. They are symptoms of hopelessly bad preparation in the K-12 system.
It’s a shame to say, but along with advancements in technology has come a dumbing-down of society. We really need to engage students with critical thinking and writing exercises like these instead of the rote ‘learning’ that our kids are subjected to beginning at the elementary level.
How wonderful for your students!
@ Holly: The dumbing down of our public educational system began in the early 1960s. That was well before we had a PC on every desk and a smartphone in every hand.
I, as a teacher of K12 and mother of this age (hs/college) kids, I can’t help but feel very scared for the future of this country. This work ethic (lack of) is rampant. IMHO it is mostly laziness. They don’t want to do the work. They don’t have the maturity for delayed gratification. And the top 1-3% who do will be the winners in life and I fear the rest will work low paid jobs and have a life of suffering and financial stress. In this economy, even the hard workers are not guaranteed to have a life of material comfort. I harp on my own kids about this but it falls on deaf ears. Very depressing. Sorry for the debbie downer stuff, but you hit a nerve with me.
@ Barb: Well, ditto. I guess we’re all Debbie Downer.
The thing is, I respect my students for their intelligence and their willingness to shoulder a lot of hard work. What worries me is that they…hmmm…how to express this?
They don’t seem to appreciate that learning is worth some hard work. We’ve made acknowledgment of learning into something that can be rubber-stamped (grades, three credits, four credits…), and so what they seek is not learning but the rubber stamp. And they’ve learned all sorts of workarounds to get that rubber stamp with the least amount of work necessary.
They don’t value learning. They value the rubber stamp.
And that makes sense: it’s the rubber stamp, not the real learning, that will help them get the job.
They do work very hard, but not at learning. They work hard at jobs to pay their tuition or to minimize the amount of debt they have to shoulder to get a degree they think will help them land a decent job. They don’t readily equate learning (in the intellectual sense, as opposed to job skills) with the quality that makes them eligible for higher pay.
P.S.
Whoa! Boxankle turned in a paper that is MUCH better organized, documented, and cited!!! He completely revised his first effort.
w00t! The man may get a decent grade in this course!