There is a UThink blog about writing at the U and I have thought about posting there, but my ideas about writing need some sorting out.
I think I'm flexible enough (barely) to see that there might be something else going on than the perpetual curmudgeonly complaint that "students these days can't write Standard English." I don't want to be on that pathetic bandwagon.
Yet grading student papers and dealing with unbelievably sucky writing just makes me despair. If these students don't learn to manage standard English now, will we have a whole future world in which the written word looks like something tapped out by wasted 4th graders? Or is it just that writing papers doesn't matter: undergrads type out whatever and turn it in for classes, but when they actually need to produce flawless writing they can?
So what else IS going on?
1. Students today may be more attuned to the spoken word (radio, TV, ear buds, cell phones) and not used to seeing as much standard written English.
2. They may read less. I think the page count standard has dropped off for college courses (at least at this University) and they are quite instrumental about figuring out what texts actually HAVE to be read for the course. I'd be quite surprised to learn that very many of my students have done the reading; they don't even take notes in lecture.
3. Writing takes different forms - what with text messaging, emails etc.
Maybe the form doesn't matter - are students really thinking and having creative ideas? I was pleased to walk by a poetry reading outside of Coffman the other week and hear some passion, expressed in a fresh style. If I don't see it in my own classes, perhaps it's because I don't demand it.
Still, I'm leery of the blame-the-teacher thing. More about that in a future entry; some very interesting points about assessment were raised in our pedagogy class last week.
This is all disjointed, yeah. I need a bigger space than this little editing box to think it through...
Posted by otto0114 at November 17, 2005 12:03 AMYou commented on my Teaching Assignments: Like Christmas post, so I thought I'd return the favor. I'm interested in your suggestions about undergraduate writers. I had a chance to think about these questions in a graduate course you might want to consider. You seem to be genuinely concerned about teaching in general and writing pedagogy specifically. Maybe you'd appreciate Pamela Flash's (Center for Writing) EngL 5630 "Theories of Writing and Writing Instruction." It gives an opportunity to see what writing and composition research have to say about the questions all of us who teach (with) writing encounter. It's the only place I've found that provides a forum for thoughts like the ones you posted here.