Week 10: How class material this week relates to my present/future workplace

Well, I guess I have to fess up and admit that I haven't done the syllabus project. So, in lieu of that prompt, I guess I'll briefly discuss how this week's readings--about how we should address common errors in composition--relates to my future workplace. I'm still leaning towards staying in academia, though I must admit that the instability of the job market, and the field in general, still make me feel like I need to have my bags packed, ready to go at a moment's notice after I get my MA.

I really, really like Shaughnessy's "Introduction to Errors and Expectations.- A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing." I have strong convictions to help students, whose primary intelligence is not written language, learn how to compose effectively. Furthermore, I really want to be able to teach my students how to bring their unique ways of knowing and making meaning into composition. I think Shaughnessy's argument is a great start towards that. Rather than immediately placing a negative value judgment on an error--bear with me here--we should get curious about it.

Here's how the process has worked in my own grading:

1. See an error.
2. Mark an error.
3. (Optional) Sink head into hands whilst trying to compose formative commentary.
4. Write summative commentary to explain the error and formative commentary to help guide revision.
5. Notice that formative commentary, depending on the students' personality and level of composition trauma, reads like either "fix it." or "FIX IT, OR FOREVER BE BANISHED FROM MY SIGHT AND FORFEIT THE CHANCE TO INTEGRATE INTO SOCIETY AS A SUCCESSFUL INDIVIDUAL!!!"

This idea of a universal error has changed the way that I approach grammatical and stylistic errors in my grading. Before, I felt like my students deserved 110% of the knowledge that I could impart to them that would improve their writing. Don't get me wrong, I still do, but as much as I want to help, that's too much. Students don't read kindness and gentleness in my suggestions; they only see a hellfire-and-brimstone Writing Warlock gone mad, flinging hordes of fiery thunderbolts of red ink and mockery that blot out the blue skies and sunshine of an otherwise lovely afternoon. Let's face it, that's a terrifying experience, even for qualified experts ("revise and resubmit"is all that need be said). Students don't like being wrong. They hate feeling incompetent or unworthy (we all do). For some, it's humiliating and directly challenges and contradicts their self-identity as a capable individual. It can cripple their ability to learn, their ability to grow. If they knew how to see or how to fix these errors, they wouldn't make them in the first place. 

As momentarily cathartic as being a mad Writing Warlock can be, I have started to take a different approach, and I like it much more. Even though I can't engage with my students, I'm sure they do too. I mark a few instances of recurring errors, maybe two or three at the most, and that allows me to focus my commentary on teaching argumentation and the learning objectives of that assignment. I then address those problems briefly in a final comment that explains them in more details and provides resources to learn how to avoid those errors altogether. Unfortunately, our grading system leaves no way for me to get feedback from the student, so I'm unable to engage in a dialogue with the student to satisfy my curiosity about why that error in particular seems to be his or her Achilles's heel. 

I miss that personal contact, so very much. It feels like all I can do is mail each student a pack of generic-brand Band-aids and hope that the problem is something a Band-aid can fix. I know this is just because I'm in Tech Comm, but I also worry that, figuratively speaking, my students can understand the directions on how to apply that Band-aid. I don't mean that as an insult to their intelligence. I mean that in the sense that, try as I might, the language I speak is very different from theirs. If I got a strange, alien device that would supposedly fix me right up, I wouldn't know how to read the directions either, and that would make me unreasonably fired up (again, probably in part because I'm in Tech Comm).