Grading

We're getting into the time in the semester where my mentor is involving us in grading. Grading has to be my least favorite part of teaching. I like reading students' papers. I'm always excited to see what they have done with the topics they have been working on. I think what I don't like about grading is the fact that I don't feel like I can spend as much time as I would like on each paper. I just don't have the time,, especially if I want to get them back in a decent amount of time. That means that I have to focus on what I believe are the most important or most helpful things. This gets frustrating because I want to talk about everything and I know that I can't. The other problem is trying to write my feedback in a way that the student will understand. With freshmen it's difficult to know whether or not they will know what I'm talking about. Hopefully, over time it will get a little better.

Mo' Money, Mo' Problems

Between our textbook review and having to order our books this week I have been doing a lot of thinking about composition textbooks. One of the biggest challenges for me is the price of textbooks. I have such a a hard time justifying the use of a textbook that would cost the students more than $40-50. I know that the content should probably be more important than the price, but having been one of those students that had to purchase those books and still getting notices about my own student loans I can't help but take the price of a textbook into consideration. I was one of those students who tried to pay for all of my books out of pocket if possible and sometimes that was a struggle. When I was still majoring in the sciences, I paid almost $800 for all of my books and equipment for one semester. That probably wouldn't have happened, except that semester all of my instructors chose new editions of textbooks that I couldn't find used copies of. My struggle now is that I love Dr. Ranieri's multimodal textbook, but I believe it costs around $90. I think the students would get a lot out of it, but at the same time how much are they going to be able to focus on school work when they are worried about having enough money to pay for it?

Just Let me Help You!

Tale 67 really struck a cord with me. My last university had a pretty low retention rate for undergads. We had a lot of commuter, nontraditional, and part-time students. The majority of the students were working at least one job, though I would estimate that a large majority were working at least two, and many of them had a family they were taking care of as well. I worked with students that were consistently late to class because they had to drive across town from work, students that had to miss classes because their child was sick, students whose jobs scheduled mandatory training the same time as our class, and even a couple of students who had lost their homes in the middle of the semester. There are so many obstacles that students have to deal with that its no wonder some of them decide that its not worth the effort and drop out. It's disheartening sometimes when we're not able to help students, especially when they've put in all the work, but I've come to understand that most of the time we can really only help them with what's going on in our course. 

A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Feedback Go Down

          A recent comment by my mentor last week has got me thinking about instructor feedback. She was handing back the first paper and she told the students that they shouldn't be frightened by the amount of writing that they saw on their papers. She didn't want them to think that she was trying to tear their papers apart, she just wanted them to know what they could work on for revision. At the end though, she mentioned that sometimes she forgets to put positive feedback on the papers and that they shouldn't take that as a personal slight. I was a little surprised because I have always tried to give students at least some kind of positive reinforcement on all of their assignments. Not that I don't give them critiques as well, but I feel like sometimes instructors are so focused on finding what's wrong with the paper that they don't notice what the students may have done right. Most of the students in our classes are not English majors and many of them are not confident writers. Being too/solely negative in your comments can have a damaging effect.

          The worst case of damaging feedback I've seen was in the second year of my MA. A previous student came to me to talk about an assignment he was doing for his current English class. He was extremely upset because on the second page of his paper the instructor had written that she didn't read the rest of the paper because the first part was too bad. I was shocked. Had this student been one of my strongest writers? No. Did he struggle sometimes with grammar? Yes. Was his writing bad enough that it hindered the meaning of his papers? Not at all. I was so mad at this instructor (and I still am! Your still on my list lady!). I knew that this student had always come up with great topics to write about and good ideas about those topics. He simply struggled with more of the grammatical aspects of writing, which was common at that school because we had a lot of students that came from very large, underfunded high schools. And yes, sometimes I had to get on this particular student about proofreading his papers, but now he was telling me that he didn't even see a point to turning anything else in. He was afraid to go talk to the instructor because he thought she would just tear him down further. He was even considering just failing the class (it was too late to drop) because he said the comments on his first paper were similar. This student did need guidance in his writing and he did need to have a lot of critiques on his papers. However, the negativity of the instructors comments and her failure to acknowledge that he had any strengths in his writing made him just give up. To me the point of FYC classes isn't to weed out the bad writers, it's to help develop those writers so that they can be successful in the future and sometimes that development needs to include building their confidence.  

Conferences

So this week is conference week in my mentor's class. I have a love/hate relationship with conferences. I love them because I feel like the students get a lot more feedback and are able to revise their papers better. I would love to do conferences for all my papers because I feel like the students learn more through them. I hate conferences because they take so much time! If you don't read the paper's ahead of time then you have to have really long conferences. If you do read them ahead of time then you have to spend the time before hand getting through everyone's paper and commenting on them before you even start conferencing. Especially as a grad student, I don't know that it's feasible. I definitely make sure to have at least one conference with them, so that I can go over patterns of issues that each student is struggling with. I think if you are going to do conferences you should have one at midterm and one before the final paper/portfolio is turned in. This gives students time to try to adjust their writing from high school expectations to college expectations, as well as giving them a little extra help before the last major assignment is turned in.

The (Red) Pen is Mightier Than the Sword

Even though Tale 47 was probably one of the smallest tales that we've read, it is one of the tales that I relate to the most. I had such a hard time not starting with grammar when I started grading papers, especially since I wanted (and still due) to get through the grading as fast as I could. Eventually I had to just put the pen away when I first read the papers. It's such an ingrained habit that I even correct the novels I read for leisure (not with pen, just in my head). I get so annoyed with myself when I start thinking about how a sentence could have been written better because it ruins the effect of the story when I start thinking about it too much. I think it's the same with students' writing. If I stop to correct every superficial mistake I won't be able to get the effect of the whole paper. Also, I think students also have an innate negative response to red ink. Instead I bought a pack of multicolored pens. Purple is less threatening than red, right?

P.S. My mom gave me this book when I started teaching. It's adorable.