At one point, she simply screamed, “Aaaargh!!!”
"Uh-huh," I said.
A young writer and friend emailed me today about his ongoing undergraduate adventures at the UC. He passed along this email sent to students from the instructor of his Literary Journalism class:
Dear Class:The instructor advises students to run a correction program before turning in their final drafts. He closes with this remark:
Bad news.
I've read through a bunch of the papers and one of the strongest impressions is that the general grasp on grammar is poor. This is a shame, as for the most part, your arguments are at least adequate. However, bad grammar makes it difficult to follow an argument. I keep trying to revise your sentences. Since we're in a literary journalism class and not a comp class, I don't feel it's my job to correct basic grammatical mistakes.
You are, after all, considering spending your lives in a field where all that matters is writing well.Hmmm. That’s pretty understated. I bet what he was really thinking was “Aaaargh!!!”
I’ve been grading student writing all afternoon. Some of it isn’t bad. Most of it is dreadful.
For this assignment, students were supposed to explain a point made by David Hume concerning reports of miracles. Such reports, he said, can be explained as (1) true reports of actual miracles (headless horsemen, healing waters) or as (2) false reports instigated by deception, such as hallucinations or illusions or trickery. Hume noted that the latter is much more likely than the former.
Here are some student “explanations” of Hume’s point:
● The first explaination is that we accepted that mirracle happened and some of the law of nature have gone crazy. The second explain is that the person who report the extrardinary event try to decieve us or himself wa decieve. [I especially like the "wa decieve."]AAAArrrrrrggggghhhhhh!!!
● [Hume’s suggestion] is the mental measurement that one assesses in their mind when they are told of an extraordinary even that has defied the laws of nature. ["Mental measurement that one assesses in their mind." Wow.]
● Hume sought to explain the truth or to give the most logical explanation to certain conditions. [This was the entirety of the kid's explanation. Wow.]
● fund what Hume was saying on Miracles was somewhat confusing. Because is it a law, or did God step in and save us from an Air plane crash or what. But i guess what he was trying to say that it is not valid. How do we really no that if it was a miracle or was it a blessing from God. [Yeah, how do we really no?]
27 comments:
Rebl Girl shouldn't be reading student papers - she's on sabbatical, isn't she?
Isn't "arrggh" what pirates say?
Your students are blessings from God.
1st, right, it wasn't her students' papers. It was submissions for some kind of conference or something. Or maybe it was Red Emma.
Yeah, pirates say Aaargh. Increasingly, however, non-pirates say it. Google it. See what you get. It's increasingly become a synonym for "D'oh!"
Aaaaaargh!
I'm grading community college papers right now -- online classes -- and I am amazed at how many of the students can't write a blessed thing.
They fall down when it comes to writing sentences that can be parsed, to making any kind of an argument, and to structuring what they're saying in units larger than a sentence. (Paragraphs are beyond them. A multi-paragraph essay is way beyond them.)
The educational system has failed them, K through 12. My situation doesn't allow me to do much, either. They get points off, but there's little that I can do to help. I am a paper grader, paid for piecework, not an instructor.
I don't know how these people are ever going to learn to write.
I'm sure these same students received smiley faces and stars on their high school papers. It would help if their high school teachers knew how to write.
Thank you profoundly, 5:57, for making that acute observation. DAMN! I found this post comforting in that I found company. Upon grading essays for a freshman course at my (supposedly) somewhat elite private school, I was just about ready to throw myself (or maybe some of them) on some kind of sword.
They are sweet kids, interested, excited about being in college, with the best of intentions (well, at least some are)----and they are so, so unprepared to write, and therefore to succeed in any discipline that requires good writing or thinking. And in spite of the heroic and intelligent writing directors we have, I often think that it is simply too late to right the wrong that the K-12 system has done to these kids. Some are already pretty good and will get better. Most are execrable writers and don't have a clue that that is the case. Will they improve? I seriously have my doubts.
Thanks for the timely post, Roy. I'm trying to steel myself for another round of grading tomorrow. AAAAAAAARGGGGHHHHH!
Perhaps the trials of grading actually drive law-abiding citizens like us to piracy as a second career, and hence the coincidence of that apt expression.
MAH
p.s. I'll never forget one student who labored through several Phil. courses with me--always trying his hardest, never able to master writing coherent essays or even sentences, just struggling along with heroic, but fruitless labors.
A couple of years after I thought he should have graduated, he got in touch with me regarding an Incomplete that he proceeded to remedy--with his typically crippled writing.
He emailed me after that, thanking me profusely and saying: "I am so grateful that you got bare with me."
I didn't have the heart to point out his error. Last I heard, he was working as a bartender at the "Cheers" bar in Boston. I was glad.
MAH
MAH,
I loved that story - sweet and sad and funny at the same time.
ES
Dear 5:57 --
You pinned the tail on the donkey. So many teachers do not themselves know how to write.
I am a professional writer with two children in college. Both write well, and for years we endured hapless attempts by teachers to correct their writing. I'm still saddened by the memory of the papers that came home marked up with needless or outright incorrect corrections.
It still happens, even in college, but considerably less.
Maybe it was a Freudian slip ?
ES
My last comment was directed at MAH; sorry for not making that clear before.
ES
8:32,
Can you give us some hilarious (or sad) examples?
In my personal experience as a student amongst these writers (my friends, I would say, can't adequately express themselves) the common argument is that writing is for writing classes. You don't write to your friends, you just chat with 'em. If you try to correct them, "ur gay."
It's not hip to be critical of your friends. So we get a bunch of polite brains like myself who tip-toe around idiocy.
Then they embrace the "language is evolving" argument to wrap themselves up in their comfy ignorance.
We're doomed. BS
Oh, man. I fear that BS is right.
Politeness can be such a harmful thing. I'll bet it's beyond "gay" and geekhood for friends in that generation to suggest that a friend is morally wanting, too. And *that* is even scarier than tiptoeing around *expressive* idiocy.
BS, you must carry the torch onward, somehow....
MAH
Should we lay some of the blame on the text messaging and general intrusion of communicative technology, or are the students just as bad as they have always been?
Here we go again.
All this argle-bargling and harumphing about how poorly our students write (and, by the way, I certainly agree) presupposes that at some previous time, students did write well.
So please let me know: Exactly when was this Golden Age when kids came out of high school knowing how to write good, clear Academic English?
--100 miles down the road
Well, 100, my original intent was to explore the frustration felt by instructors while grading student writing, not to emphasize the slide in writing ability in recent decades. But since we're on the "hell in a handbasket" subject again, I do find that it is harder than ever to get students to recognize the gravity of their situation. Now more than ever I often feel that students just don't believe me when I say they write badly and suggest what they might do to improve. (I tend to emphasize clarity and directness.) They seem more complacent, less concerned, than they used to be, as though they have the momentum of their entire generation on their side. That's just an impression of course. No doubt this sort of thing has been measured by someone somewhere. Anybody got the data?
11:25 AM - You're right in supposing that, at least in the case of this argle-bargler [sic], I consulted no hard data comparing past and present proficiency in English.
A possibility is that, in the past, many students with compositional skills just as marginal as those of the students of today were "tracked" differently -- into vocational tracks in high school, and into blue- and pink-collar jobs they took instead of going to college.
I recall reading Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations, a classic book on student problems with composition. The number of students with severe writing problems in her institution, the City University of New York, skyrocketed when CUNY implemented "open admissions" -- the policy of taking any warm body that walked in the door.
So my hypothesis, supported by that one slim data point, is that the number of students with serious writing problems may not have increased markedly over time, but that many more of them are going to college.
How one would control for such variables as the quality of teachers, the importance of literacy in everyday life, school budgets, and advances in composition methodology, to name but a few, is beyond the scope of this post.
Roy:
I have a nagging fear that, at some point, poor written and spoken English will become so prevalent in our society that there will be a general consensus, at all levels, that writing and speaking English well do not matter and can be dispensed with.
It's got electrolytes!
Thanks for listening.
I don't think it's true that even when college admissions were restricted to the sons (but not the daughters) of the elite, students at the most prestigious instutions of higher education were able to write well.
This is merely anecdotal, but in 1870, the dean of the Harvard medical school wrote that "written examinations could not be given because most of the students could not write well enough."
In 1873, the President of Harvard University declared that "bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing, ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation . . . are far from rare among young men of eighteen otherwise well-prepared to pursue their college education."
"Argle-bargle," by the way, comes straight from Kurt Vonnegut. I read it, I remembered it, and I like to use it.
That's one of the reasons why I'm a pretty good writer--I read. I'd bet the mortage that those of you out there who are also good writers acquired your skills from reading (together with lots of practice writing), and not from what you learned 'way back when in English 101.
Students today--and yesterday and a decade ago and a century ago--are poor writers because they don't read. It's as simple as that.
Finally, I want to comment on the "decline" of English. The linguist Charlton Laird in "The Miracle of language, created a character named Og, the first human to speak:
"Given 'Mbu bork' and 'Ho gluck' he made up a new sentence 'Mbu gluck,' and some female of the species understood him. They moved shortly after that into a cave that Og had had his eye on and began raising children, who, as they grew to adulthood, were making new sentences like billy-o and wondering how they could use this power to do in their neighbors. And no doubt the senior Ogs were deploring the slovenly pronunciation and bad grammar of the children and reflecting on how all would be up with caveman culture if the degeneration continued."
--100 miles
Jon: I read a lot of fiction when I was younger, but I only read technical stuff now. I tend to think that good writing is just a habit I have fallen in to. If I seem to use the appropriate grammar, it isn't really by any conscious desire to do so, though the benefits are innumerable.
The expressing of an idea clearly, however, is no accident and never does it feel like it is easy. I don't think I have ever written an essay in "one go" or written a proof that left my mind the instant I finished it, leaving me with so much confidence that I exclaim, "ah hah, I have done it!" the second I put down my pencil. That seems to take effort, and you really have to set yourself up as your own strict judge and ask yourself "does this convince me?"
Maybe students should be taught to judge writing before they are taught to write.
Oy, I have a lot more to write (as per usual), but I have to go - Called work off to finish some homework.
Feels the arguments of bad vs good writers in the public involves too much writing
BS
12:10:
What are electrolytes? :)
(I suppose this reference might get lost in the crowd, so, I'll just say "Idiocracy.")
Welcome to Costco - I love you.
I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm the president of Model UN now at IVC, and I just finished looking at all the papers the members have submitted on their country's foreign policy positions. Even kids who join prestigious clubs like Model United Nations eff up... royally! I can't tell you how many times we've gone over the papers since class started, yet they still turn in last minute CRAP and give weasely (is that a word?) excuses about how busy they are -- apparently making it impossible for them to write coherently. These are my peers, and even as a student I am witnessing this problem.
Morons! I'm surrounded by morons!
"Morons! I'm surrounded by morons!" wandering daughter, you sound like the jaded, fed-up, angry old codgers that so many of us have become.... Sorry that you have had to be so disillusioned so early.
But YOU give me hope (not what you report, but how you report it and how you feel about it).
MAH
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