Monday, April 4, 2011
Who’s Paper is it Anyway?
In Nancy Sommer’s “Responding to Student Writing,” the notion of teachers appropriating a student’s text comes up. This idea that when a teacher comments on a student’s paper, he/she is polluting the text with his/her own ideas and desires as to what the text should look like, resonates with me. I hate it when I get a paper back and read some of the side comments that steer me to directions that I do not want to go to. It seems that instead of writing MY paper, I am now attempting to please the teacher and play that dreaded guessing game. It is true, I have asked teachers this question that drives them insane. I ask them the ‘tell me what you want me to do” question, and they always respond with the typical “it’s your paper, I’m simply giving you ideas” (150). But, teachers fail to take into account what Sommers says in her article, that students “make the changes the teacher wants rather than those the student perceives are necessary” (149). This, I believe, is a topic that should be addressed more frequently when responding to students papers and when discussing how one should comment on student papers.
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I know I've met my share of this problem in my own writing and experience with teachers. I even have a few experiences where I was able to get a better grade in a class, not because I knew the subject material better than my classmates (I couldn't remember the material if my life depended on it, really), but because I was able to "read the teacher" better. Sadly, in one instance, it was literally recognizing that the teacher had assigned some of his own published essays as reading for the class and regurgitating quotations from those essays.
ReplyDeleteAs for comments on papers, through reading Lindemann, Recchio, and Sommers on the issue, I've realized that the biggest problem is exactly what Sommers points out on page 151 of her article, and what Lindemann talks about in chapter 14: the comments teachers often write on papers are a) contradictory or b) as vague as they claim the essays they're commenting on are.
From what I've noticed of late, I think the issue falls on the shoulders of both students and teachers. For students, way more often than should be the case, they are trying to do "what the teacher wants" without realizing that this is the mentality that actually stifles learning. The counter to that, of course, is that the teacher is still the one that grades papers, so experimentation isn't exactly encouraged. This leads to the teachers' role. I think teachers can do a few things to help students break away from the "please the teacher" mentality but simultaneously improve their writing.
1) Provide opportunities for experimentation where a grade is not expected.
2) Provide constructive feedback that focuses primarily on content issues, ignoring grammar and mechanics until at least the 2nd or (preferably) 3rd draft.
3) Make expectations of students clear from the beginning. This could come in the form of a grade contract (where a certain grade is guaranteed as long as certain conditions are met) or other methods.