Behind the Chair

I had a personal experience this weekend that expanded my learning personally as an English Graduate student.  First, there was Derry's 7am haircut appointment.  He is inconsistent but I keep his spot because I enjoy a change of pace compared to normal barbershop conversation.  Saturday's discussion started around an article on Cal Berkeley and the low percentage of African-American students.  Derry is black and a Cal graduate and thus offered personal insight.  However, his discussion of how he excelled in his writing courses is exemplary of many of the theoretical discussions that I have encountered in the last two semesters.  In short, Derry says that he often scored poorly on the first assignments of many professors.  But, once he learned to engage the professor either verbally or by a pay close attention to comments on graded papers, he drastically improved his grades.  He concluded that he never really cared to learn how to write.  He just learned to comprehend what the professor wanted and thus reproduce that.  It begs the question then how many variables really exist in the grading of academic work and what truly is the measure of what one learns about writing in academic discourse or any other discourse for that matter.  I must admit, I still find myself want to know first and foremost, “what does the teacher want?”  The sooner I know that, the easier it is for me to produce the written document…