Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Teacher who doesn't read student essays

Or, I should say, doesn't appear to be reading them anyhow.

I love my son. He's got a monstrous vocabulary and generally enjoys writing. But good grief he can really produce some Word Salad at times. And silly me, I'm expecting the schools to actually help!

For the last few years, it was painfully clear that the teachers were satisfied with giving gold stars as long as the margins, line-spacing and headers were all correct. I bit my tongue, expecting that things would change in high school and that DS would actually get constructive feedback on his efforts so that he could actually learn to write more betterish.

We're now 3/4 through Freshman year and in my son's advanced English & Comp class, I'm seriously questioning whether or not his teacher actually reads the papers he turns in. I think the first couple essays came back with some much-needed criticism with an opportunity to rewrite and resubmit. But to the best of my recollection, he's not had a single paper kicked back for a re-write in months.

Are my expectations out of whack? It's been a few decades since I was a freshman, but I remember our teacher regularly ripping our efforts to shreds (sometimes literally) and putting us through the paces to edit and improve our work. Dare to use passive voice? DIE! Contractions? DIE! Faulty parallel structure? Failure to provide examples? Weak transitions? DIE! DIE! DIE!

But this teacher just gives an A with nary a comment... and I know that I've let some pretty shoddy work leave this house HOPING that the teacher would ding my son and demand a partial rewrite.

My son thinks that we are punishing him by making him slog through the editing process with us before he turns it in because he knows he can get an A without the additional effort.

The principal & counselor both say the teacher has no guidelines regarding editing & rewrites and that I should cut him some slack because he has such a large class. Arggh.

Expectations have generally slid pretty far south IME.

DD has had a couple of real barracudas, but the rest of her teachers have been total marshmallow peeps in terms of grading the quality of her writing.

I've encouraged the teachers that have higher standards, and on the other side of things, encouraged my DD to view those classes as a way to IMPROVE her writing skills.

Frankly, with some of the English teachers she's had, I did finally step in since the teacher clearly wasn't going to do so. Then again, our model (virtual school) makes that a bit easier thing to do in a practical sense. At any rate, I started demanding a minimal standard of quality-- and a minimal adherence to the writing process (that is, at least PLANNING before drafting, if not fully 'organizing'). If it didn't meet MY standards, it warranted a re-do. We used the model vividly described by Norman MacLean in A River Runs Through It, more or less.



My standards, as it happens, are far far higher than any teacher she's had in high school-- including the two AP teachers.

Now, I'm aware that my standards are pretty high. Still, I'm not the kind of grammar and usage stickler that, say, my father was... not to mention the teachers that I recall having.


Yes, this has been the crux of the problem. We've dealt with this by honestly appraising the amount of LEARNING happening in those classes taught by the Peeps, as opposed to what she learns when she has a tougher teacher grading and offering feedback. No doubt, she doesn't always appreciate my input (or the teacher's), but there's also no question that she appreciates the improvement in her rhetorical skills. So.

We have and have had the same issue here. It's been a problem with middle school, high school, and college English courses.

Since I want them to actually learn to write, I also force my kids to edit their papers properly (which can include rewriting major portions when things are off topic or don't make sense) before handing them in. (Well, actually, I finally stopped making the dual enrolled college kid do this when he got to Comp II.)

The book The War Against Grammar may be of interest.

I have that book in my wish list... I suppose I should send a copy to the teacher.

I can't get DS to commit a whole CTY summer session to one of their writing courses, and I just can't bring myself to further impact his day with an on-line writing course (especially with that 30+ page discussion going on here right now!).

Irony of ironies is that his current paper discusses the pitfalls of late-night, last-minute cramming. Yet this is exactly what he's being taught. Wait 'til the very last second, crank out a thousand words in an hour or so... and get an A.

Arghh.

This is a problem in my H.S. as well. Teachers have up to 40 students in a class, teach 5 classes and are expected to grade their own essays. Thus papers are not graded for weeks sometimes months, there is very few comments evens with a bad grade. And most of the writing for fear of cheating is done in class. It's easier to make sure that the writing is the students own words if you watch them write it. Essays are rarely sent home for rewrite. I have no idea how anyone learns to write this way.

It came back to bite my DS last semester because half his grade was writing. It was based on two essays, the second one wasn't graded till almost the end of the semester. And the teacher dropped my son out of honors because of it. This semester, the class he was moved into because they would teach writing skills. This week will be the first writing assignment, half way through the semester.

Not to defend this practice at all (I'm horrified). But there was an interesting study some months back where they compared (1) a group of students who were told to favor quantity over quality, churn out tons of writing, and then select their best for grading; (2) a group of students who were given feedback to hone a smaller amount of writing. At the end, (1) was determined to produce greater gains in writing than (2).

Again, not defending this-- I am eternally grateful to those teachers who helped me learn to write-- but just noting that teaching writing is a tricky business.

My belief is the student/teacher is a two way relationship. The student does the work on time and the teacher grades and returns the work in a timely manner. Work must be returned soon enough and with adequate feedback so the student can learn from previous mistakes. This is in my perfect world of course so I have been let down a few times by teachers not fulfilling their end of the contract.

HK, we read A River Runs Through It in high school English -- so you know what the standards were in that teacher's class!

My mother used to tell of a class she had where the teacher didn't read essays. Nobody believed her when she told them so, and she actually proved it -- she handed in an essay with the first and last paragraphs on topic and all the insides a scathing commentary on the school, the class, and the teacher in particular. She got an A. Nobody ever bothered writing real essays after that.

I would definitely be tempted to try that, if I got the idea that a teacher wasn't reading the work. I have sent some commentary back on papers, and demanded better work, from time to time.

OMG, yes. I am positively at wit's end with his AlgII teacher who is multiple weeks behind on homework grading, only to plop reams of corrected papers on the students just a couple days before a test or quiz. How in Hades is he supposed to review his errors & figure out what he needs to study?

On one of the last quizzes the teacher waited so long to grade that he finally decided to give all the kids an A for the quiz and not grade them. My DS earned only a C on the next (related) test. Sadly, the bulk of the errors were from that 1st half covered by the "freebie" quiz. And with his silly weighted grades, tests count for 60% of the grade... while quizzes are assigned a measly ... 5%.

No -- I'm not irritated in the least.

Thankfully, for the next two years DS will have a different math teacher who is known for returning homework & quizzes the next day and tests within three days.