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

I cannot talk to any of DD's grandparents. The only exception is one of DD's great-grandmothers. She's been very supportive of DD and is very proud of her. She shows off pictures of DD and her artwork to anyone who is willing to listen to her. I don't know why the rest of the family thinks we are either too pushy or not pushy enough. I guess I should be happy that if I average out their feedback, it comes out that we're doing a great job. :P

For the sake of humor, let me tell you in my first job out of college I had to do some write-ups in pencil. The manager would then (gleefully?) mark it up entirely in red pen and hand it back to be re-written again in pencil. (So, thank you to everyone who contributed to the era of word-processing!)

Nowadays, we cannot figure out the philosophy. On the one hand reports are that the world (let's not be country specific) needs skilled workers, but the students are in an environment in which what is expected of them seems very low.

We can't make sense of it either. So maybe that is when the chaos theory works? Maybe no one is really connecting the big picture between student today, worker tomorrow.

It'll really make your head hurt and furrow your brow when you try to trace history and figure out are we doing better as humans, worse, the same? You can look at it so many ways; it is hard to conclude.

Maybe we are in period of great change and because we are in it right now we can't see it entirely.

I am a writing teacher.

This is a huge issue, and it is not a gifted issue. The time spent critiquing essays isn't properly compensated. As a result, teachers aren't doing it anymore. Your child's freshman comp teacher is most likely a grad student with other demands on his time. Right now I'm teaching one class as an adjunct. The pay is completely meaningless. That's why I only teach one class. (I'm keeping my foot in the door, so I can work again when my child is older.) But the issue is the same for part time and full time teachers of writing on all levels: critiquing papers takes time.

I actually do comment meaningfully on papers, but that's why I only teach one class. I spend around three hours of grading for every one hour of class time (and that's with peer reviews and ungraded journal entries). It's just a HUGELY time consuming activity.

Fight all you want, I don't think you're going to get satisfying resolution on this issue. We're moving towards standardized testing, so what a paper "looks" like becomes vastly more important than the content. That affects feedback. Lack of time affects feedback. Low teacher (adjunct or other) pay, high student/teacher ratios, lower levels of literacy... all of these issues affect the ability to spend quality time with a student's paper. Those issues aren't going away.

For those of you with children who aren't in college, perhaps talk to the school about offering grading software. I have software on my ipad that allows me to link to websites and leave verbal notes. It saves time and can encourage teachers to grade papers more completely. If your children are in college, encourage your school to use fewer adjuncts and hire more full-time employees.

This is one of the reasons I'm paying for private college for my DD. Her writing classes had less 12 students and the teachers actually gave her real feedback. I understand how hard it is for a high school teacher who teacher 5 classes with 40 kids per class. About 10 years ago the school hired graders but they don't gave the budget for it anymore. It's just frustrating because this isn't a good way to teach kids to write and it comes out as a big shock the first time a teacher really gives them good feedback.

Another part of the picture is that many kids and parents don't really value high quality writing. I regularly assign rough drafts and then the students have to submit a final draft in which they respond to all of the feedback they have received. Many do not make much effort. It's hard for teachers to be enthusiastic about spending large amounts of time on feedback that isn't read or taken seriously.

That doesn't mean students shouldn't GET good feedback. The best teachers make the effort and push students to read and consider it in some way (e.g., by requiring revisions). Students can learn to value it more. However, I can understand why some teachers get discouraged.

One thing that may help is to show the teacher that your child really cares about the feedback and will learn from it. I try to provide good feedback to all of my students, but always provide much more to those students I know will take it seriously.

Thanks to all who contributed to this discussion, especially the teachers!

My son reminded me the other day that this particular teacher had a 45-student class dropped in his lap rather unexpectedly at the beginning of the year. So, yeah, I TOTALLY get the issue of time.

I would love to see a thoughtful critique of my son's paper -- like I received in school ALL the time -- but understand that 4 classes x 30 students = a major PIA when it comes to anything beyond checking for proper margins and headings.

But still.

Even if only one paragraph of each paper were ripped to shreds... or maybe another assignment focuses on transitions. I don't know. I just can't believe that the As are handed out so freely when there is little to no preparation for the demands that await him in college.

And thanks also for the person above who recommended "The War on Grammar." I've already ordered a copy for the teacher. After all, I know he has all sorts of free time to read!

If teachers do not read essays, parents may need to critique writing, as discussed in this essay. But most parents are not English teachers, as the author's mother was.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/the-perfect-essay/
The Perfect Essay
By JOHN KAAG
New York Times
MAY 5, 2014

...

My mother said she would help me with my writing, but first I had to help myself. For each assignment, I was to write the best essay I could. Real criticism isn’t meant to find obvious mistakes, so if she found any — the type I could have found on my own — I had to start from scratch. From scratch. Once the essay was “flawless,” she would take an evening to walk me through my errors. That was when true criticism, the type that changed me as a person, began.

She chided me as a pseudo-sophisticate when I included obscure references and professional jargon. She had no patience for brilliant but useless extended metaphors. “Writers can’t bluff their way through ignorance.” That was news to me — I’d need to find another way to structure my daily existence. She trimmed back my flowery language, drew lines through my exclamation marks and argued for the value of understatement. “John,” she almost whispered. I leaned in to hear her: “I can’t hear you when you shout at me.” So I stopped shouting and bluffing, and slowly my writing improved.

...

Yup. What MoN said.

DD has been bitten by this again and again and again in grades 7 through 12. Read the rubric, read the assignment, follow the rubric to the letter, clean up obvious spelling, formatting/usage problems, collect your A.

If you do too much thinking for yourself... attempt to be too sophisticated... well, you're just asking for trouble. DD's collected a few of those kinds of grades, too. She knows that if she is going to take a stand like that, she has to turn in something that is pretty much late undergraduate level or better if she is going to earn full credit for it. Eventually, students tire of producing 10 times what is (seemingly) required in order to get full credit while using more advanced rhetorical or analytical skills.

I have complex feelings about the Times article, but the type of feedback he is asking for isn't easy to get unless you have a mentor on your side or something with some serious one-on-one time, like a senior thesis. Ultimately, if your child wants to receive real writing instruction, encourage him to be persistent.

I agree wholeheartedly with apm221. It's much more likely that a student will get good feedback if he specifically requests it. Most of my students don't respond to feedback. I doubt many even read it.

If your child wants to experiment or attempt to be more sophisticated than expected, my advice is to encourage the child to talk to the teacher about what he or she is trying to do. Personally, I encourage taking risks (even if students aren't able to fully reach their goals). However, I need to know what the student is attempting in order to assess the work. It's not always evident. You get that information in a writer's workshop, not so much in other types of classes.

The reality is that teachers at the high school level have to use rubrics these days because they need to teach kids to write essays that fit into the standardized testing box--the kids can't be successful on writing tests if they don't play the game.

I used to score the writing portion of the GRE, and that was a mess. What was most important was that you and another scorer gave the same essay the same score--or at least an adjacent score. As a result, the scorer focused on guessing what the other reader would rate the paper instead of being focused on the paper itself. Today ETS uses a human reader and an E-rater. I don't have experience with that, but the problem would seem to me to be the same: as the human, you're pushed towards calibrating yourself with another entity--the essay is the thing between you. Does this lead to weak, formulaic writing? Yes, but that's what I see happening.

When it comes to "Write the way the teacher wants is how you get by," I'd say that a positive way to phrase it (if it is helpful) is know your audience. I know that's lame, but if it helps you get through the day...