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.

I would love to know more about that. Especially the academic level of the students. I've always been on board with voluminous reading making for a better reader... but writing without being able to learn from critical feedback? Naw -- the boy would fill up pages with word salad and never look back.

Thanks all. I no longer feel like I'm crazy.
Now I'm just sad. And irritated.
But mostly sad.

I think they were college students. Will look for it when I have time.

Presented here as conventional wisdom with some (not terribly recent) citations:

http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/design/instructionalstrategies/writing/respond.html

In searching I also found this, which seems both useful and entertaining:

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/635/01/

In high school, we also had a teacher like that. Would offer grades based on the length, seeming to not read, and a friend tested the theory by putting random stuff in the middle. Got a high grade. I'd also want to give that a try (maybe with a backup essay in case the teacher actually does read it) and show it to the principal.

Dandy: You're definitely not expecting too much to see your DS receive meaningful feedback for his writing in 9th grade. I was pleased to finally see my own DD bring home a constructed response essay with a well-deserved F, for failing to properly respond to the prompt, and with splashes of red ink for grammatical mistakes which had hitherto gone completely ignored. This was only 4th grade.

Funny, Dude. My son and I were sifting through some of his old papers and found that the only teacher who ever consistently read & criticized his work was the amazing teacher he had in 5th grade.

If his 9th grade teacher put half that effort into her responses, I'd be happy.

This late in the year, I'm not too keen on making waves as I'd hate for him to get a vindictive grade when it might be too late for him to recover his grade. This might also happen to be the teacher who didn't understand weighted grading very well, which could really make a mess of things.

I am waiting to hear back from the counselor again -- all you peoples's responses made me realize that I wasn't nuts.

Thanks to all you all again.

Writing essays that will never be read is good practice for the SAT.

That was the only section of SAT prep my son didn't fight. He liked the challenge of creatively living down to their expectations.

Although apparently there will be no more essay after the next round of dumbing-down. Too bad.

His teacher tried this nonsense at the beginning of the year. Thankfully, a few parents got together to complain to admin after she ignored their private criticisms. Sent in actual papers with the "peer review" sheets attached. Hilarity all around. Apparently an edict came down saying no peer review on subjectively-graded assignments or some such.

I don't mind kids grading quizzes & tests with clear-cut answers because errors are easily addressed. But essays? Nope. Not having that.

Peer grading starting in 3rd grade is the norm here too - and I think it's been really good for my kids both because they get practice in catching mistakes and correcting them in spelling/punctuation/grammar etc but also because they have the opportunity to read different writing styles and response types.

Unlike mon's experience, the peer edit step is just a step in our kids' classrooms - their teachers still read and edit/critique their writing assignments as the last step in the writing process. I can tell the teachers are reading them because they write in notes in various places in the work, make suggestions, and explain their grades. I think it's really sad to think of teachers assigning work that they aren't going to take the time to read and give feedback on!

polarbear

My high school AP English classes did peer reviews, but those peer grades had no input on the teacher's final grade. It was just an exercise in our ability to critique others, and accept criticism in return.

And thank goodness, because most of my peers had no idea what they were doing. Much of the feedback was idiotic. I was never amused when my correct grammar was "corrected."

Indeed. I kept reining DD in on that score, which in retrospect maybe I shouldn't have. She might have enjoyed it more if she had written about King Abraham Lincoln and the alien monkey invasion.

I may go to Heck for sharing this, but considering it came from my septuagenarian mother, I think I should get a pass:
http://wtvr.com/2014/04/08/english-teacher-profane-letter/

The actual profanity is blurred, but obvious.

At least the knucklehead student has a teacher who takes the time to read & criticize.

Seemed an appropriate response. I dislike peer editing. A student should be able to decide whether to share their private work. I think making them share is a) encouraging the child to curtail personal expression, and/or b) providing ammunition to bullies. I would have been in the formal category as i objected to sharing any but the most mundane writing without free consent.

Just so that no one thinks this is a modern problem, I had a science teacher in middle school (mid-80s) who used to assign bunches of questions and would make us rewrite the question and the answer. It turned out that he never really read them, so once you got past the first couple of them, you could write whatever you want. We used to have great fun with that, but now it's just sad.

This is so bloody hilarious... I had to share.

DS's teacher had the kids use on on-line system for submitting papers, which at first I thought was a nifty idea. Well now I know why. The teacher used this on-line system to perform the only critique the papers will ever see.

So my son received a computer-generated critique that managed to point out one missing comma and two spelling errors (that simply weren't in the checker's dictionary).

Passive voice? Not flagged. Nor was anything else that I know dang sure plagued that 1000 word paper. Glad he'll get to learn whether or not he provided strong theses... and properly supported with meaningful examples.

So he added the missing comma and will be resubmitting tonight to get his A. Awesome... absolutely awesome.

I'll make sure his short-list of colleges have robust remedial writing programs available.

I know students who write one paragraph, then copy and paste it until the AI grading system gives them the top score in the rubric. (They write their own, rather than ripping it from published works, so the plagiarism checker doesn't flag them.)

Oh, now that's amazing.

I gotta share that with DS. And then get an iron-clad promise that he will never EVER do such a dastardly thing.

LOL.

My DS is too honest or something to try these things. Last year in science I actually told him to just write nonsense when he didn't have a good answer to some of the science worksheets. The teacher only graded on completion and if one box wasn't filled out the whole page was marked wrong. I couldn't get him to do it. I guess that is good.. but aggregating since the other kids had figured this out.

My kids have both used these systems, but it always just to check for plagiarism and first level grammar check. The teacher has always looked it over, although many times not for months and they give very little feedback.

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...