Listening

I know I have written about assessment a bit too much--imagining a way of assessing our writing programs through what our students say about what they have learned in our writing programs rather than having them "prove" (or argue) what they have learned by their writing performance in, let's say, school (trying to be polite here) writing situations. Key is that we're evaluating our programs more directly than by asking students to perform in an artificially constructed rhetorical situation (unless we argue that teaching students how to argue for a grade is the kind of genre--and social dynamic--that we want to teach). I will say, somewhat selfishly (and in keeping with my four rules of good writing assignments), that it's more fun to read what student feed back to me what they have learned (or not learned) in our writing courses than it is to read essays in which students are arguing for a grade.

I'm imagining the same kind of dynamic--a direct evaluation--of students' learning experiences in our university. I think we can learn a lot by listening seriously to our students, through their writing, rather than by asking them to prove something to us through school writing.

At any rate, at the end of the last quarter, I asked the students to write about their first-year experience at Drexel--with some focus on what they may or may not have learned in our writing program. I've posted their essays over on the right of this blog: "Students Essays Describing First Year at Drexel." These essays were actually addressed to an Associate Vice Provost at Drexel who came into our class to talk to us about her interest in learning about students' experiences, but I also told the students that I would be posting these essays for other teachers to read.

I'm not going to say these are great essays--we do very little revising and rewriting in my classes--and, quite a shift for me, no peer response activities. We just read what others write and write back to each other. Still, I find their essays very interesting. I know we can learn a lot from our students by seriously listening to them--and what better way to listen to them then by paying attention to what they tell us in writing.

On the right side is also a link to a book my LSU students wrote--"Writing Ourselves into Each Other's Lives." They wrote that for other teachers to read, so I hope some of you will look at it. If you want to use any of the chapters, feel free to link to the book or copy the chapters. Let me point to the chapter on "Voice." My students always like reading that one. Another favorite is "Journals." And many of the essays in the last half of the book are, to me, startling.

A note to my students: Brainwashed in Writing Classes

Below is a note that I sent to my students about our next essay:

OK, here’s what I’m thinking about this next essay or re-vision of your current one. In general, I would like you to take this chance to rewrite and/or refocus your last one and make it an essay that you’ll feel good about. I want you to include more research, research of your classmates, on the internet, and in the library databases. Next week, we’ll work in class on the library databases—I’ll try to give you some search tips. I also would like this to be an essay that teachers in our program should read.

But right now, I want to talk about refocusing. Robert came into my office yesterday and we looked at his essay again—and we discovered a few things.

First, Robert and I saw several places where he could do some research to give more substance to his opinions. I’ll give an example. Robert thought that women in general were more stressed than men. As soon as you think something like that, you want to research it. Robert was basing this on his relations with his sisters (and the schools they went to), but a thought like that begs for research. Another common gendered thought is that men are better than women at math—again, begs for research.  In general, we hear in our lives common stories and if we hear them often enough, we think they are true.  If you’re a critical thinker, you check them out.

I had another student in my office yesterday (someone else’s student). In our conversation he said something about in the United States, we tolerate crime less than anyplace else in the world. I raised an eyebrow. “Really?” I said. See if you can find anything about the crime rate per capita in all countries. A very quick search gets this:

The top ten countries in per capita crime rate are as follows:
1. Dominica: 113.822 per 1,000 people
2. New Zealand: 105.881 per 1,000 people
3. Finland: 101.526 per 1,000 people
4. Denmark: 92.8277 per 1,000 people
5. Chile: 88.226 per 1,000 people
6. United Kingdom: 85.5517 per 1,000 people
7. Montserrat: 80.3982 per 1,000 people
8. United States: 80.0645 per 1,000 people
9. Netherlands: 79.5779 per 1,000 people
10. South Africa: 77.1862 per 1,000 people

Crime rate per capita per country

That’s only one source, but a more extended search would tell us whether answers.com is overly fabricating the stats. The following source said that the U.S. was close to the leader in high murder rates in developed countries:

Murder rates in Developed Countries

But you of course have to check this stuff out—that last source is notably liberal (Rawstory.com).

Robert and I saw several other claims in his essay that could bear research and substantiation.  Here’s what I would suggest: when you make some kind of claim (like the United States is the best country to live in) that you might imagine others from a different belief system might challenge, ask yourself, how do you know that? Do you know that because that’s what everyone you know says? There was a time when everyone said the world was flat.

The most interesting part of Robert’s essay was about stress—the way his sisters were stressed out in STEM schools with a kind of side slide into the way in which students at Drexel are stressed. Behind this conversation lies our previous conversation in class about stress with some suspicion that teachers like to create stress as a way of control (Robert and I ventured here into the link between torture, stress, and control).  We have all wondered in this class as a consequence of your narratives about the turn in education somewhere around 5^th grade, at which point learning was no longer fun.

We can always question why schools/teachers emphasize stress/rigor rather than fun in learning. I have been asking this question lately—why do we try as educators to stress students out? Why aren’t we having fun? It seems clear to me that if we’re having fun doing one thing, we might want to do more of it. The other side of the coin might be true.

Toward the end of his essay, Robert threw in a casual thought. It was somehow linked to Elizabeth’s comment about grades—about how we are trained to think we have to get all As, that we have to be perfect. Schools, parents, and culture of course combine to create this drama about being perfect. You don’t, after all, want to be an F. You want to be an A. A straight A. I am sure that you all recognize that this line of thinking is connected to our overall investigation of how schools affect our identities—our ways of understanding who we are. In grade school, were you a cardinal or a blackbird?

In his essay, Robert threw in a comment about how schools brainwash us. I told Robert I thought “brainwash” might be a bit heavy.

In his concluding paragraph, he said something about the way in which we are brainwashed into not feeling good about ourselves so that we’ll want to buy things to make us feel better about ourselves. In essence, when we don’t feel Ok about ourselves (which maybe is what our schools are trying to make us feel), we’ll be conditioned into buying things, always buying more, to fill up that empty space in ourselves, the space school has created in order to perpetuate the culture within in which school resides, a consumer culture.

At the end of our conversation, I told Robert I thought his claim/insight was kind of veering into a new direction, and I said maybe you should just think that but not say it. But I thought a lot about Robert’s direction, and I have changed my mind. I think that direction could well be the focus of his essay, an answer to our question about why schools try to stress us out.  But maybe “brainwashed” isn’t it. It’s brainpolluted.

[Names of course have been changed.]