Hi Folks,

I just joined ATEG and the list this spring. I have been teaching freshman compostion for fifteen years, (too many sections a semester). I also teach a 4th semester writing course that attracts students who major in the humanities and in education, and I am teaching this course this summer. These students attend the main campus, but are taking this course at the campus where I teach. I do not have a PhD, and I have no publications to date, but I'd like to add my thoughts about several of the issues that have arisen.

1. Education of education majors, English undergraduate students, and grad students.
First of all, I was one of those students who entered grad school, 18 years ago, with intuitive knowledge about grammar and punctuation but without real knowledge. However, I soon realized that I needed to educate myself, and quickly, about the logic of grammar and the reasons for punctuation. (And this makes me wonder how many graduate programs in English--not comp and rhet-- require a linguistics course. Mine sure didn't.) 

I have nine students in my summer course. 6 of them are education majors. I assigned them a sentence analysis exercise, in which they were to write a descriptive and rhetorical analysis of a sentence. Even though they will be juniors in the fall, they cannot "see" subordinate clauses in sentences. They can see compound constructions, parallelism, metaphor, but not subordination. Interesting and disturbing, since several of these students are elementary education majors and 1 is an English Education major.

For their first paper, I assigned them to write their literacy autobiography. About half the students pointed to 7th to 9th grade as the turning point for them, regarding learning, but writing and reading especially. Before 7th grade, learning, writing, reading, creating were fun; after 7th grade, boring, prescriptive. Perhaps, they only say this because, of course, middle and high school are simply more academically challenging than grade school, and they were not able to cope. But all of these students in my class, except one, have at least a 3.2 gpa if not higher. I've asked them about their writing experience in college to date: It's a game; they all know it's a game. Find out what the teacher wants and get the right answer. When their papers are returned, they receive them with few comments, because grad assistants usually grade the papers--and we all know how much time grad assistants have to grade papers.


3.Teaching grammar and puncutation in freshman composition
This is absolutely essential.  My students typically have no relationship with their language; they are indeed alienated from it. But in order to have any power over their writing and their punctuation, grammar must be taught. Yet, here's the problem: time. I teach at a univeristy that does not have a freshman composition sequence. When Penn State changed from quarters to semesters, the powers that be collapsed the two terms (a total of 20 weeks) of composition into one semester (15 weeks). So we're actually covering in 15 weeks what is usually taught in 30 weeks. How do you cover expositon, argument, research, documentation, grammar, punctuation in 15 weeks to students who just come out of high school with the attitudes that my summer school students expressed in their papers?  How in 15 weeks can we make up for this?  So maybe, it's not that composition teachers do not want to teach grammar and puncuation. Instead, they make choices about what to include and what to exclude. They exclude grammar and punctuation because the global issues of writing--organization and development--seem more important and they hope that the students' sentence structure will come around. True, they could exclude them because they don't have the knowledge to teach the concepts.

4. Commenting on Student Papers

For the first paper of the summer course, I experimented with commenting. I wrote each student a letter, beginning with commenting on their process and on the paper, and then writing summary comments. On the average, I wrote a three-page, single-spaced letter, with some reaching 4 or 5 pages, and spent at least 90 minutes on each paper. I would love to comment in this way on all papers. And this is the level of commentary that is actually needed if we want student writing to improve. But at the college  level, some instructors teach 3 or more sections of writing a semester. At the high school level, English teachers may teach 5 or more classes with more than two preparations. With schedules such as these, what can we expect first-year college students to know about grammar and punctuation? Can we expect composition instructors to deal with the more writerly issues of writing? It seems to me to solve some of these problems we need massive institutional changes: smaller schools, smaller classes, and probably fewer students accepted to college. 

My apologies. I've gone beyond the acceptable length and subject matter for this assignment.