My response to ASLE responses

Thanks, all, for the thoughtful--and thought provoking--responses. I also am beginning to feel misunderstood--and possibly maligned. I hope none of you think that I am among those "worrying about whether their own judgement is worthy and thus looking for ways to find limits without taking it on as a personal challenge" (as Prairie Mary put it). That sounds pretty insulting, but I don't think (I hope) it was meant to apply to me personally. And of course, I focus on teaching them how to think--but thinking is only as good as the method of expression, so they can't be good thinkers without being good writers, and vice versa. I also agree that we get into dicey territory when we start talking about "norms" or "standards." But my dilemma is trying to figure out what is most beneficial in terms of actually educating students. That's all I really care about: how best to ensure that my students are as well educated as possible at the end of a 15-week semester.

I hasten to reiterate that I'm looking particularly at my comp classes: literature electives are a different animal, but in comp, students are just beginning to learn how to be college students, and the shift from high school expectations to those of college is drastic and difficult for them. I'm also at a two-year school--but almost 75% of our students transfer to four-year schools, and I want to be sure I am preparing them appropriately for what they should expect as they move on. I'm willing to stick to my guns and keep to what I think is appropriate, no matter what I find out from colleagues around the country--but for my own sanity, I need to have a clear sense of why I maintain the standards I do, why I am making the choices to teach as I do. My request for information (and samples) was a way of getting some needed distance from my own head.

I find my own personal philosophy is split between two ideologies. One is that there is, in fact, a sort of Platonic ideal of an A paper. I acknowledge that what constitutes an A is not the same in every class: as I suggested above, an A in a second semester comp class is different from an A in a literature elective. But I do believe in a general standard of excellence within that sort of situational context. I don't, however, want to give students grades that are adjusted relative to other students in the room: the best of a bad lot is still not an A, in my estimation.

On the other hand, grading is a measure of progress. I do work through stages of revision in my comp classes, and they get a grade on their engagement with the revision process as well as a grade on the end product--but my concern is that my standards about that end product contribute to the "culture of failure" that many students have experienced since they first started taking standardized tests. Also, I know that students think a C is tantamount to failure, and I go over what "average" means--and I have very clear grading criteria (and actually use language originated by a writing committee in the SUNY system, so the students don't think what constitutes an A comes from my evil desire to make them feel like shit). But I'm working to overcome 13+ years of "education" that not only influences how they see grades but what they think they're supposed to do when they write.

My department just had a meeting with teachers of middle school and high school English that was horrifying in what it revealed about the moronic shackles constraining teachers in the public schools. My students are diligently working in the forms that have been hammered into them, which is why they feel it is their job to "agree or disagree" with a poem, for instance. Recognizing that I need to un-teach them a lot in order to start teaching them how to really think, I am concerned that maintaining standards of quality chases too many of them out of the classroom--in which case, they don't learn anything at all (or not from me anyway), as I noted above..

So, the dilemma I face is whether to let go of my standards, accept crappy work as the best they can do for now, and try to keep them in the class, teaching them what I can but recognizing it won't be what I think they really need to know--or let them know that their work is, at the moment, crappy but reassure them that they can improve. I find that most of them are so unused to working through frustration and difficulty that they bail before I can effect that improvement, but I think learning how to work through frustration is in itself a very important lesson for them....

You see, I can go around and around about this, which is why I asked for the feedback. I wasn't expecting (and would be horrified to suggest) a national "standard" that we all have to adhere to, but I hoped that I might get a sense of the thinking of my colleagues elsewhere who are teaching freshman comp--and actual samples of freshman comp writing, as points of comparison.