Afraid to Grade?

I can understand the desire of early twentieth century comp instructors to find what Connors and Lunsford term "a defensible rating instrument" (201). There is perhaps nothing scarier than having your grade challenged by a student who reads your comments but still can't understand why they got a C. I know instructors who use a grading scale. They assign a numerical value to grammar, thesis, organization, and their numbers are rarely challenged. This doesn't make their grade any less "objective" than mine, but somehow, students don't feel justified in arguing with a list of numbers that add up to a numerical grade. And in all fairness, a system like this has its merits. When I was grading papers for the online 203 class, I was given a grading rubric that I was required to follow. A paper was divided into five "gradable" sections and each section was worth two points. This meant that even if a student's paper was deficient in the "thesis" category, they could "score points" with perfect grammar and still pass with a tolerable grade. For an online class that spends so little time on writing instruction and offers students no opportunity for revision, this rubric seems like the only fair way to grade. But for comp instructors who work one on one with students, we need to have the ability to be more flexible. For paper one, I told my students that they needed to have an arguable thesis that was backed up with evidence. We workshopped theses in class; I gave them examples; and still, I got close to forty reports on various discourse communities. Admittedly miffed, I wanted to send a message to my students, so report-like papers automatically got a C. I believe this will force my students to pay attention to the assignment's requirements and revise their papers accordingly. I would not have been able to send this message if I was forced to adhere to a hard and fast rubric like that used for 203.
Like the example papers described in "Teacher's Rhetorical Comments on Students Papers," I spent a lot of time defending my grades in my end comments. As always, I began by making a positive observation, and then like most of the instructors in Connors' and Lunsford's study, I point out deficiencies and make constructive suggestions. I consider my students' feelings and try to make my comments beneficial, but they are often extensive and repetitive, a repeat of those given in the margins throughout each paper. I think I'm afraid of my students' reactions to their grades and worry too much about avoiding conflict.

Time for a change?

Kathleen Welch's "Ideology and the Freshman Textbook Production" provides some interesting food for thought. I tried to think back to my own freshman days--tried to recall any textbook words of wisdom--but I can't even remember if I had a freshman comp text. I'm sure I had some sort of technical handbook, one that answered basic formatting questions, but a text like the Norton? I don't recall. Of course students feel disconnected from composition texts. Hell, even teachers hate them. That's why we ignore the text half the time and pad the syllabus with "interesting" supplemental material. So why have a text at all? The only logical answer is money. Publishers make money off selling texts to schools, colleges make money off of selling texts to students, but whether they receive any benefit from them at all is a mystery. It's practically impossible to create an affordable comp text that doesn't reproduce writing samples, thereby disconnecting text from context. I like Welch's idea--make student writing the focus. I say, get rid of texts all together. No, seriously. Think about our own writing as grad students. Grad classes help foster some kernel of an idea. We take that idea, research it, formulate a thesis, and because of time constraints, write a poorly executed seminar paper. But for us, the project doesn't end with a final grade. We hold on to that seminar paper, write abstracts in defense of that original brilliant idea, condense our best thoughts into a twenty minute conference paper, and if we are lucky, revise and expand those thoughts into something publishable. With every step, that original idea gets better, more complex maybe, but the writing itself, the execution of the idea gets better. Why not make freshman comp that simple. Make our students start with a kernel of an idea and revise, revise, revise, each time with a new audience or a new goal in mind. We base grades on improvement over time. Just one project--one grade--and hopefully, one brilliant idea.

Amy Devitt writes, "Genre entails purposes, participants, and themes, so understanding genre entails understanding a rhetorical and semiotic situation and a social context" (576). Let me preface this blog by saying that I agree whole-heartedly. In fact, I've based my thesis on a similar claim. In the comments I make below, I am not disagreeing with Devitt as much as I am simply writing into some questions I have about my own teaching methods...

A few months ago, I had a conversation with a veteran comp. "How do you feel about the five paragraph essay?" she asked. Reflexively, I answered, "It's restricting. I teach my students to break away from the it--to become more sophisticated writers."
"I teach it," she answered. We then had a lengthy conversation on the merits (and detriments) of teaching the five paragraph essay, and I must say, I found her arguments compelling. "How can we expect them to become more sophisticated writers," she asked, "if they still haven't learned how to master the basics?" And isn't this how the rest of us learned to write? We learned poetry by writing sonnets and copy the rhyme schemes of the great poets. We wrote horrible juvenilias based on the books of our favorite authors. And we mastered the five paragraph essay in our English classes.
I did well in my comp classes. So it's hard for me to argue against teaching a genre that I benefited from learning and writing into. I know that it's restricting. I know some students will never be able to break away from it, (but I wonder if nursing students or biology students will ever need to). Sometimes I feel that by allowing them to select and "write within a genre" of their choosing, I am actually doing more harm than good (578). For one, the organization of their papers suffers. For two, most teachers are used to (and fond of) seeing this form, and when they don't get it, they punish the student. Devitt doesn't want comp students "writing for the teacher," but isn't this a skill--one student's must master if they are ever going to get through college?