Loose Ends
Hi again, everyone. I was just looking back over my notes from recent weeks, and I decided I'd off-load some stray remainders from our discussions about grading, commenting, and grammar.
First of all, just for the record, a few sources to recommend: Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, As, Praise, and Other Bribes. That title probably reveals why it's relevant to our discussion of a couple weeks back; Kohn argues that we're doing students no favors by providing what he deems to be artificial incentives. Also, a couple of the most influential short articles on commenting date back to 1982 with Nancy Sommers's "Responding to Student Writing" (College Composition and Communication, 33.2) and 1993 with Robert Connors's and Andrea Lunsford's "Teachers' Rhetorical Comments on Student Papers" (CCC 44.2).
Sommers cautions us that "teachers' comments can take students' attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers' purpose in commenting." She later asserts that "our comments need to offer students revision tasks of a different order of complexity and sophistication from the ones that they themselves identify, by forcing students back into the chaos, back to the point where they are shaping and restructuring their meaning." These snippets remind me of the question Michael raised a couple weeks ago about the extent to which we should expect our students to respond to our comments (and their peers' comments). On the one hand it's very important that they do so, but this can often lead to a "fix it" approach to subsequent versions rather than a "re-vision" (and I always write the word re-vision on the board in that way, and we talk about how the word is changed by the presence of that hyphen).
Thinking back to last week, I also really like a relatively recent article by Laura Micciche entitled "Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar" (CCC 55.4). Aware that teaching grammar is "unquestionably unfashionable," Micciche proposes that we should seek to "establish grounds for teaching grammar rhetorically and for linking this pedagogical effort to larger goals of emancipatory teaching." I think many of your postings and comments about short, strategic discussions of particular grammar and usage issues were right on. In the past, depending on how my peer groups were set up, I've done something half-silly, half-serious (but ultimately very productive) called "Grammar Wars." After each major paper I would assemble a handout offering about a dozen examples (lifted directly from their papers) of sentences featuring various sorts of errors, need for certain types of clarity, etc., and I'd give point values to each one. I'd then pass these sheets out with the instruction that each peer group was responsible for turning in one sheet with amended sentences. Occasionally we'd talk about selected issues in class, but mostly we just kept standings throughout the semester to track which peer group was in first place. It actually made incorporating a bit of grammar and usage kind of fun (though it did admittedly create a fair bit of extra work on my part), and also helped to cement some camaraderie within the individual peer groups.
In any event, there are a lot of empirical studies and work by cognitive psychologists out there that suggest if given the choice between dealing with surface issues in student writing and going after their ideas, we should privilege the latter; the thinking is that once they chase down their ideas and start to articulate them more confidently, the grammar and usage issues will eventually sharpen on their own. What is assuredly deadly is what Micciche calls "'school grammar' and its focus on repetitive, decontextualized, drill-and-kill exercises."
First of all, just for the record, a few sources to recommend: Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, As, Praise, and Other Bribes. That title probably reveals why it's relevant to our discussion of a couple weeks back; Kohn argues that we're doing students no favors by providing what he deems to be artificial incentives. Also, a couple of the most influential short articles on commenting date back to 1982 with Nancy Sommers's "Responding to Student Writing" (College Composition and Communication, 33.2) and 1993 with Robert Connors's and Andrea Lunsford's "Teachers' Rhetorical Comments on Student Papers" (CCC 44.2).
Sommers cautions us that "teachers' comments can take students' attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers' purpose in commenting." She later asserts that "our comments need to offer students revision tasks of a different order of complexity and sophistication from the ones that they themselves identify, by forcing students back into the chaos, back to the point where they are shaping and restructuring their meaning." These snippets remind me of the question Michael raised a couple weeks ago about the extent to which we should expect our students to respond to our comments (and their peers' comments). On the one hand it's very important that they do so, but this can often lead to a "fix it" approach to subsequent versions rather than a "re-vision" (and I always write the word re-vision on the board in that way, and we talk about how the word is changed by the presence of that hyphen).
Thinking back to last week, I also really like a relatively recent article by Laura Micciche entitled "Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar" (CCC 55.4). Aware that teaching grammar is "unquestionably unfashionable," Micciche proposes that we should seek to "establish grounds for teaching grammar rhetorically and for linking this pedagogical effort to larger goals of emancipatory teaching." I think many of your postings and comments about short, strategic discussions of particular grammar and usage issues were right on. In the past, depending on how my peer groups were set up, I've done something half-silly, half-serious (but ultimately very productive) called "Grammar Wars." After each major paper I would assemble a handout offering about a dozen examples (lifted directly from their papers) of sentences featuring various sorts of errors, need for certain types of clarity, etc., and I'd give point values to each one. I'd then pass these sheets out with the instruction that each peer group was responsible for turning in one sheet with amended sentences. Occasionally we'd talk about selected issues in class, but mostly we just kept standings throughout the semester to track which peer group was in first place. It actually made incorporating a bit of grammar and usage kind of fun (though it did admittedly create a fair bit of extra work on my part), and also helped to cement some camaraderie within the individual peer groups.
In any event, there are a lot of empirical studies and work by cognitive psychologists out there that suggest if given the choice between dealing with surface issues in student writing and going after their ideas, we should privilege the latter; the thinking is that once they chase down their ideas and start to articulate them more confidently, the grammar and usage issues will eventually sharpen on their own. What is assuredly deadly is what Micciche calls "'school grammar' and its focus on repetitive, decontextualized, drill-and-kill exercises."
posted by Eric at 2:03 PM
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