Williams, ICON, Ma and Pa

I'm having trouble writing this blog, so I'm going to resort to sub-headings. This is in no particular order.

Grading
I have an anecdote about grading. My freshman English teacher in college allowed us as many revisions as we wanted on any essay. He attached comments about the content of the essay and the quality of the ideas to the back. On the essay itself, he circled every grammar mistake he found and wrote the page number in our handbook corresponding to the error. Although this was a lot of work up front for him, I found it particularly effective.

First off, all revisions had to fix every one of the grammar mistakes, and in order to figure out what I'd done wrong, I had to look up every one on my own, and figure out how to correct the grammar myself. There were a lot of mistakes I learned to fix because I got tired of looking them up over and over again with every essay.

Also, although in theory a student could rewrite a paper a thousand times, in reality, we had better things to do than spend yet another hour rewriting. Usually, then, the second draft would correct nearly all the errors. We didn't have time to write a third and fourth draft while writing a new essay the next week for his class.

And with this method, I got the idea that he cared more about the content of ideas than the grammar. The grammar was important, which is why you had to revise all the grammar to get an A, but it wasn't the point of the assignment.

Williams
I see the benefit of Williams' approach to writing. I would have enjoyed such a class a lot. However, that said, I think he should have had a mandatory meeting at the middle of the semester. As a student, I would be upset if I'd gone through an entire semester thinking my work was "A" quality, and then in my conference found out it was actually only "B" quality.

Also, I still can't figure out how to make this work on a large scale. I think it's a good way to get students to write more, which will help improve their writing through basic practice, but without lots of teacher/student contact, I don't see how it will work.

I do not think TOPIC is the best solution to the problem of getting people to write more, and therefore write better. I think the best solution is quite simply more teachers; but, for obvious economic reasons, that is not always possible. I've been thinking about where TOPIC succeds and fails since our class on Wednesday.

I don't have conclusions, just some thoughts. First, I would rather be teaching a class and grading the papers for that class; then, a teacher from another class could be a second grader. But then I could be certain that the comments the student gets match the instruction he or she has recieved in my class. I realize that laws about who can teach/graduate hours required limit this possibility.

I believe it would be helpful to have one grader who focuses on grammar and a different grader who specialized in content. How would you weigh the two different grades, in the context of the course? I don't know.

I thought the Ma and Pa observations were interesting, but only as they might make a teacher or grader look at his or her own method of grading, and say - hey, I mark comma splices because it's easy. Maybe I should explain some bigger concepts. But how does that help someone teaching five courses, who doesn't have the time to explain why one sentance is off and another works well?

In the end, I stand by my comment in class: there should be one semester of general composition instruction and one semester of specialized composition in the student's major. End of story.