Independent high school English teaching is a great gig without much in the way of drawbacks. The pay isn't really that bad. The kids are great. You can choose where you want to live. Colleagues are usually wonderful. The only drawback, as any English teacher will confirm, is . . . grading papers. By inviting or requiring kids to give us rough drafts, we double the misery.
If you're a student of mine out there, please don't take this as a denegration of your thinking and writing that may have meant so much to you for a variety of reasons. Of course, we enjoy, even delight in your progress as a writer and the revelations that young minds can share. We just don't like a stack of 45 papers to read over a weekend.
Of course, if good pedagogy deems it necessary, then we need to assign rough drafts. But what if good pedagogy doesn't compel it. What if, in fact, good pedagogy militates against it?
It's up to you if my argument is self-serving, but here goes:
We are teachers, not editors preparing essays for publication. Accordingly, no one paper is important. Rather, the progess from paper to paper is important.
As a teacher of writing, I have to help kids maximize their strengths while recognizing and attending to their challenges. That's the real skill, the independence, to be developed. The ethic of assigning rough drafts can be expressed as "now go back and try again given the comments and corrections I've added." But that same ethic applies to the next paper. Correcting what I circle or comment upon, doesn't require as much writerly attentiveness and problem-solving as does anticipating weaknesses in brand new efforts, finding them, and attending to them. This is why I generally assign no drafts, but there are lots of starts.
I'd also argue that when we correct rough drafts, the kids naturally attend to those corrections and comments almost exclusively. The result, I fear, is that they sense that the progress from rough draft to finished product need only be relatively superficial when, in fact, a second shot at a paper should be an opportunity for further, deepening thought, clearer prose, a more confident, supple voice, i.e., more beautiful writing.
So, sure, the students could benefit from rough drafts, but my involvement with them might actually stifle further thought.
Then there's the most unfortunate possible impact of assigning and marking up rough drafts: If a student attends to all the corrections and comments energetically, should she get an A on the paper? Not necessarily, but that may be a hard sell (except at my school where we don't have grades . . . I'll address this on another day). At its best, the rough draft may become a good, not a great paper. However, it may have become great had the student worked beyond the corrections and comments.
A compromise: I will occasionally invite a particularly challenged writer to show me any paragraph of their choosing. Whatever mistakes the student is making in that paragraph are likely to be exhibited in the others. And I tell them so. "Look out for that thing you do . . . " I might say . . . or something to that effect.
"Try again," means on the next assignment.
First of all, I want to heartily congratulate Mr. Greg Monfils on his current exploration of online journaling. You are a scholar, a poet, a musician, a healthy skeptic, and one who clearly can live in both past, present and the future. Congratulations.
ReplyDeleteThe efficacy of the draft versus the final paper begs the question of what it is that we're really asking students to do? If the work is simply geared as a learning exercise, then perhaps there's no need for the final paper but rather it's essentially the rough draft that is examined and evaluated by the teacher. Perhaps the final paper is not important? It's importance seems to lie in whether or not the student --- in the process of self evaluating as well as utilizing the comments of the teacher in the rough draft --- has the ability to alter in a substantial way to make the paper better. But is that process sufficiently important to justify the enormous amount of time and effort that both the teacher and the student has to put into the process of taking the rough draft and making it into a final draft? What you talk about above --- and these questions are vitally important --- is really about the efficacy of teacher time in the process of evaluating and commenting on both draft versions --- the first and the final version --- but this dual process is something that is consuming an enormous amount of student time also, obviously a significantly greater amount of time that the student has to put in to making that transition from draft to final.
Yet, on the other hand, can the final paper have efficacy beyond just as a learning tool, in other words can it have a readership that extends beyond just the teacher? If so, then the time and effort that goes into the finalization of the final draft starts to make a lot more sense. If, as you say, the process is really just geared toward student learning, and if, as you say, each paper is really not that important because --- this is not what you say --- there is no significant readership, then my challenge would be to re-think the assumption that student writing in the course of a 9th 10th 11th or 12th grade English class has no true readership beyond simply the dialogue between the student and teacher.
My interest and I suppose challenge is to find authentic avenues for student work to be witnessed outside of the classroom. This does call for somewhat of a re-examination of the multiple centuries old view of what the assumed roles of teachers and students are, that is that students produced for the teacher (or for him or herself) and not for a broader audience. The act of blogging, right now, is a direct challenge to that assumption. What a student work had has its goal in a traditional English class that of publishing their works? Perhaps right here on this blog? What happens in a world in which millions of potential readers can latch on to the writings that interests them, such as the writings of Greg Monfils right here within this blog? Something to explore the future.
Howard
This message above was "voice composed" using MacSpeech Dictate software, along with additional minor hand editing.
Don't underestimate the power of requiring a rough draft due some days before the final draft. Even if your only comment was "okay, now rewrite!", your students would still be ahead of the game.
ReplyDeleteNice blog, Greg!
--Barbara