I have three or four sets of technical writing papers to grade this weekend – I am teaching two sections this semester – and I was thinking to get started tonight, but I can’t bear the thought right now of having to deal with student writing so I am going to procrastinate by telling you briefly about a discussion I had Monday with the section that is all male (the other is mostly male) about the assignment they will be handing in to me next week. I am using a textbook called Elements of Technical Writing, by Thomas Pearsall, the first seven chapters of which deal with the technical writing process. Each chapter is given over to one step in that process, and Pearsall has built an incremental assignment into the sequence of chapters: Students are to imagine that they work for a start-up company that is thinking about investing in groupware so that employees can work remotely. They have been asked by their supervisor to do some research and write a report on groupware that she can use to persuade management to spend the money. The first two steps in the writing process that Pearsall lays out involve putting together a work plan, a description of the project and a list of the tasks that need to be completed. On Monday, we were talking about the audience analysis section of the work plan, and I was asking my students to list what they knew about their supervisor that might be relevant to how they would choose to write their report. They called out some obvious things about being a manager, and then someone said, “She’s a woman.”
“Is that relevant to the writing of your report?” I asked.
“Of course,” someone else answered.
“Why?” I asked, and the answers came very quickly.
“Because women are more skeptical than men.”
“Because women over analyze everything”
“They pay too much attention to details.”
“Women ask too many questions.”
“Because women never forget when you make a mistake.”
“Because women in the workplace always feel they have something to prove; she’s probably going to be really pushy.”
There were a couple of more that I don’t remember clearly, but all of them – with the exception perhaps of the last one – were such unambiguous instances of sexist stereotyping that I was, for a moment, shocked into silence. It had been a very long since I’d heard anyone anywhere assert those stereotypes as if they were simple fact. “Do you really think you want to write your report based on those assumptions?” I asked. “Remember, she’s your supervisor.” A few of my students laughed; a couple of them shook their heads; we had a brief and predictable conversation about sexist stereotyping; and while I doubt I changed anyone’s mind about women in general, they all seemed to get the point: don’t base workplace behavior on those kinds of assumptions.
Then, as the conversation was winding down, someone said, “It’s good there are no girls in the class. If there were, they’d be fighting us all the way and we ‘d never have been able to talk like this.” Unfortunately, class was over and so I couldn’t pursue precisely what he meant by that, but I walked to my car with mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is wisdom in what that student said; on the other hand, there would have been value for those men in having to deal with women’s anger; and it made me start to wonder about how to structure a lesson, or lessons, around the problems of sexism in the workplace and ethical behavior in the workplace, that would remain true to the course description but also go a little deeper than some version of When you go to work, check your sexism/racism/etc. at the door. It’s something I will be thinking about, since it looks like I will be teaching technical writing for the foreseeable future.
Like Kittenloss said in her or his comment on DeadSpin, where I found this story – thanks to my friend Amy King–I expected, based on the title, NYU Business School Professor Has Mastered the Art of Email Flaming, to side with the student, but the details convinced me otherwise. The graduate student, and the graduate part is important, walked into Galloway’s lecture one hour late on the first day of class and Galloway asked him to leave and told him to come back the next day. This is from an email that the student sent to Galloway complaining about the lateness policy – you can’t enter class if you’re more than 15 minutes late – and explaining his lateness:
As of yesterday evening, I was interested in three different Monday night classes that all occurred simultaneously. In order to decide which class to select, my plan for the evening was to sample all three and see which one I like most. Since I had never taken your class, I was unaware of your class policy. I was disappointed that you dismissed me from class considering (1) there is no way I could have been aware of your policy and (2) considering that it was the first day of evening classes and I arrived 1 hour late (not a few minutes), it was more probable that my tardiness was due to my desire to sample different classes rather than sheer complacency.
Here are the barely tongue-in-cheek first paragraphs of Galloway’s response:
Just so I’ve got this straight…you started in one class, left 15 – 20 minutes into it (stood up, walked out mid-lecture), went to another class (walked in 20 minutes late), left that class (again, presumably, in the middle of the lecture), and then came to my class. At that point (walking in an hour late) I asked you to come to the next class which “bothered” you.
Correct?
You state that, having not taken my class, it would be impossible to know our policy of not allowing people to walk in an hour late. Most risk analysis offers that in the face of substantial uncertainty, you opt for the more conservative path or hedge your bet (e.g., do not show up an hour late until you know the professor has an explicit policy for tolerating disrespectful behavior, check with the TA before class, etc.). I hope the lottery winner that is your recently crowned Monday evening Professor is teaching Judgement and Decision Making or Critical Thinking.
In addition, your logic effectively means you cannot be held accountable for any code of conduct before taking a class. For the record, we also have no stated policy against bursting into show tunes in the middle of class, urinating on desks or taking that revolutionary hair removal system for a spin. However, xxxx, there is a baseline level of decorum (i.e., manners) that we expect of grown men and women who the admissions department have deemed tomorrow’s business leaders.
The rest of the letter is worth reading as well.
For me, what jumps out here – aside from the obvious question of whether Galloway is just being a dick, which I think he is not – is the degree to which this student seems to take for granted that, as a customer of the college, he has the right, because the customer is always right, to do what he did. I have run up against the “I am a customer of this school and you have therefore to give me what I want” thinking a lot over the past couple of years, and it troubles me. There are ways in which students are and should be treated as customers: they have a right to adequate parking, to clean and comfortable facilities, to access to technology, to competent teachers who come to class prepared, etc. But I a not a customer service representative and I resent the hell out of it when students treat me that way.
Three students from my technical writing class came to see me during my office hours a couple of weeks ago because they were unhappy with the grades they received on their first assignment of the semester and they wanted my help in rewriting it for a better grade. The assignment, which I give every time I teach technical writing, is pretty straightforward. Students are instructed to imagine that it is the end of the previous semester – which in this case would be Spring 2009 – and they have gone to the English Department office, where they are told that registration for Technical Writing is by instructor’s permission only, and so they need to submit to me a letter of application. In writing this letter, they are allowed to use any source material they think is relevant: the syllabus I have handed them, the college catalog, my faculty and/or personal website, my ratings on ratemyprofessors.com – anything – as long as what they write contains the following:
- An explanation of the course’s relevance to either their career goals or their academic careers;
- A discussion of what they perceive to be their strengths and weaknesses as writers;
- A discussion of what they believe they have to offer the class.
The assignment is difficult, especially given the fact that my students are, overwhelmingly, college freshmen or sophomores. Not only have most of them never had to write a real letter of application before – and good letters of application are damned hard to write – but even seasoned writers can find it difficult to articulate their writing strengths and weaknesses. More, it is rare that an 18-, 19– or 20-year-old has the maturity to write persuasively about either her or his character traits or plans for the future. Indeed, one of my goals is that, by confronting students with just how difficult it is to write about themselves in a way that is both persuasive and professional, the assignment will spur at least some of them to think a little more deeply about who they are, what they want to do with their lives, the place of writing in their lives, and how and why they choose to present themselves in writing the way they do.
The first student who came to see me, a woman from Senegal for whom English is a third language, received an F on her paper because it was filled with so many grammatical, editing and proofreading errors that, had it been an actual letter of application, I would have stopped reading after the first half of the first sentence. Truly, it read like she’d spent, at most, fifteen minutes typing, unfiltered, whatever was in her brain and then handed to me the piece of paper that emerged from her printer without giving it even the most cursory of second glances. Almost the first thing she said to me when she sat down in my office was, with her eyes starting to tear up, that maybe the best thing for her to do was drop my course. Clearly she was a horrible writer, she said, and she did not want to end up with an F on her transcript. I asked her if she was a good writer in French, the language of instruction in her country, and she said yes. I asked her what grades she’d gotten in high school on the essays she’d written in French, and she told me A’s and B’s. The problem, then, I explained – and I am paraphrasing a much longer conversation – was not that she was a horrible writer. Literacy skills transfer from a first to a second – and even a third and fourth – language. The problem was that she hadn’t taken the time to do her best work, and when I suggested that maybe this was because she’d figured writing a letter would be easy, she smiled and nodded. Now that she knew better, she said, she would at least give rewriting the assignment a chance before deciding to drop the course.
I’ve been teaching in the English Department of the community college that employs me for twenty years now, and I am still surprised – though perhaps I shouldn’t be – that it’s the students who are used to getting good grades with whom I have to have the above conversation. Not that these students are the only ones who fail to take assignments seriously, but they tend to be the ones who come to my office either, like my student from Senegal, more or less destroyed by the poor grade I have given them or convinced that what they need is to get from me my personal “Student Road Map to the A.” Student who are looking for the latter tend to argue that my standards are not just different from those of all the other teachers who have graded their work in the past; my standards are much, much tougher. This was what the second student who came to see me said. An African-American man who wants to be an inventor and a consultant, his first words after he sat down across from me were, “I don’t understand what you don’t understand about what I wrote.” It’s a fair question, and one I usually look forward to answering because it can lead to real dialogue and real learning on the part of the student, except that – at least at first – this student was more interested in persuading me that the strategy he used in his letter should have gotten him a better grade than the C I gave him than in hearing my explanation for why it didn’t. I explained, giving several examples to illustrate my point, that his letter was neither well-focused nor well-enough substantiated and organized to convince me, were he truly applying, to admit him to my class. Each time I paused to see if he understood what I was saying, though, he responded by explaining in turn that his goal in the letter was for me to get to know him as the impressive person he is – that is my paraphrase of what he said; he was not, in fact, arrogant enough to say it like that – because that knowledge, he felt, ought to have been sufficient for the letter to succeed. When I suggested that asking me to read five paragraphs of often irrelevant detail about himself before he even mentioned the fact that he was applying to my class might be asking a bit too much, he explained, again, how important it was for me to get to know him. “I still don’t understand why you don’t get this,” he said.
So I went over one paragraph with him in extreme detail. I showed him how adding specific examples to support the claims he was making about himself, while at the same time taking out the irrelevant information, would make his letter persuasive. He understood, or at least seemed to understand, but instead of taking this understanding and going back to rewrite his letter, he tried to push me into doing the same thing with every other paragraph. When I told him I would not do that, that he needed to take what he’d learned and try to apply it – to do, in other words, his own work – he said, “I’m beginning to understand what you want from me, and so what I need to know now is how to get you to give me an A, and the only way I am going to learn that is if you go over each paragraph with me.”
What I need to know is how to get you to give me an A. I recognize that students want good grades; I acknowledge the emotional validity of feeling like, if you are paying for an education, part of what you should be receiving is a roadmap to the grades you want to receive; and I certainly appreciate that there are students for whom the practical value of their grades outweighs, legitimately and reasonably, whatever value I might place on some ideal notion of what teaching and learning ought to be about. As I see it, though, my job is not to show students how to get A’s. My job is to teach, to help students learn, which means that, on one level, it doesn’t really matter to me if a student moves from a D to B, or from a C to a C+, or from a B to an A. What matters is that they have moved, that they are better writers when they leave my class than they were when they entered. It’s not that I am indifferent to students’ desire and/or need for good grades, but learning to write is not like filling in a blank or coloring in a circle on an exam where there is only one right answer to each question and so the formula for getting an A is clear. Rather, learning to write is a lot like growing up. No matter how much advice and guidance we get, the fact is that we all grow up in our own way, at our own pace, and some of us never manage it at all. » Read the rest of this entry «