Richard Jeffrey Newman

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.

One word: pla­gia­rism. I spend a great deal of time at the begin­ning of the semes­ter, on the first day actu­ally, talk­ing about it, explain­ing it and mak­ing sure my stu­dents under­stand my pol­icy, which is: If I catch you will­fully try­ing to fool me by pass­ing off some­one else’s work as your own, you will fail for the semes­ter, no sec­ond chances. I lec­ture in excru­ci­at­ing detail – with more than a few exam­ples of stu­dents who were pass­ing (one was even get­ting an A) whom I failed because I caught them will­fully pla­gia­riz­ing – about why I take it per­son­ally when some­one tried to do this: because it means that he or she thinks either that I am stu­pid, that I won’t know the dif­fer­ence between her or his writ­ing, which I have been read­ing all semes­ter, and the professional-grade writ­ing that stu­dents inevitably hand in when they pla­gia­rize, or that I don’t care enough about my job actu­ally to pay atten­tion to the work that stu­dents hand in. I repeat this warn­ing sev­eral times dur­ing the semes­ter, with a shorter ver­sion of the same lec­ture, espe­cially when I assign any paper that involves even the small­est amount of research. I even tell my stu­dents how I am going to catch them. Most pla­gia­rism these days involves stu­dents cut­ting and past­ing stuff from the web, and if it’s on the web, I tell them, Google can find it. “Please,” I ask them, “don’t put me in the posi­tion of hav­ing to fail you. If you are hav­ing prob­lems with an assign­ment, come talk to me. As long as you are some­one who has been com­ing to class and doing the work – even if you’ve been get­ting D’s – I’d rather work some­thing out (an exten­sion, what­ever) to make it pos­si­ble for you to do the work than to fail you for plagiarism.”

Inevitably, though, there are stu­dents who don’t believe me or who think they are smarter than I am, and this semes­ter is no excep­tion. I have caught three pla­gia­rists in my Tech­ni­cal Writ­ing class, and it’s really piss­ing me off. First, the assign­ment they pla­gia­rized – writ­ing a set of instruc­tions, a descrip­tion and a process analy­sis – while not nec­es­sar­ily easy, is not hard to do well on if you take the time to do it right. Sec­ond, two of the stu­dents were clearly pass­ing; one of them was on his way to get­ting a B. (The other would have ended up with a D+ or a C, depend­ing on how he did on his final paper.) Third, the remain­ing pla­gia­rist does not have Eng­lish as his first lan­guage, and so the work he’s been hand­ing me has not only been sprin­kled with the kinds of gram­mat­i­cal errors one would expect from some­one writ­ing in his sec­ond lan­guage; even when his writ­ing was gram­mat­i­cal, it had a slight “accent” that betrayed his coun­try of ori­gin. So what did he hand me? A gram­mat­i­cally per­fect descrip­tion of a light bulb, as if I wouldn’t notice the difference.

All three of them are going to fail for the semester.

And now that I have vented, I am going to bed. I need the sleep.

Edited because of pri­vacy issues.

Accord­ing to one of my stu­dents, in a paper he wrote meant to talk about the dif­fer­ent approaches to his­tory in Max­ine Hong Kingston’s China Men and Island, edited by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, China has his­tor­i­cally been infused with a “racial ide­ol­ogy of male mas­culin­ity” and that is why so many “Chi­nese Amer­i­cans believe in racial inequal­ity.” I wish I could quote the entire two sen­tences for you; they are truly pre­cious. It’s not just the poor qual­ity of this writ­ing per se that gets to me, though, it’s that phrases like “racial ide­ol­ogy of male mas­culin­ity” appear all over the essays I have been get­ting from far too many of the stu­dents in the lit­er­a­ture class I have been teach­ing – as if the stu­dents were choos­ing one word from col­umn A, two from col­umn B, etc. in order to come up with a sen­tence that sounds so intel­lec­tu­ally pro­found that I won’t notice it doesn’t really mean any­thing. It is depress­ing and debil­i­tat­ing when the papers handed in by my fresh­man com­po­si­tion stu­dents are, in many ways, bet­ter writ­ten than the ones handed in by the stu­dents in an advanced lit­er­a­ture class.

I’m not sure what I feel like writ­ing about tonight, just that I feel like writ­ing. It was a hec­tic day. I woke up early to get a lit­tle bit of work done on my Shah­nameh intro­duc­tion – noth­ing new, mostly typ­ing up notes I took while I was in DC last Wednes­day – and then, after I dropped my son off at school and came back here to make myself break­fast, I rushed out to school to get some paper­work and email­ing done before my first class of the day, Asian Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture. I gave my stu­dents the assign­ment for The Joy Luck Club, which most of them have not yet fin­ished read­ing. That’s okay, though, since they will have two class peri­ods to work through the short essay ques­tions in groups before they go home to write the assign­ment up. If they don’t fin­ish the book dur­ing that time, it’s their own fault.

Teach­ing Asian Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture has been inter­est­ing. First, it’s not my field, which has meant that I’ve had to learn not just about the three eth­nic Asian com­mu­ni­ties whose lit­er­a­ture we will be read­ing – Chi­nese Amer­i­can, Fil­ipino Amer­i­can and Iran­ian Amer­i­can – but also about the field of eth­nic Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture in gen­eral. It’s nice, for a change, to be teach­ing some­thing that teaches me some­thing, but that is not actu­ally what inter­ests me tonight, sit­ting here in my office while my son goes to sleep and my wife takes a shower. The fact that I am teach­ing a course that is not in my field has started me think­ing about just what, pre­cisely, my field is. Because it’s been some time since I’ve felt like I have one.

In terms of cre­den­tials, my field is Teach­ing Eng­lish to Speak­ers of Other Lan­guages. That’s what it says on my Master’s Degree, and that cre­den­tial is largely why I was hired by the col­lege where I now teach. Indeed, I spent my first five to seven years there doing almost noth­ing else but the work of the ESL pro­gram that the insti­tu­tion was in the process of build­ing. I loved the work, though I have not taught ESL classes for some time now and don’t plan to any­time in the near future. Indeed, if I were to be com­pletely hon­est, I think going into TESOL was, in the first place, a way for me to avoid the fact that what I really wanted to do was write.

I fin­ished my TESOL MA in 1987, three years after I grad­u­ated from Stony Brook Uni­ver­sity with a dou­ble major in Eng­lish and Lin­guis­tics. In Fall 1984, right after my senior year, I enrolled in the Cre­ative Writ­ing MA at Syra­cuse Uni­ver­sity – this was before they had an MFA – where I stud­ied with Tess Gal­lagher, Philip Booth and Hay­den Car­ruth. I lasted just one year. I was 22 at the time, and I was sure that writ­ing poetry was what I wanted to do with my life. I fig­ured I’d make my liv­ing as a teacher, but it was as a writer that I intended to leave my mark. I t was not long before cir­cum­stances at Syra­cuse con­spired to make me real­ize how young I was, and how arrogant.

It was Philip Booth who sat me down towards the end of the Spring 1985 semes­ter and told me that, while I cer­tainly knew how to han­dle a line of verse, and while I also very clearly knew my way around a sen­tence, there was not yet a real cen­ter to my work, no set of con­cerns out of which my poetry grew. That absence, he sug­gested, would make it very hard to write the the­sis – a book of poetry – that I would have to write in my sec­ond year. What I needed, he said, was to live a lit­tle bit and there was just no get­ting around the fact that liv­ing would take time. So why didn’t I take some time away from school, he offered, and see what that did to my writ­ing. Mr. Booth’s words – I never got to the point where I felt com­fort­able call­ing him Philip – meant a great deal to me, and if I had to say now what I learned from them it would be that you don’t have to go to school to become a writer.

So I went to my grad­u­ate advi­sor and told him I wanted to take a year off from school to work on my writ­ing. I was not expect­ing his response. “If you want to go com­mune with your muse,” he sneered at me (and, yes, it was a sneer), “that’s your busi­ness, but you came to school – or at least I assume you came to school – to learn some­thing and that’s not going to hap­pen sit­ting alone beneath a tree try­ing to cap­ture the wind in a song!” This was dur­ing what I have heard peo­ple refer to as The The­ory Wars, when lit­er­ary the­o­rists and cre­ative writ­ing fac­ulty were, quite lit­er­ally, at war with each other over the legit­i­macy of their dif­fer­ent pur­suits. My grad­u­ate advi­sor was clearly in the the­o­rists’ camp, and I guess I have him to thank that not only did I take time off from Syra­cuse, but also that I never went back. I think I have led a much more inter­est­ing life than if I’d stayed at Syra­cuse and got­ten my MA, though it is also true that if I’d known then what I know now about acad­e­mia, and if I’d known then that I would end up as an aca­d­e­mic, I might have made very dif­fer­ent choices.

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 rate​mypro​fes​sors​.com – any­thing – as long as what they write con­tains the following:

1. An expla­na­tion of the course’s rel­e­vance to either their career goals or their aca­d­e­mic careers;
2. A dis­cus­sion of what they per­ceive to be their strengths and weak­nesses as writers;
3. 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 «