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Date:         Mon, 28 Dec 1992 14:01:24 -0700
From:         CROWLEY@NAUVAX.BITNET
Subject:      Standardizing Composition Classes

I like Russ's analogy:  having Freshman English in your curriculum is like
having a defense plant in your town.  Here are my reasons for advocating that
universities drop the universal requirement in composition:
        1.  Quality of curriculum:  recent research by Richard Larson for the
Ford Foundation establishes that half of the introductory composition courses
in the country use a current-traditional syllabus and materials (you know,
exposition the first semester, research paper the second).  Half of these (ie
twenty-five percent of the total) concentrate instruction on mechanics.  If
a quarter-million students take Freshman English every semester (by publishers'
estimates) that means that between 75,000 and 80,000 students are drilled in
grammar, spelling, and usage every academic semester.  They are not taught to
write.  A very real problem facing those of us who profess composition studies
is that while many of us, like David Schwalm, put together exciting programs
that teach students how to write and TAs how to teach (something TAs get
nowhere else in the academy, by the way), at least half of the courses/programs
in the country are an intellectual embarrassment.  I know we don't like to
think about that, much less mention it, but there it is.
        2.  Ethics of the requirement.  The course I described above has an
ethics;  its ethics is that students adopt the discursive niceties preferred
in the academy or they go elsewhere.  Now I know that there are some who would
deny that this formalist course has an ethics.  But they are wrong--the
traditional course sends all sorts of messages to students about what is
valued in the academy and how the academy values them and their teachers, who
are, after all, among the lowest paid and most ill-treated people in the
institution.  The fact that this course is required all the while it offers
a demeaning and outmoded curriculum is not lost on most students.  The
requirement says:  buy this program, or you can't be certified as one of us.
All of you have to buy this program (unless of course you opt to be an
English major--an exception to the requirement made by English departments
that I find very suspicious indeed).  To show you how important it is that
you buy into this program, we will put you through the humiliating ritual of
writing a placement exam, along with thousands of other students, all of whose
names will be blotted from their papers when they are read.  Those who manage
to pass the exam have got it, those who don't must be remediated.  We won't
tell you, of course, how to "get it" or how those who "have it" "got it."
You're just supposed to know.  If you're a minority student, of course,
you're used to this feeling of not knowing what it is you're supposed to know
that you don't.
     3.  Administration of required programs:  none of you on this board have
to be told about the love-hate relationship that comp directors have with their
departments and universities;  about the working conditions of part-timers and
TAs.  If universities were to drop the requirement, sane planning for numbers
of sections could take place, since WPA's or chairs would be in control of
saying how many sections of the course could be offered, respectably staffed.
With advance planning available, some of the biggest gripes of part-timers
could be addressed:  they'd know far ahead of time whether they would be
teaching, and what, instead of being told the night before, or two days into
the semester, that they'll be teaching a section of FE.  Without the
requirement, we can drop the nightmare of placement, which is after all our
complicity with the academy's love of hierarchy.  Students who need writing
instruction can be advised into elective courses or can self-elect.
     4.  Institutional politics:  I have concluded that the one thing that
makes FE different from all other college courses is the fact that it is
required.  If we don't require it, perhaps (this is a big perhaps) it might
assume the status enjoyed by other university courses.  Its history mitigates
against its ever being respected, and if we do drop it, I expect that someone
else will try to re-establish the teaching of mechanics under some other
venue, because that hoop-jumping ritual is so firmly entrenched in academic
consciousness as the way we certify folks for admission to our ranks.
     Enough said?  The Grinch.
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU