X-Envelope-to: MBU-L@TTUVM1
X-VMS-To: IN%"MBU-L@TTUVM1"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Sat, 29 Aug 1992 22:24:00 EDT
From:         "Thomas Reber @ English Department" <REBER@CANISIUS.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: comments

Russell,

Sorry about that last truncated msg.  I sent it accidentally by hitting the
wrong key.  What I was trying to say was that I was interested in your
approach of having the students be the audience for each other.  You say,
"Just find a situation in which something depends on their finding something out


and explaining it to somebody else." Would this kind of approach work in all
writing courses (all situations)?  I can see how this approach might work
in some courses, and how it might tap the social energies students and their
peers seem to have so much of.  I try to tap these energies through peer
review sessions and small group presentations, which often go well, but
which sometimes seem to me to show that most students are not very
demanding in eliciting/evaluating the intellectual production of their
peers.  Perhaps part of the problem lies in the way I implement these
group activities, or in my simply having expectations that are too high, but it
seems to me that a good deal of involvement (including comments) by the
teacher is necessary if part of the role of a teacher is, as I see it, to
help introduce the student to a new discourse community--an academic one.
Call me elitist, but if I were simply to ask my students in my writing
course to find out what a poem means and tell their peers, I would not
expect much depth in the written product that would emerge.  But maybe I
am twisting your meaning here . . . .

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
They can write ten pages a day and it would
be better than what they usually do now . . . but it would be even
better if someone actually read it, and if both writer and reader cared
whether the reader understood it.  But of course, given the kind of
numbers writing teachers are talking about, there's just no possibility
for that audience to be the teacher (even if the students really did
believe we were interested in what they had to say -- a conclusion that
marginal comments makes very unlikely).
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have two comments about your comments here. First, the smaller point:
I don't agree that marginal comments make it unlikely that students
believe we are interested in what they had to say.  Attempting to engage
the student with written comments on a paper's ideas is a mark of respect for
the writer, and, while my students have not always _liked_ my comments,
they have tended, I think, to see them as evidence that I take their
ideas more seriously than if I had written no comments or only superficial
comments ("good start" at the end of the paper, etc.). But the larger point,
of course, is the one about numbers. With four sections of up to 100 students,
I find, as both you and Robert Royar say, that really attending to students
['] writing is a problem.  I begin to see myself as an
administrator with overflowing "in boxes" that need to be emptied before
the next batch of paper comes in, rather than a teacher, and I can forget
trying to remember any paper I have read other than the very best and the
very worst.
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU