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I teach developmental composition. In my class, I require 7 essays and 3 rewrites, with a fourth rewrite as optional. Most of the other faculty require between 4 and 6 essays and between 0 and 3 rewrites.

When I was much younger I required 14 essays in a 16-week semester.

I would like to encourage my students to write better, while not having to grade quite so many papers. So when I was reading the CHE forathis post, it caught my attention.

I assign a paper due on the first day of the second week. Five pages based on a unique set of questions over a short book. I mark the s*** out of the student papers and grade them fiercely, using only two grades–B, and Rewrite (sometimes I don’t give any Bs). I prepare a handout of the most common errors, and review them with the class. Then I hand around a piece of my own writing with tons of editor’s marks on it. As the students look it over I talk about the importance of rewriting to the writing process. At this point one student will say “This is going to be bad, isn’t it?” Then, with jokes and encouragement, I hand back the papers. If they got a “Rewrite” they must rewrite the paper, attach the original, and get it back to me in a week. If they got a B they can rewrite if they like. Only the grade on the rewrite counts. “You can all still get an A!” I tell them.

They nearly all do a fine job on the rewritten papers (except for the 10% of the class I lose–bonus!). This reinforces something I have long thought, that most students can write better than they normally do write. You just have to show them the fear.

I usually assign two more 5 page essays during the semester. The second essays are so much better than the first! I still grade them pretty hard and assign a handful of rewrites, but more As. The third essays I just glance and grade, generously.

I see dramatic improvement in student writing over the course of the semester, and even more so when students take multiple courses with me. And the policy has additional benefits–it drives the slackers out of my classes right at the start of the quarter, it causes the rest of the students to prioritize my course over their other classes, and (counterintuitive thought it may seem) it gets me great student evaluations. And nicely written ones as well.

I like this idea. I think I will institute it during my summer class with freshman composition.

It also seems that it would encourage the students to think of themselves as part of the academic discourse community, if I told them about revise and resubmits in publishing.

A different approach, and one I have used for the exact reasons specified, was recommended by another forumite:

One thing that’s worked well for me in the past has been to allow rewrites of papers, but to average the original grade together with the new grade. It works for two reasons: (1) students have an incentive to do well on the original draft in the first place, and (2) the slackers decide that it simply isn’t worth the effort for only a slight grade increase, but it still makes the grade-conscious students happy. In my class of 24 last summer, maybe six students decided to do revisions, and they all did a good job with it.

I require 3 rewrites for my developmental students. They need the help and the experience. I offer them an optional rewrite. I haven’t gotten those yet, so I don’t know how many took me up on it. Based on past experience, I would say not very many.

The Hemingway Conference was amazing. If you get the chance to go in 2012 to Michigan, you should show up. You’ll learn more than you thought there was to know. Much of it will be very useful and it might change the way you view the world.

I was set to write everything I heard, but when my plane touched down in the States, my mother was in ICU. I spent eight hours a day with her for eighteen days. Then she died.

My plan is to write a requiem here, even though Mother did not teach English or college.

But I wanted to post on something I realized this week and that I think is important.

I enjoy The Chronicle of Higher Education’s forums. There is a lot of interesting stuff there and people have the most interesting questions. I learn a lot about the academy in general and things that will help me in particular.

There are some fora that are all about helping you get an academic full-time tenure-track job. They are very useful.

However, some of the forumites believe that a ft tt position is more important than anything else. It trumps being with your children. It trumps being with your family. Tt jobs should never be left except for other tt jobs.

I disagree with that. Some things are more important than a job, even a cream-of-the-crop dream job.

My mother was 16 years older than me. She was one of my dearest friends for about 25 years. And she taught me, through her life, what was important.

My family, my spouse and sons, my parents and siblings, my nieces and nephew, are more important than a tenure-track position. Even one that allows me to work with graduate students and help prepare future teachers. Even one that caters to my desire to learn by paying for tuition and supporting extensive conference attendance.

If I, like my mother, am on my deathbed in 16 years, most of my students, no matter how influenced, will not be in mourning. They will be sad but remain essentially untouched.

My family, however, would notice my absence. They would miss my presence. They would remember me and weep. (No keening, though, since I found out this week that includes drinking the blood of the dead. None of that.)

I would like a ft tt job. I would love to have one where the full range of my interests and abilities was encouraged.

But there is no job in the world that could replace my family.

I am grateful for that fact.

If you have family, I hope that it is the same for you.

Teachers best ideas for working with your students can be found at Jedi Mind Tricks (and there are some good ones).

Teachers helpful hints for getting done what you need to get done can be found at Jedi Mind Tricks you can use on yourself.

For the future, have you considered doing a mid-semester review by which your students can give feedback on what is going well and not so well in the class? These tend to improve your end-of-semester evaluations for at least two reasons:

1. You can make some changes mid-semester that actually improve student learning.

2. Students feel that you have listened to them and thus will rate you higher.

I know it sounds like a fluff exercise, but in a few cases, I had no idea that some issues were really hindering student learning. I made some changes that did not affect the integrity of the course, but that helped students a great deal. In one class, almost 50% of the students independently named one thing that was really bothering them. Fixing it was easy. My course evals for the end of the semester for that class were particularly high.

(BTW, I have students me what is going well in addition to what can be improved. I tell them that this way, if 5 students don’t like something, but 25 do, that gives me better information than if I had not asked what students felt was going well.)

I really like this idea, which came from Avaya on the Chronicle’s fora..

I think I will institute that this semester.

If there have been two editions or two translations of the work you are teaching, use both. Have the students read the two and look for differences between them. This can lead to some very interesting discussions.

Make sure you know, though, whether the first edition was a pirated work or a first-version. Was the second version a reworking or an official version? What were the differences between the two translations?

Some places these might be used:
Leaves of Grass Obviously he wrote various versions of this.
Gulliver’s Travels Though both versions were by Swift, he did make some substantial changes in the framing of the story in the second version.
Judith Reading the Vulgate version and the Old English poem give entirely different feels to the story.
Beowulf Reading Heaney’s and Raffel’s version, for example. Doing those two would give very different flavors to the story. Even simply limiting the Raffel to the sections on the web would be useful, and easier for our students to digest.

1. Do not put all your major papers in the same three weeks. If you get slippage in any of your classes, because of the flu or a hurricane or students not understanding, you may end up with several at the same time.

2. Do not wait till the end of the semester for all long papers to be due. At least schedule them one month before the final so you will have time to grade them.

3. If at all possible, move the major paper to the beginning of the course. Students who are not serious will drop and you will have fewer papers to grade throughout the semester.

a happy file is a folder or box where you deposit records of happy events, thank you notes that touch you, and other tokens of your successes. On the days you can’t face the world, you pull out the happy file and review the contents. You’ll feel better. I have a work one and a home one. Sappy notes from kids, a special note from hubby, etc. They provide a real boost in the dark days that we all face now and then. They can also help validate your self worth when it takes a beating.

I used to have one of these and then … I forgot to update it and now I have no idea where it is.

I could have really taken advantage of it this semester. Perhaps I should reinstitute it.

from the Chronicle’s fora.

Too bad I don’t remember these things before the evaluations are due… Maybe I’ll make a note to myself to check back here from time to time.

These great (and funny) ideas are from the Chronicle’s forums.

On eval forms, students will parrot back anything you tell them during the semester.

One semester I apologized profusely when I didn’t get assignments back to the students particularly quickly. That semester, the comments were all about “she should get our papers back to us more quickly.”

The following semester, I was similarly slow, but stressed how concerned I was about giving each paper individual attention. That semester, the comments were all about “she gives each paper individual attention.”

One semester, I had to work under the constraints of a hideous department grading scale, under which anything under 95% was an A-. I covered my butt with the students by telling them that this grading scale was a departmental thing, and I would do things differently, but… The comments that semester were all about “the departmental grading scale is wack.”

The semester after that, I stressed to the students that for this particular course, a more stringent grading scale was imperative since these were real-world skills they were learning–and the real world was far more unforgiving than any professor could ever hope to be. The comments that semester were all about “thank you for preparing us for real-world standards.”

Want good evaluations? Tell them what you want them to write. Not the day of, of course, but throughout the semester. They’re listening, at least to that part.

And it doesn’t hurt (not just for evals–just in general) to mention at the end of any particularly successful class meeting that you appreciated their preparation and willingness to engage. “Good thinking today! Thanks.”

and

Yes, this is true. They’ll write pretty much whatever you tell them as long as you can make them think it’s their own idea – I think it’s related to the way they ask you about whether everything they do is “what you want”. I tell them how happy I am to be there, and how I’m looking forward to spending the semester with them, and they say things like, “mad_doctor is so passionate about teaching” and “it’s great to have a professor who cares about his students”. I also make a point of telling them how I’m impressed by how much they have learned by comparison to other classes, so they know how to answer the “How much did you learn?” question on the eval. I actually really do grade papers quickly, so I don’t have to make anything up, but I’m sure to tell them how hard I worked to provide timely feedback for them, and they respond with, “mad_doctor is one of the hardest working professors in the college”.

Students aren’t particularly fond of the research paper, but they need to learn how to do research and report it to be successful academics. When they are being asked to do something that is “hard” for them, it can be useful to maximize the use they get out of the project.

When my students are doing the research for their long papers (on a controversial issue) I require that they find sources both for the side they agree with and against that side. I want them to understand the entire issue and not just the side that they agree with.

Then the question becomes how to have them use both sides so that they actually see the strength of the opposition’s arguments.

Possibilities:

• Have them write the research paper from the side they disagree with first, then write the one they agree with.
• Allow them to write the research paper they agree with, then have them compose a short refutation, as if from the opposing side, arguing against one of the points they made in their paper.
• Have the first paper be a compare/contrast on the arguments on both sides of the topic. For example, “Global warming may or may not be caused by humans.” and then present the arguments from their research.

These multiple exercises, or even combinations thereof, allow the students to become more familiar with the arguments on both sides and encourage them to understand their side’s arguments better.

The photo is from Ricko on flickr.