After Developmental Writing: A Letter of Recommendation

It’s rare that I have the pleasure to write letters of recommendation. I don’t teach the kinds of “content” courses in which advanced students develop their sense of the discipline of English, imagine themselves as English majors, and ask me as their professor of British Lit or whatever to write something to help them transfer to a four-year school. Often, I teach developmental students who are sort of surprised to find themselves in college at all, or who are so un-savvy about what college is about that they wind up taking my class whether they need it or not.

In Fall 2011, I had a magical class. You know the kind, if you are a teacher – it had very little to do with me, just chemistry among the students. They were each others’ role models. They supported each other, gave each other feedback, did everything I asked them to do, tried new ideas and stretched themselves. A strikingly large number of these students boosted themselves over the barrier to English 1101 a semester ahead of schedule. Keith was one of them. He was just barely ready, but he passed his exit essay fair and square.

I remember one essay of Keith’s from that developmental class. Describing how he felt lifting weights, he wrote, “I don’t want to be a mean guy,” and explained how working out helped him work out his frustrations and keep his emotions on an even keel. I loved that line then, and I still love it now. It says so much about the person Keith is.

Keith spent the next two semesters fighting for a respectable C in his first-year comp classes. He took both classes with me – I think he was afraid to break the spell. I don’t blame him. His efforts were uneven and halting. He struggled to understand the readings, to catch onto the genres our writing projects were based on. Interestingly, I either don’t remember or never knew whether he had documented learning disabilities, and I don’t recall any particular story about why he was so unprepared for college-level literacy. I just remember what a hard time he would have as we started each new writing project – his early drafts undeveloped, his grasp of new concepts weak and partial – and how steadily and slowly he would work, pushing himself to do more.

Keith just never gave up. I always tell my students that if they come to every class and hand in every assignment, they can be pretty sure of passing the class. Keith is proof positive of this principle. Whether or not he really understood what was wanted, he attempted every assignment. So he was always building on something – never on nothing. By the time the paper was due, he always had something prepared that at least approximated the assignment.

This was never more true than at the end of English 1102, our “research paper class.” Keith’s final essay, an exploration of the relationship between childhood obesity and bullying, earned only 320 points out of 500. In the comments, I wrote, “I greatly respect the effort you have made here. You really tried to fulfill the spirit of the assignment, and you tried a lot of new strategies over the course of the semester. I think you have learned a lot, and I hope you will not be too discouraged by this grade. This class is a really big stretch for you.” Despite the low grade on his final paper, Keith earned a C in the course because he had doggedly accumulated every possible point, all semester, showing up for every class and completing every homework assignment.

A couple of weeks ago, I bumped into Keith. I was really happy to see him – that patient, cheerful, not-mean guy I had spent three semesters with – and he asked me to write his letter of recommendation to Columbia College in Chicago. I had to do a little research and a little soul-searching to get this letter right. Keith is never going to be anyone’s academic star – but what a star he is in his own way. I wrote the letter and mailed it along with a prayer that I had done justice to Keith. Columbia College, please may you recognize something among my words that reflects the character of this young man.

More placement test angst: where does it end?

That student who was looking for the lucky break in my post from a few weeks ago – she found it. She went to our Testing Center and took the Compass test, and she passed with a score of 81, well above our cut-off. I was surprised, to tell you the truth. So much for what I think I know. She said that when she took the test, she applied what she had learned in my class. Hmmmm. Considering that I don’t directly teach how to succeed on a multiple-choice test of grammar and style, I guess I should be impressed that she figured out how to transfer the lessons I taught over to that different context. So now she jumps the second semester of developmental writing and goes straight into our first-semester composition course.

I congratulated her – sincerely. But I am left with many questions. This young woman may very well pass English 1101, depending on what teacher she has, and what standards or what level of attention are applied in her section of the course. Frankly, I am very ambivalent about forcing any student who has any basic level of literacy to stay in developmental writing for two semesters. And, considering how determined she was to get out of the second semester, it seems likely that she would have been a torture to whatever teacher she had next. (It could have been me.)

However, many faculty in our department are understandably frustrated with the very uneven batches of students in our composition sequence, and this story is emblematic for me. A student who is ill-prepared for essay writing passes a fairly difficult multiple choice exam which in no way resembles the actual writing tasks she will face in the target course. At the same time, students who don’t manage the multiple choice exam well are dumped into a writing task (the dreaded e-write, which I have written about previously), which cannot give us any useful results. Then there are the thousands (literally) of students who have completed the ACT with a composite of 20, which marks them as “prepared” for college coursework, and so we let them into English 1101, even though we have no way of knowing whether they have ever in their sweet lives written an essay. (Once upon a time, Illinois high school students did the essay portion of the ACT, but then they decided it costs too much. Never mind – I would rather have a student who had no instruction in writing in high school at all than a student who was trained only to pass the ACT essay.)

Welcome to open admissions. Placement is chaos. Placement seems nearly random. Placement depends on so many disparate factors that it seems impossible to sort them all out. Frequently – tragically – placement depends on a high school senior who never really planned to go to college, who arrives at our front door somehow and enrolls, who is sent to the Testing & Assessment Center (oooh, doesn’t that sound FUN??) to take tests in Math, Reading, and Writing, on the spot, whose mom/sibling/buddy is impatiently waiting to give them a ride home, who does not really understand what she/he is doing, who haphazardly completes high-stakes standardized assessments that he/she later will only have (maybe) one chance to re-take. Yeah – you get the picture.

It’s possible, I admit, that there could be some reasonable ways to parse all this out. But it’s not clear to me at the moment what committee should or would undertake to understand the experiences of thousands of community college freshmen entering their first semester of composition – what those composite ACT scores might really mean in terms of how well prepared they are for English 1101, which students do succeed there and why, which ones actually benefit from developmental writing, etc. It makes my head hurt just thinking about it. I’m teaching a 5-4 load of writing courses this year, and this does not make me yearn for any committee I sit on to take on the kinds of big sweeping questions we should really be asking.

Struggling with sources

My developmental students are currently working on a unit modeled on impressions I have gathered of how other faculty in my department teach English 1101. We are working with a set of three readings. The primary one is “The Writing Revolution,” an article in the October 2012 Atlantic Monthly. I first heard of this article on a writing program listserv – it’s about a high school on Staten Island called New Dorp, whose principal, upon realizing that her school was in danger of extinction because of poor performance, embarked on a challenging school-wide project of reform based on Writing Across the Curriculum. The article includes commentary about writing achievement at the national level, and in a smallish way, profiles a student who exemplifies the reasons for and the results of the reform at this particular school. It somewhat bashes/blames teachers for the school’s failings – but also portrays hard work done by teachers to develop the new curriculum.

I thought the article told a story that my students might relate to, and I was happy to see that the Atlantic website was also publishing a series of responses. I selected two of those, including an interview with Erin Gruwell, the real-life teacher whose work was adapted for the film Freedom Writers, starring Hilary Swank. I printed a total of about 15 pages of these articles and quietly made 45 copies of reading packets (back to back, of course) in our workroom, in three different sessions to avoid tying up a copier for too long and drawing unwanted attention.

I passed the packets out to my students with a lot of instructions for reading and writing responses. They have had opportunities to practice double-entry note-taking, to summarize, to paraphrase, as well as to develop comparisons based on their own high school experiences. As I keep saying, college courses frequently ask students to read and understand (and demonstrate their knowledge of) source readings, as well as to find their own ideas in response, to write from their own perspectives and experiences.

This is a somewhat different approach for me in developmental writing. In my writing courses in general, I dislike restricting students’ choice of topics and sources. In my developmental course last spring, wanting my students to work with readings, I experimented with a short research paper unit in which I gave students too much freedom to select their own sources. They found scholarly journal articles that they had no hope of understanding. They found junk websites and content farms, covered with ads, written for anybody by anybody, which they cited just as seriously as the journal articles. Honestly, the USA Today articles were golden – which did not seem to me a good sign of instructional quality.

I like this approach better. Luckily, my hunch that my students would relate to these articles was pretty good. The tie-in with Freedom Writers helped, but the main article caught a lot of my students’ attention. Many have strong opinions about writing instruction, especially what worked and didn’t work for them in high school. They have ideas of their own in response to the readings. Many of them are drawn to Gruwell’s defense of memoir writing, but they also see the value of the style of academic writing that took center stage in the reforms at New Dorp. They are still free to develop their own thesis statements and to use the articles as either support or contrast to their own points. So far so good.

Some of the problems that have come to light in their early drafts have fascinated me. For example, some students seem not to catch on to the “before-and-after” nature of the New Dorp story. Several of them were very drawn to a quote from a teacher who admitted that she thought students were lazy, that it was the students’ fault that they didn’t get it. I understand my students’ indignation at her comment, but without a sense of the story overall, my students used this inappropriately in their own drafts – as if all teachers at New Dorp, then, now, and forever, believe their students to be lazy. At a more technical level, in some cases, my students did not use verb tenses correctly to convey what HAD BEEN true at New Dorp, before the reform, in comparison to what WAS (or IS?) true, after the reform.

Interestingly, most students know how to quote. They use quotation marks and they copy a phrase, a sentence, or a short passage accurately for the most part. (I know – copy/paste – but I’ll take it, at least it’s accurate.) A few of them know how to paraphrase, or at least they can tell me that they are supposed to “write it in your own words.” This is easy to work with.

A larger problem for many of my students is the balance between using the sources and drawing on their experiences and observations from their own schooling. A large proportion of them want to do one or the other. Either it’s personal, or it’s source-based – it’s a struggle to imagine doing both. So we are looking at examples of drafts where I can see a little of both, and I point out the boundary lines, and show them where they could add an author tag or a citation to clarify what’s what. I show them problematic sentences that mix the writer’s comment with a fact from the article, such as “It’s crazy that 82% of the students couldn’t read at their grade level.” How should Michael revise this sentence to show what part of it is drawn from the article? Then, how should he express his opinion about that fact?

We’re also discussing the “drop your essay in the hallway” test. If you dropped your essay in the hallway in the BIC (our main classroom building), I ask, could someone pick it up, understand it, and be interested? Why not? And how could you fix that?

Looking for the lucky break – instead of doing the work

This semester, our English faculty agreed (quite willingly, and thank you) to a plan by which our students in the upper level of developmental writing will transition to our English 1101 class simply by earning an A or B in the developmental course. No exit exam. We created a provision for students who are passing with a C to have their portfolios read, and we also will read portfolios of very strong students from the lower-level class whose instructors believe they are prepared for regular first-year comp.

Both students and instructors in the developmental courses have long bemoaned the exit exam. As instructors, we felt that looming test undermining our teaching. While we determinedly emphasized the writing process in class, our students dreaded that all-or-nothing, make-or-break essay exam, and many of them cared little for what we offered in class that did not directly, obviously, prepare them for that. They also complained (rightfully, in my opinion) that it was unfair to make them take the test if they were succeeding in class.

When I announced this policy change to my upper-level developmental class, a number of those students reacted with obvious elation. I was happy for them in particular. They were doing their assignments, willingly trying out the unfamiliar strategies and approaches I asked them to practice, and they were doing good work. Some weaker students in that class are now motivated to step up their efforts – and some of them are. Overall this is a strong class. It’s a hybrid class, so we meet only once a week, and I give them very structured assignments to post in Blackboard between classes. The ones who are working the format to their advantage are doing very well, and I am delighted with their progress.

I’m also teaching a lower-level developmental class – which I have described in previous posts as a group of football players who behave as though they have never been in a classroom along with their 13 needy classmates. I love this class too – but in a different way – kind of like you love your really annoying younger cousins, because you have to (to make your mother happy), and because you really, really want them to grow up and do credit to the family.

In this class, I announced the policy change and the elimination of the exit exam, and I was startled when two particular students in the corner wailed in dismay. It turned out that they wanted to take that exam – to have that “hail-mary pass” opportunity. Of those two students, there is a decent chance that one of them would have aced it, but it’s the other one whose reaction interests me. She is in the right class. Her writing is floppy and indistinct; she has ideas, but no discipline or structure, and she does not want to take responsibility for developing new skills. She was hoping for a lucky break – to have a good day, to take the test and pass it just by the skin of her teeth, to get the ego boost that she beat the test. She is very outspoken, but I would guess that she is not the only one with this fantasy (and it is a fantasy) about taking an exam and suddenly being deemed smarter than you were the day before.

In a telling moment, this student remarked to me during class a week or so later, as she was supposed to be working with another student on editing final drafts, that she wanted ME to edit her paper. In her midterm conference, I explained why it would be wrong for me to do that. She seemed to understand – “because then I wouldn’t learn anything,” she said. Indeed. And the same with that exit exam. Good riddance. Let’s do the work, not look for the lucky break.

Our new contract – and how it hurts

This is our first semester teaching under a new contract. In English composition at College of DuPage, we now teach 15 hours per semester, instead of 12. Historically, the load for teaching composition (including developmental writing) was set at 12 hours per semester in consideration of the heavy load of responding to student writing. We also had (and still have) smaller class sizes than instructors in humanities, foreign languages, social sciences, and other possibly somewhat comparable general education classes.

For those who wish to compare apples to apples, here are the numbers:

• 22 students per class in first-year composition @ 3 credit hours per class.
• 20 students per class in developmental writing @ 4 credits per class.
• Our credit hours must add up to at least 30 hours per year, and we have to teach a minimum of 15 hours in the first semester.
• If we go over 15 in the first semester, we are allowed to “bank” the overload in order to reduce our load in the second semester.

Because it’s tough to make the numbers come out exactly right when you mix 3’s and 4’s and try to make 15 within the reality of what courses are available, and because 15 is the minimum for Fall semester, I have 17 hours – five classes. Two of them are developmental (at two different levels; the higher one is a hybrid and the lower one is f2f). I have three sections of English 1102 (one f2f, one online 8-week session, and one online 16-week session). I know better than to whine too much about this in a blog that reaches anybody beyond my best friends – I know, I know. English faculty members all over the country bear this kind of load, and worse. The part-timers known as “freeway flyers” cover this kind of load, or more, on several different campuses.

That being said (How do you feel about that expression? If I had a linguistics blog, I would be writing about emerging new expressions like “that being said,” and newer usage contexts for “anymore,” which I find compelling and fascinating – but I digress).

That being said, I would like to enumerate a set of “costs” associated with my new course load.

1.  In reality, I now have five preps. Every single one of my classes, even if some of them supposedly “deliver” the same content, is being delivered in a different format. (How you do feel about the verb “deliver” in relation to your teaching? Do you feel that it adequately describes what you are doing when an online students emails you at 11pm and you stay up past any suitable bedtime for a 50-something-grey-haired lady and answer her? Is this a subject for a linguistics blog, or an advice column for some badly needed Ann Landers of online teaching? Sorry – I digress.)

Having five preps means that I have no choice but to multitask constantly – and inefficiently. I have to shift gears for every single class meeting. I have to shift gears every time I switch to a different class in Blackboard to post a lesson plan or grade an assignment. Please note that credible experimental research has documented the efficiency cost of this kind of constant switching.

2.  As I have mentioned in this blog once already, I have several football players in my f2f low-level developmental class – all of whom act like they have never been in a classroom before. I love these students. Each of them has enormous potential. Each of them is deeply intelligent in his own way, and each is on an amazing and powerful journey of self-discovery and growing up. I could spend all my time taking care of them, along with the rest of their class – thirteen other profoundly interesting, profoundly intelligent, and profoundly needy students. In past years, I would have held individual conferences with each of them by now to review their placement scores and discuss their progress in Unit 1. This year – not.

I am looking at the length of this post and thinking, that’s only point 2. Shit. I can’t give up the next one, though.

3. This week, the 6th week of the term, I got to about 10:30am on Wednesday, and I failed. My energy crashed to some point below my ankles as I sat in my office and considered going to the class with the football players and the thirteen other needy students – for two hours – and having anything left of myself at the end of the day. I literally became ill at the thought. I called myself in sick, thus canceling the class. I went home, took Zicam, lay down on my sofa, and fell asleep for a while. I did some reading and watched an Altman movie on cable (very healing, Cookie’s Fortune – I recommend it). I felt better in the evening, went to campus the next day, taught my morning class, and in the early afternoon crashed again and went home and took an even longer nap.

Now it is Friday, and that was yesterday. I don’t teach in the classroom on Fridays, I got a little more sleep last night, and I feel better today. But I am left pondering the costs of the fifth class. It’s not even midterm. I am already working most of my waking hours. The 8-week class will end in a few weeks, but what will be left of me? Will there be enough for the football players and their thirteen classmates? And for my other developmental class, which I have barely mentioned? (I am going to write about them next week – I promise). I will STILL have two other sections of English 1102 – and if you have ever taught the dreaded “research paper” class in first-year composition, you know those students are plenty needy too. Everyone needs so much. I am a good teacher. I know how to take care of them. But this is too much, and they are too many. How much can I give, when I am already this tired, and it’s not even October 1?

Showcase Day – and its fascinating after-effects

Frequently, I just try things. I have been teaching for a lot of years and I have a lot of cred. I can experiment without worrying if I’m going to bomb. For one thing, I have tenure. For another, I trust myself to think on my feet – if I see that one of my ideas is going down, I know I’ll figure something out. What’s the worst that could happen? My students see me mess up? If I’m honest with them and say, hey, I was trying something new and it didn’t go so well, let’s talk about how we could do it better next time, then I’m just modeling adulthood for them anyway.  And really, how is that wrong?

I don’t know where this particular idea came from, but if you want credit for it, feel free to leave a comment. So, one day, a couple of weeks ago, I heard myself saying to my students, “Next week, we’re going to have a showcase. We’re going to print out all your drafts and post them around the room and read them and make comments.” Huh? Really?? My students, bless their hearts, did not react much. It was early in the semester. They were still getting used to me. They were not sure what college was supposed to be like anyway – so they played along.

When Showcase Day arrived, I had no idea what to expect. To my shock – and awe – every student who was present in the room that day (18 out of 19!) had prepared their two Showcase Drafts. Within about ten minutes, we had tabletops, whiteboards, and even a stretch of empty wall taped up with their drafts, printed out in 14-point type, double spaced, for easier reading. I passed out five post-it notes to each student, along with a handout with some mocked-up comments for them to imitate. I asked them to read as many drafts as they could, and write at least five comments, following the models in the handout.

It won’t surprise you, probably, that they ran out of steam before I did. In half an hour, they had had enough, but I was still walking around, reading and marveling. There were bright-colored post-it notes all over the place. (If you want to cheer up your icky drab college classroom, get some post-it notes and/or whiteboard markers in goofy colors and give your students a reason to use them.)

When we debriefed afterwards, they admitted that the whole idea had made them nervous, but they thought it was fun when we actually did it. (Whew.) I asked them if they got ideas for revision from the comments they got on the post-it notes, and/or from reading other students’ drafts, and they swore they did. This was the part that worried me – I wondered, if they just got a feel-good vibe, would they still revise and improve their essays, or would they think, oh, everybody liked my draft, I’ll just hand it in like it is now? (I know, if you’re a writing teacher like me, you’re cringing and thinking the exact same thing.)

So I’m grading the final versions of these essays now, and I have to say, I am happy with the results. Each student was supposed to bring two different personal essay drafts to the Showcase (which they all did, I love this class), but they only had to revise one of them, and they got to pick for themselves. It seems like they got a lot of ideas from the Showcase – it’s a somewhat mysterious alchemy from my point of view – I was quite startled to see how much revision they did between the Wednesday Showcase and the Monday deadline for submitting a revised/edited essay.

You know how hard it is to convince students to revise in any sort of meaningful way, right? How often do you assign revision and lecture on how to do it, and you give them your own comments if you are really conscientious, and even have them write goals in class for how they will improve their essay – and they hand in the same damn thing again – maybe with double spacing. Ugh.

I’m happy to say that I am seeing considerably more revision than that, and them some. Alchemy? Strategy? Why did this work? Comment here.

Placement test angst

This is a true story. I have a student, Chris, in a lower-level developmental writing class, who just so happens to have attended the same high school as my daughter, and we discovered that they took a creative writing class together.

When I saw Chris’s “first-day writing” (diagnostic writing sample in teacher-speak, ick), I was not happy. He is clearly in the wrong class. I emailed him right away and said, I need to meet with you. He showed up the same week during my office hours – another clear sign he’s in the wrong class. That’s how we discovered he knew my daughter. We discussed his issues with taking tests (he doesn’t do well), and I recommended that he should get some coaching at a workshop offered in our Learning Commons and then retake the placement test.

I emailed my daughter and mentioned in a generic sort of way that Chris-whom-she-knew-from-creative-writing-in-high-school was in my class. My daughter, in her usual direct and prescient way, emailed back, and I quote, “he’s a great writer…he’s not in developmental is he? If so it’s definitely because of performance and not because of ability.” Hmmmmm. (My daughter has been looking over my shoulder while I grade papers since she was 8.)

At my college, we do initial writing placement in three cuts. Students who present ACT composite scores of 20 or more automatically place into English 101. Chris has a 19 – remember, he doesn’t test well. The next cut is the Compass test, a bullshit instrument brought to you by the same company as the ACT. Chris didn’t do well on that either. The test format is completely opaque, plus it tests things that students do not expect. It’s not just correcting errors – it asks you to make judgment calls about style, repetition, transitions. Chris got a 58 on a 99-point scale – he needed 70.

The third cut is even worse bullshit, and of course the students who are least able to fend for themselves all end up taking this terrible test. It’s called e-write. They get a prompt and a blank screen and no hints about where the real bar is set. They write something; the something they write goes into a black box. The essay is scored by computer, and (this is the part that really justifies this horror) the score is returned instantly. Some gobbledygook jargonated “feedback” comes out with a score. And the score determines placement. At no point in this process is there an academic adviser. At no point is there a human reader.

In our Learning Commons, there is an Avenging Angel. I’m not going to give out her name, but let’s call her Maria. Maria has done some sort of guerrilla research, I’m not sure I understand exactly what her sources are, but she is doing the coaching on e-write. Chris and I both attend her workshop on how to beat e-write, and what she says sends my jaw straight to the floor. She recommends that students take 2 hours and write eight to ten paragraphs. WHAT??? She says that she has been giving this advice, and it works. Students have come back and reported to her that they have gotten a high enough score to get into English 101 by following this advice.

Seriously, people, if this is true, and I suppose it is, then what hope is there that our talented students who don’t test well are being placed fairly by this test? I’m reminded of the fine work by Les Perlman at MIT who says that the key to the SAT essay is length. Not sophistication, not clarity, not critical thinking or factual accuracy, but how LONG is your writing sample.

A placement test should not be an endurance test. It should be a humane experience. Students should be told the criteria they are going to be evaluated by – if they have to write a certain number of words or paragraphs to hit the mark, they should be told that. And there should be informed advising at the end of the rainbow, so that students like Chris will have some strategies or tools to know what steps to take next, instead of registering for – and paying for, and making room in their schedules for – classes they don’t need.

And . . . We’re Back!!

I started teaching as a graduate assistant in 1989. I’ve had quite a variety of experiences in all these intervening years, but here is one I have never had: teaching summer school.

When I was in grad school, I took summers off because I could make a lot more money doing freelance writing and editing. I went around to all my old clients from my freelance life, asking for work in the summer. Those clients were happy to see me. I was always sort of amazed that they had gotten along OK without me from the end of August to the middle of May, but had work for me the minute I asked for it. I made $50, $80, $100 an hour…. Waaaaay more than I could make teaching. Those windfalls paid for summer vacations, car repairs, lots of things I don’t remember anymore. I was a good freelancer. I met deadlines and my work was excellent. I’ll just say so myself. When you’re a freelancer, you know your work is excellent if your clients wait for you to get out of school in May.

By the time I had worked for my community college for a few years, I no longer had any real need to work in the summer. I did some projects, if they attracted me, if they paid enough. But I was making a decent living with my ten months of pay stretched out over the whole year. I lived modestly. My daughter and I had a small condo, a small old car, and not many luxuries – but we had everything we needed. She went to camp. I luxuriated in some summer freedom, started cycling, did a lot of journaling, read books, went on vacations with my family, and caught up on the kinds of personal to-do lists and projects that other single working mothers give up a lot of sleep for.

In more recent summers, I have started writing a book, a memoir. I am still doing a lot of other good stuff like cycling and family trips. I got married again and my new husband is also a cyclist. We love to travel, and my summer freedom facilitates wonderful weekends that I have time to pack the car for while he’s at work.

All this is a long way of saying that when I go back to school in the fall, I am coming back from a long way away, mentally. I am so lucky. I have a job that pays a living salary even considering the relatively high expense of living in the Chicago metro area. I can choose what to do in the summer, and the point is, this is good for my students. When I come back after a long summer break, I am ready to come back. I am ready for anything.

I am ready for a developmental class with five football players who act like they have never been in a classroom before. I explain that they are in college because they have goals to reach, they have work to do, and I expect them to work hard and do homework for every class. “I am all about the homework,” I say at the first class. At the second class, I say that I like a little formality because it reminds everyone that we are there to work. “You should call me Dr. Evans,” I say. They will probably settle down in another week. When expectations are high, they will rise to them if they can. I have already collected an essay draft in this class, and one of the football players wrote such a strong draft that I looked up his test scores and wrote him an email, asking him to meet with me, since he probably should be placed higher. What factors of race, socioeconomic status, and lack of test-taking experience and coaching from his impoverished home district are holding him back now? I am ready to meet him.

I am ready for the student who emails me that she has missed the first week because she is out of the country. I respond to her politely, holding her accountable for the assignments, and she drops the class. Fine. Another student from the same class, who is blind, emails me to say he can’t find the link to submit his assignment in Blackboard. I write back and explain that he is supposed to post it on a discussion board instead. This is a good sign – he will reach out between classes. He has someone at home who is helping him navigate the course web site, and he will need that help. This is a hybrid class, it meets only once a week. Students with restricted scheduling arrangements tend to choose this class. The ones who chose it for the right reasons will do just fine. The ones who thought it would be easier will be disappointed. I am ready for them – all of them.

I worked my butt off this week. I have three regular composition classes in addition to my two developmental classes. I got my own daughter off to college, and my husband has two job interviews next week. There’s a lot going on – when isn’t there? But I had the summer off. I had days to write my book, days to ride the tandem with my husband, days to help my daughter get ready for college, days to read and rest, days to clean closets. I am so lucky – because now, I am ready.

Test Results Day

I got my students’ exit exam results late Tuesday afternoon. It’s a Tuesday/Thursday morning class, so on Wednesday I carefully composed two email messages, which I sent to the two groups – those who passed, those who didn’t. I stressed that this information is private, that we would not discuss their individual results in class, and that they should bring their questions and concerns directly to me rather than discussing them with each other.

However, I knew that many of them would not see my email until they came to class this morning and heard some buzz. Then, I feared, they would check their email and erupt, one way or another, during class, at unpredictable times. I did not want my lesson plan derailed by this drama – I did not want the students acting out the drama in class at all. So I staged a bit of a performance myself, preemptively.

I arrived at the classroom just on the early side of late. They were almost all there, waiting in the hall – they are locked out until I arrive. They flowed in around me, chatting about how they were about to give up on me. I raised my voice slightly and asked them to go ahead and have a seat, but not to turn on their computers, that I wanted to talk to them first. “We’re going to have a pep talk,” I said.  I heard several of them repeat the instruction to each other not to turn on the computers. Thanks, you guys, you rock. (I love this class.)

The pep talk went more or less like this: “Some people passed, some people didn’t. If you passed, I am proud of you. You deserved to pass, and you earned it. If you didn’t pass, it doesn’t mean that you’re dumb, or that you’ll never make it into English 1101. It just means that the readers had a problem with one essay that you wrote on one day. I will meet with you, and we will figure out what you should do next. I know I can’t stop you from checking your email here in class to find out your results, but here’s what you are going to do. You are going to be absolutely stone-faced. There will be no cheering or gloating, but there will also be no pissing and moaning. No reaction at all, not in this room. You can talk about it outside the room with your friends, but not in here. You can come to my office and cry, I have the Kleenex ready. But in here, you are going to act like a grownup and keep it to yourself.”

They were listening. I watched them as I was saying all this, and I could see they got it. A few of them were nodding at me. Ok, here we go, turn on your computer, here is the handout, this is what we’re working on today, please log into Blackboard, and open Microsoft Word. It felt almost normal. I kept on acting like everything was normal, and they fell in with me. Sometimes I tell a student, “Fake it till you make it.” We faked it, and we made it.

Today’s lesson plan was about writing the reflective letters for their final portfolios. In particular, we were focusing on the first paragraphs, in which they were to tell prospective readers (either instructors or future students) about how they landed in developmental writing and how they had changed during the course. I gave them 15 minutes to draft their paragraphs, then asked them to share an idea. As I called on them, some sort of magic happened. One after another, they shared stories about how much their experiences of writing had changed. One student said he never cared about anything he wrote about in high school, that writing papers was just a chore, but now that he knows how to define a topic he cares about, writing is much easier. Another said that whenever she had to write an essay in class in high school, she felt she had to perform perfectly on the spot, but that now she understands how to start out freely and think about the topic, letting her ideas evolve and grow over time. One after another, theme and variations, so perfect and beautiful I could have wept.

As they listened to each other, they too heard the power of the changes they have created for themselves this term. We passed, all of us, in that moment together, on this day.

Teaching college writing, 125 students at a time – how desperate will you be?

Faculty contract negotiations at the College of DuPage have stalled as the college administration has proposed startling changes to faculty working conditions – especially teaching loads.

Under the administration’s proposal, full-time faculty teaching English Composition at COD would carry a load of five courses per semester instead of four. Five sections of 25 students (if the current class size holds): 125 students. Imagine trying to do justice to this: responding helpfully, completely, and responsibly to the writing assignments of 125 students. Students in an open admissions college, whose vast needs vary widely; whose preparation for college varies from kind-of-adequate to almost none.

I know perfectly well that there are many teachers who have this kind of load already – and they somehow survive. But nobody who cares about the quality of education thinks this is a good idea. This kind of teaching load is a desperate measure.

Is the College of DuPage this desperate? Let’s consider some numbers.

First, consider the current load. A full-time load in writing courses at COD now consists of four sections of 25 students each. Assuming some attrition, this load might actually be 90 students per term. We can be assigned up to three separate preparations. Here is a generic estimate of how a full-time instructor’s time might break down:

• 12 hours per week teaching classes
• 6 hours per week of lesson planning (assuming one prep, or maybe two)
• 15 hours per week responding to homework assignments, quizzes, etc (assuming 10 minutes per student)
  OR 22.5 hours for one batch of essay drafts or final essays (assuming 15 minutes per student)
• 10 hours per week of office hours

Even in a week when an instructor is not responding to full-length essays, these hours total 43. A teacher who is turning around a full batch of essays has a time commitment of 50.5 hours – and that’s before counting any meetings, curriculum development, professional development, or time spent communicating with colleagues or administrators by phone or email.

Next, consider adding another section. Assuming 112 students instead of 90:

• 15 hours per week teaching classes
• 9 hours per week of lesson planning (assuming at least two preps)
• 19 hours per week responding to homework assignments, quizzes, etc (assuming 10 minutes per student)
  OR 28.5 hours for one batch of essay drafts or final essays (assuming 15 minutes per student)
• 10 hours per week of office hours

With the proposed increase in load, weekly hours would total 50 with homework grading, or 59.5 with a full batch of essays. Remember, that’s before counting any meetings, curriculum development, professional development, or time spent communicating with colleagues or administrators by phone or email.

Just one student with a crisis or special need can easily consume a precious hour or more out of a week. Add on a few students who would like to revise their writing projects again. Add a time-critical deadline for, let’s say, program review. These issues may be gracefully managed during office hours – or not – depending on the scope and timing.

Feel free to try your own math. How long does it take you to write comments on an essay draft or finished essay? How long does it take you to grade a batch of homework or quizzes? How long do you spend on lesson planning – do you write new handouts often? Do you change up your textbooks and have to update a lot of your materials regularly? Do you conduct one-on-one conferences on a regular basis, and how does this affect your time commitment?

If this proposal comes to pass and you have to teach five classes, starting the semester with 125 students, how will you survive? What corners will you cut, and how will your students be affected? How will your own well-being be affected? How desperate will you be?

Let us know.