It's midterm season, and like everyone else in the academic blogosphere, I'm marking. After 18 undergraduate papers on character development in short stories by Chopin and Hemingway, I'm feeling a little burnt out in the constructive criticism department, and wonder where my vast stores of positive reinforcement went that served me so well when I was teaching high school. Criticism, after all, is much easier swallowed when preceded by a compliment - if my students anticipate that all the comments I make on their papers will be negative, they'll soon quit paying attention to them - and to me. Not to go all Mary Poppins or anything, but a spoonful of sugar really does help. I wouldn't be inclined to listen to anyone who'd read one of my papers and couldn't think of anything positive to say - why should I expect my students to be any different?
And so I tried to spill just as much ink on the good stuff I found in the essays as I did on the bad: "Nice image!" "Good use of semicolon!" "Great title!" This sort of commentary costs me little in the way of time, and it makes all the difference in the world to the student reading it. When I was an undergrad, the first thing I checked in a returned essay (okay, the first thing after the grade I'd earned) was the commentary, and even a lousy mark could be mitigated by a genuine compliment from the instructor. Even now, I learn more from looking at what I did to provoke a "Yes!" in the margins than I ever could from the simple correction of a punctuation mark.
All too frequently, this sort of positive reinforcement gets bypassed in most university classrooms in favour of a simple "correct and punish" approach to transferring "knowledge". When teaching writing, the impetus can be for a marker to reedit a student's paper, circling errors with a red pen and writing corrections over-top the student's text. "Who has time," this approach insists, " for coddling a student? The whole goal of an effective writing course is to identify student's writing problems and weed them out. If we take the time to tell them what they're doing right, we lose out on the opportunity to correct as many errors as possible."
But who wants to hear only what they're doing wrong? It's hard enough to get students to care about the passive voice at an ungodly hour of the morning; it's harder still to get them to care about it if, when they use it incorrectly, you chastise them in dripping ink the colour of blood.
For Pete's sake, I'm still stinging over the most backward compliment I've ever received from a professor. In my second year Canadian lit class, I'd written a paper comparing Michael Ondaatje's poetry (if you've only ever read his novels, RUN to the library and take out The Cinnamon Peeler for some of the best modern lyric going) to his prose in his semi-autobiographical Running in the Family. Enjoying myself, I'd attempted to replicate some of Ondaatje's signature fragmentation of image and sentence structure in my own writing, choosing to demonstrate the effect that I was endeavoring to explain. Looking back on this essay eight years later, I see where the effect sometimes fails, but the fact that I am trying something stylistically is nonetheless readily apparent:
The first passage is repetitive: “Give…Give,” “I am…I am.” It alludes to King Lear, though the name of the play is never mentioned. Ondaatje again requires his reader to re-think, to recall Edgar as the faithful son. Ondaatje too, is highly present in this passage, perhaps more intensely than ever before in the text. In this passage, the author appears to have been laid bare. Here Ondaatje is most infused in his work. Cries to a missing father, the stuff of psychoanalysis; of literary criticism. Poignant to both reader and author. The repeated “give” is an imperative, frequent in poetry but rarely used in prose except in dialogue. In this passage, it is not dialogue, but an internalized emotional outcry, again something much more common in poetry.
Sentence fragments? Sure. Mixed images? Absolutely. But given the vocabulary and structure surrounding those fragments, it seems pretty clear that they were deliberately chosen for rhetorical effect. Sure, this paper isn't going to be published anywhere (what intro to Can Lit course paper would be?), but I think that my engagement with the text is pretty clear. Looking back now as an instructor myself, I think the creative risk that I took deserved acknowledgment from the professor I worked so hard to please. At the very least, a simple "interesting" in the margins, or a "good bibliography", would've let me know that I wasn't a complete idiot, and that someone with a pulse had read my essay.
But the only comment my professor made on the entire paper stung like a whip: "This essay shows flakes of intelligence and insight."
Flakes?
How could this statement ever help me learn to be a better writer? A better scholar? And how could it possibly make me feel good? Why should I ever listen to what such an asshole has to say, if he compares my efforts to the words we use to describe cereal? Or dandruff? What was no doubt intended as a compliment proves upon examination to be a dismissive insult. All this professor managed to convey to me was that I was beneath his notice, a "flaky" undergrad whose commentary on Ondaatje was irrelevant and insignificant to a "real" scholar like himself.
And here's the rub: as scholars, we should be the first ones to remember the vulnerability inherent in handing our work over to someone else to evaluate. We who write grant applications know only too well that our writing is often a product of love (or of hate, depending on the amount of work involved), and that in asking someone else to judge if for us we're admitting our own inability to do so ourselves. We're constantly sending off our work to be reviewed by our peers, and in that way our writing stands as representative of us, a metonymy that determines how much money and status we get to claim as our own.
How then, can we afford to be callous in our commentary in our students' work? We academics should know best of all the difference that a little praise can make to modify criticism's sting. After all, if we are going to encourage our students to learn from us, we probably should first make the effort to learn from ourselves.
Thanks for this. I just emailed off a rant to an academic friend in an attempt to keep that sort of thing out of my marking.
It is important to find the positives and the good work in every paper, because it does exist. A check mark or a yes! goes a long way.
I still remember the anonymous review of a rejected journal article that made me cry and feel so awful that I never revised the paper and stayed away from trying to publish for a very long time.
Though I still bang my head against a proverbial spike when students so very clearly don't get the article they're supposed to be critically reflecting on.
Posted by: Steph | October 20, 2005 at 15:16
When I was grading (er, "marking"), I always used the Sandwich Method in my end-of-term evaluations or in the comments at the bottom of the essay. You know: positive, negative (i.e., constructively critical), positive.
Posted by: Anne | October 21, 2005 at 16:47
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Posted by: how to write a masters dissertation | February 09, 2009 at 07:50