I have a favorite site – pbwiki – for bringing students together for collaborative writing. There’s a bit of a learning curve for some of my students, especially for many of the developmental students who often don’t have computers at home or the sort of easy familiarity with such websites.

But so far everyone has managed and the ways students work together with the wiki to produce a single piece of writing proves pretty interesting, with lots of opportunities for my instruction along the way.

However, what I wanted to say is that they are changing their name and taking “guesses” (I suspect they are really suggestions) for their new name. In the process, they’re giving away t-shirts. Interested? Go here: http://blog.pbwiki.com/2009/04/21/official-announcement-were-changing-our-name/

There are days in Paragraph City when the student skull weather is a dense fog bank complicated by lachrymose clouds as the barometer dips deep into opacity. This is when it seems that the only thing we teach is what we demonstrate. Students don’t do the reading, forget the conversations (except for the things they said themselves), lose the things they write, but remember what they see in their teachers. That’s when I model.

(Lest you are thinking of runways and Gisele, an excursion: This is modeling. When I talk with a class about writing, I try to take the students into my head as I pull at a topic, find an entrance point, gather a couple buckets of ideas, splash them on the floor and start to sort, find words that communicate, and so on. When we look at a poem I talk about taking a sidelong glance at it, my usual dance steps, why a window in the poem would open for me here, what associations I’d make with the images, and again, so on. I admit, there’s a “look-at-me-be-like-me-think-like-me” quality to it that troubles me, and yet it’s a cornerstone for the way I have learned.

Like all strategies, modeling doesn’t work for everyone, or to put a more positive spin on it, modeling works really well for some students. So then I go on and try something different, looking for an approach that harmonizes with other students’ minds: small groups, independent research, free writing, conversation, games. I don’t have a big bag of tricks, and not enough cool gizmos, but then the semesters are short.)

Here’s the trouble (which is to say the interesting part): we don’t really know that the point we think the modeling sends out is the point the students pick up. I’m using semaphore flags and students are reading nautical flag code; I’m saying “I feel around to find the central emotion in the poem” and they’re hearing, “Be dorky-girly-moany-groany and wear baggy pants.” Or something like that.

Yet it’s not like we can’t model. That’s like trying to avoid making a first impression. Even our students most talented in being mentally and physically absent see in us a model of something. I’m wondering if we can really tell what that something is.

This particular question has been gnawing at my leg for a couple of semesters now, ever since an exchange with an adjunct (let’s call her Professor Collie to maintain the dog-bone image). About a dozen of us who teach the first year seminar were talking about approaches to the course. Someone mentioned almost all faculty complain that students who most need to be in classes are the one who cut them most often. I think of these as my Ginsu students, but that’s one of many things I try not to say at such meetings.

“This is the sort of thing we should address in the seminar, right?” my friend Jack Russell, who is running the meeting, says. “So how?”

Jack has a way of killing a roiling conversation with a pertinent question, and that’s what happens now. Then Collie pipes up.

“Well I base 50% of my course grade on attendance, so my students know from Day One how important coming to class is.”

Is that what this policy communicates? Doesn’t it rather tell the student that college is way easier than high school ever was, that thinking or writing or studying is unnecessary, that being near knowledge is the same as knowing things? Yet there it is, my dear old modeling strategy put to use, writ large into a syllabus. A domino row of questions click down:

• So how would you model the importance of class attendance?
• In fact, how do you teach anything which seems so basically obvious?
• Is this really college subject matter? Imagine the final exam question. “Should students come to class? ____ Yes     _____No”
• Is that 50% attendance grade of such a different ilk as a requirement for students to read a textbook? We send students near knowledge and later test to see if any has adhered to them.

At the bottom of this matter, I’ve decided there’s a professorial force in me that functions like gravity – irrational and unexplainable but inescapable – which says this just isn’t something you do if you respect your students. You don’t tell them with your actions that you think they are so incapable, so hopelessly worthless, that they should earn college credit for simply being alive and breathing in the proper locale.

Yet that’s the crux of the matter with modeling, for it turns out that this is exactly what I think a 50% attendance grade communicates. Collie would surely say something like, “A grade immediately and clearly tells a student what you think is important. I am telling my students how important it is to me that they be in every class.”

Dog-gone if perhaps she’s right, but it just doesn’t smell that way to me. 

There’s a type of student in Paragraph City who regards a college course as a sort of prolonged date. He or she has scoured the options, selected a professor from a dishearteningly limited field of available profs, and is by the second week of the semester hoping that he hasn’t (or suspecting that he has) made a terrible mistake.

On the dating side of this metaphor, I see our character as decidedly male. He’s mainly hoping to get lucky and so has tried to select a date that’s easy. If it turns out his date is not going to put out, he hopes she’ll at least show him a good time and not bore him with lots of talk-talk-talk. Hotness is important, and keeping things superficial is just fine, preferred, actually. He also hopes his date is forgiving about promptness, attendance, and telling the truth: all things he will record in his little black book of a student evaluation and ratemyprofessor ranking. Like the easy girl at the frat party, these profs are immensely popular at the time but not much respected in retrospect. Fun, perhaps even worth a chili pepper, but not “good.”

However, on the student side of this metaphor, I find as many women as men with this approach to course selection. Who hasn’t heard the exchange in the halls that I heard last week as I was entering a building:

“Hey, Kath. I need to talk to ya.”

“Gotta go, Beth. Seth’s waiting.”

“Well you’re in Ms K____’s Childhood Psych now aren’t you?”

Listen: you can hear the eyeballs roll. “Yeah.”

“How easy is she?”

“She’s OK. She canceled class before spring break. Gotta go.”

So what is that? Ms. K___ lets you get to third base but not all the way?  I’m too far out of the loop to know.

While it seems to me most students don’t rely mainly on this course-selection-as-date thinking to build their semester schedule, I think it occupies a dim corner of most students’ minds during pre-registration. Perhaps it’s hard to blame them, given the structure of choosing classes. So I’m trying to envision a different process, where the tables are reversed.

Instead of simply registering for classes in the last five weeks of the semester, students apply for admission. Professors review the students and – as long as there are more students than seats in the class – make a selection. In my case, I wouldn’t be as concerned with that obvious GPA as I would a grade in a writing class and a selection of courses that show a rounded – or even better quirky – range of interests. I’d like to see who has been penalized for plagiarism or cheating (out) and who has a weak high school background but solid grades now (in). I’d prefer a mix of genders, races, and ages. I have a high regard for Nursing students. And I’d welcome especially students who have seriously tried the course with me before and failed, as long as I had a sense of why they failed and a strategy to beat that cause.

Then students still seeking courses find what faculty want them in their courses and make a second round of applications. And a third. Those who are chosen last in this sandlot ballot (and I’d reserve a few seats in each class for these) might wonder what they can do to improve their contributions to the team.

Or perhaps colleges should take the NFL draft as a model. But we descend into folly (in addition to badly mixing our metaphors), or perhaps that happened in the first paragraph. Yet is the current system that much better, where – at least in the first and second year of college – many students build their college career, and even majors, based upon how easy an instructor is? Or where students, upset with a grade, fume “I pay your salary!” to their prof?

Paragraph city is in pre-registration now. We see students slinking off to the neighborhood where the faculty strumpets cluster, red lights burning outside their offices.

Student comment: “That Shakespeare, he don’t write good English.”

Teachable moment, perhaps, but where to start?

Once upon a time, as I sat at my office desk in Paragraph City, answering the morning’s email from students curious about how to meld E.M.W. Tillyard’s vision of the Elizabethan worldview with Lear’s world which seems rather more suspended between will, nature, and love (You understand that I created Paragraph City to indulge such fantasies, right? In reality the email contained questions about when I would get to some extra credit and what the connection was between that limbo place we talked about where Hamlet’s dad is hanging out and the limbo song those penguins sing on Happy Feet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuvzJbqPuIU&feature=related), I was half listening to a faculty-student discussion going on just outside my door.

“I’m so sorry I missed class,” the student is saying, “but I got the notes from the lecture from my friend and the handout on the next paper….”

“Ok, that’s good,” the instructor says.

“…but I forgot to give my friend my paper to turn in…”

“oh.” I know that this instructor doesn’t usually accept late papers, and I can see what’s coming. But the student, on the other hand, is handling it pretty well.

“…and so I was wondering if you would please take my paper today?”

“Well, S____ do you remember my policy on late papers?”

“Yes, M.______, and I went back to the syllabus and saw that you don’t take late papers, and I wouldn’t ask you to take this one except I really want your feedback on this essay. The topic is important to me and I worked and worked on it but I don’t think it’s as good as I want it to be yet….”

I can feel the instructor caving in at this point: student got notes and handout from class, knows the syllabus, is concerned about her writing (or at least has the courtesy to say so), acknowledges the policy without complaint. I’m about at the point where I would take the paper.

“…and I think I want to make this my major revision paper, but I’m kind of stuck on what to do with it…”

“oh?” The student sees she’s winning her cause and her voice goes up an octive as the words come a little faster.

“…and I’ve got perfect attendance except for that one class. I wouldn’t have missed if there was any possible way I could be there…”

“oh?” Suddenly I sense the scales tipping back away from the student. She doesn’t know when to stop, and apparently doesn’t need to breathe.”

“…but that one day during your class time was the only, only time I could pick up my new dirt bike, and…”

At this point I laughed a shamefully unprofessional laugh, muffled but apparently loud enough for them to hear, for the instructor stepped into my office, said “Just shut up” and took the student down the hall.

“The penguins,” I write, “are actually singing a Chubby Checker song from 1962…..”

Most of the students in Paragraph City are poor. Financially, I mean. If we had bouncers at the doors of our classrooms who upended each student as he or she entered the classroom and gently shook the change out of pockets as a tip for the faculty teaching the class – I’ll save the argument for faculty gratuities to another day – we would find more money in the professor’s couch than in the collective pockets of his students. Very few of our students – let me guess at 5% — do not have jobs, and most of those that do are working more than 20 hours a week.

Every semester a few new students haven’t budgeted at all for books, and most first-semester students underestimate the cost of books. Every semester I have students trying to get through my course without buying the books, an act as foolish as my thinking I can demand they get the books and they will.

How do you get anything out of a literature course if you don’t read the books?

How do you justify buying books when Niagara Mohawk is threatening to cut off your electric?

It is certainly not the professor’s job to get books into the hands of the students, but I’ve been thinking, as I write book orders for the Paragraph City College Book Emporium, what I can do. Nationally students are spending something like $500 a semester on books. I want to put a little, English shaped dent in that, so I’ve been taking these steps:

• List the ISBN of my books on my syllabus. Starting with July 2010, colleges will be required by law (http://www3.sunysuffolk.edu/Academics/TextbookLaws/FederalTextbookLaw.pdf ) to list ISBNs on their websites so students can comparison shop online, especially for used books. New York’s Ofice of the State Comptroller estimates students could save $245 per semester if they dumped the college bookstore and bought online. And that doesn’t even factor in the used book market.
• Make my first reading assignments from work that’s available for free online. This helps two groups: those that are ordering online and need an extra week to get their books and those who need another paycheck before they can buy books.
• Balance these three factors: quality of the editorial work of the anthology vs. cost vs. what’s available free (but with my considerable organizational efforts) online. I ask myself how important is the supplemental material that comes with the usual anthology, and how many of my students actually read it. Often I can give that material more effectively myself in class or in a handout. So in my introductory lit course syllabus I provide links to all the literature assigned in the course, all available for free online. I use one book which is just lit and one which provides instruction, sample student essays, definitions of terms and so forth. The lit book is optional, the instructional book required. About half of my students don’t buy the optional book and print out the lit of the day for discussion in class. The college gives a generous printing allowance, so students save the $35 that book costs.
• If the print version is still superior, look at new vs. used. In the Brit Lit course I’m teaching this summer, I need the anthology for its Whitman sampling (and accompanying headnotes) of so much literature that students need to taste if they are to get Brit Lit but have no time to read in its entirety this summer. I dug around some and decided on the Norton three volume edition. I only wanted two of the volumes, but they are selling for $40 each, or three for $60. When I went to Amazon, though, I found dozens of used copies of the volumes I want selling for a dollar or less apiece (plus that $4 shipping charge, you know). So I’m not ordering an anthology through the bookstore; I’ll have students buy them used online.
• Look past the usual academic presses. I’m tapping Barnes & Noble classics for Gulliver’s Travels this summer ($5) and Dover Press for Robinson Crusoe ($5). They have hardly any supplemental notes at all, but I can supply that in class as needed, and there are good articles in the college databases that will serve nicely. And other options sometimes present themselves. In last semester’s World Myth I found a fine online translation offered free-for-the-asking from Ian Johnston (http://malaspina.edu/~johnstoi/index.htm ) He kindly sent the Publisher file, formatted to print out like a booklet which our secretary copied and stapled and I handed out to the class. He has an interesting, eclectic offering in the same format.
• Put copies on reserve in the library and in the college learning center, which I’ve done for years and which get a little use.

In the bookstore of the future, students will enter the ISBNs of their texts in the bookstore website and be rewarded with options and their costs: new hard copy, e-book that expires in four months, audiobook, used in-house hardcopy, used copy online. Students will make their selections on the website, including Amazon used books, and pay online one price right then and there, with mailing costs for the Amazon orders and whatever else calculated in, financial aid subtracted and the bottom line run up on a nearly maxed out Visa card. The next morning they’ll stop by the bookstore to pick up the books, receipts, expected arrival dates and a coupon for a $4 cup of coffee at Barnes & Noble, which now runs the library. The future will be a funny place.

Many colleges are holding off on hiring, at least for a year, waiting until they can read the Richter scale on these economic tremblers. With competition for good candidates down, this is a great time to be hiring, and my institution is looking for a comp & rhetoric faculty, full-time, tenure track; read all about it: http://www.sunyjcc.edu/index.php?q=node/2914.

The applications are coming in, and while I can’t comment on them, I can say that in the past I’ve written about how pathetic the typical cover letter accompanying the resume is. So Point #1 is, a cover letter is a letter. As in, it’s a letter, not a label. Really, I see cover letters that read like this:

“Dear Fill-in-the-blank, Thank you in advance for previewing my accompanying resume. Sincerely….”

The cover letter is also not a recasting of the resume into paragraphs (which only makes it harder to read). It’s a letter, and it seems to me that someone applying for a comp and rhetoric position ought to be able to write one whizz-bang of a letter, and this digression raises something else that should be obvious to applicants: In applying for an English position you are demonstrating your wares in the letter. The principles you would teach to your students (we presume), you have first taught to yourself and are demonstrating in the cover letter: economy and clarity of language; a style and grace that is professional and personable; diction that is precise but not stuffy, intelligent without obscuring meaning; language from a human being who might be interesting to work with.

Letters reflect a personality and a purpose; letters are meant to communicate; letters spring from one unique person and reach out in a human way to other human beings. You know, these are missives, epistles, notes; they live in the same rhetorical town as the Brownings’ love letters, Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, Virginia Woolf’s and Anias Nin’s diaries, Thoreau’s Walden, and Michihiko Hachiya’s journal. Remember letters: like a thank you note or a request for a reference letter from your favorite prof, they bring with them the scent of a human heart and a human mind, and we who receive them want to like the people they come from.

Point #2: Cover letters do have a job to do, and like conveying a sense of what’s human about the writer, it’s a job the resume can’t do: explain how this particular position we offer is really suited to you. We on the search committee understand that you want a job, need a job, may even be desperate for the paycheck our business office could eventually send out with your name on it every two weeks. But what we want is what should be important to you.  Again, it’s about your wares: how bad a writing instructor must you be to not know how important audience is.

So address the ad. Remember, if the search committee can’t see how you meet whatever is called “Required” in the ad, they cannot legally hire you and shouldn’t even interview you. For instance, here’s an ad placed on Inside Higher Ed a few days ago (check their job list here http://www.insidehighered.com/career/seekers?page=index.php?categories[714]=true ”):

English Faculty position, full-time. Required: Master’s degree in Composition/Rhetoric or English (Ph.D. preferred, with emphasis in teaching writing). Faculty member will teach both College Composition and Developmental English courses.

Desired: Experience in and demonstrated commitment to teaching College Composition. Community college teaching preferred. Knowledge of learning theories, learning styles, alternative delivery systems, and assessment. Experience working with both traditional age students and adult learners. Willingness to teach a diverse schedule. Ability to work cooperatively with other members of the college community. Knowledge of and commitment to the community college mission.

Since your resume makes it evident that you have what’s listed under Required, the letter deals with what’s Desired. So you’d be crazy to send them that all-purpose, stainless steel, cover letter your placement office helped you work up, the one that mentions your brilliant thesis on the burial motifs in Ellison’s Invisible Man and your adjunct work in Enormous U. and the diversity-drenched semester abroad. Those are in your resume anyway, and it’s clearly not what the folks at Chesapeake College are interested in.

Here’s my punch list for this job:

• Find out what the community college mission is, and how it’s expressed in the mission of Chesapeake College. (You’re an English major, for crying out loud – is anyone better at doing research than we are? So do some.) That’s language that goes into the letter.
• “Experience working with …adult learners” means you won’t look at the unemployed coal miner who wants into the criminal justice program like he’s a leper. That you believe a crack at college belongs to all people, and you act that way (reference the community college mission). If you talk that talk in the cover letter, they’ll like you.
• Learning theories and styles: this is a test, designed to sort out faculty who communicate to students with a concern for learning from faculty who are founts, gushing information which students then gulp down using whatever crockery is at their disposal. Much learning theory, particularly that about learning styles, is suspect, and maybe you should say that (gently, for it’s sure to be the pet theory of your first reader that you’ll use the hobnail boots on).
• Developmental English is another test, and if your resume doesn’t show you have worked with students who struggled at the basics of language, account for this. If you don’t have formal experience, then you tutored a friend or you met individually with a floundering student. You need to prove you can work within the processes by which people overcome years of deficits in their learning to slowly become literate in the academic language of, say, sophomores (yes, sophomores; the bar’s not set that high).
• “Diverse schedule” = summer, nights, weekends. The idea is that the college will schedule classes when students can come, not around when faculty want to teach. How can that not be a good thing?
• The reference to cooperating with other members of the community sounds like it originates in a problem the department is having (or had) with someone. Poke around the web site: might it be the tutorial center, writing center, Writing Across the Curriculum people, developmental studies people…? Or are they still fighting the English department’s Civil War: comp people vs . lit people. In your cover letter, be Abe Lincoln.
• “Alternative delivery styles” = usually means online courses & a CMS system to supplement your classroom courses, so they want proof you acknowledge the existence of the Internet.
• Assessment: this can be a hot potato among faculty, and unless you’ve had specific, positive experience in doing program assessment for outside agencies, you might want to let this one alone.

Finally, remember that 95% of English faculty got to be that way because once upon a time they were so in love with reading fiction that they wanted to do just that for the rest of their lives. Embed glimpses of your life story in the letter, maybe just one or two times, as you give some support to your claims. Let them know you have a story, a good one.

This week’s NY Times article on student entitlement has been flapping around Paragraph City’s faculty spaces nearly as much as it’s been linking around the teaching blogs. It’s not exactly news that students feel more entitled to high grades, but the blatant expressions of it from the students the article quotes rocks faculty back on their heels a bit.

College faculty share some of the blame if they do not make it clear just what students are going to be graded on, and just how the grading dance is choreographed in their classes. Come on, prof, put those colored footsteps on the dance floor that first day of class. The U Cal Irvine students who expect Bs for going to class, Bs for doing assigned reading, should be told what a B means and what activity is likely to result in one. Students are free to expect whatever they want, but unless the disconnect with reality is pretty complete, most will modify their expectation if they read, “Coming to class is essential to success in this class, but whether you come to class or stay away, attendance does not directly influence your grade.”

But the fantasy expectation of students isn’t what interests me so much; it’s the wish that students have to be graded on effort. The U Maryland senior says, “I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade…What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

Now that is interesting. It sends two trains of thought chuffing out of the station: one on the track labeled Deserts and the other on that familiar route called Be Careful What You Ask for Cause You Just Might Get It.

Be Careful What You Ask For: Now the syllabus thing would help here, too. How about, “A terrific essay that doesn’t meet the assignment will not earn points for you. None. Zero.” I give students fair leeway in my writing assignments, but if they ignore a component I make clear is necessary, or they reshape the assignment into something new, they need to know I’ll give them no credit. Meeting the assignment is the ante; without that you get no cards. One good reason is that the polished, off-target essay suggests a plagiarized essay. Another is that level playing field thing.

But beyond that, how does our U Maryland student expect us to measure effort. RPMs? Petunia has four kids, a drunk husband, no internet, and works 30 hours a week. Rose lives with Mom & Dad, has two computers, gets three squares a day, a BMW for her birthday, and has been told since she was four that she can be or do anything she sets her mind on.  I guarantee Petunia’s effort will easily triple Rose’s just to get the computer turned on.

Or compare the effort these students put into writing an essay with the effort  their profs expended as students writing the same essay, trudging to the library, searching articles in the Reader’s Guide, taking notes on 3×5 cards, thumping away on pre-white out, electric typewriters. This concern with effort demonstrates a common student misunderstanding of grading: really hard work = really good grade. But what if you’re working really hard polishing the silverware on the Titanic?

Effort is individual, inner-defined, felt. We can’t measure it in foot-pounds or watts, and it’s tightly wound around who we are. We don’t speak of calories burned, but rather how hard I tried given my personality and obstacles and strengths and just how hard I usually try at things. In a sense, then, students who want to be graded on effort want to be graded on who they are rather than what they do. That’s what any privileged class wants, while the unwashed masses without the benefits of pedigree would rather be measured by merit, accomplishment.

That may be one reason I don’t find the student desire to be graded on effort so prominent among community college students as compared to the Pricey U students of the Times article. This does bring me around to deserts, though.

Deserts: I worked really hard so I deserve a really good grade. Give me what I deserve. Personal rule: never ask for what you deserve, ask for mercy. As I’m going all Elizabethan on you, think of The Merchant of Venice’s Prince Aragon, pursuing one of my favorite Shakespearean women, Portia, via the process of chosing the casket which contains her portrait. He selects the casket labeled “Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves” and winds up, as you may recall, with a “portrait of  a blinking idiot.” I’m not sure what grade that would be, but probably not the grade students imagine their effort earns.

Hamlet, who wanders out of his cubby on my desk now and then, usually looking for Yorick, has reminded me that he said it better. When Polonius says he will house the recently arrived players “according to their desert,” Hamlet pops a “God’s bodkin” and instructs “Use every man according to his own desert and who shall escape whipping?” Good point.

So, the solipsistic U of Maryland lad asks, “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?” Nothing, if you are the be-all and end-all of your universe. But if not, perhaps there’s the evaluation of a flawed but learned thinker, who can react to what you’ve said, encourage you to probe a little more deeply in a few parts, let you know what you’ve provoked him to think about, and then reluctantly tag your work with a grade that has some relation to a standard he told you about when he assigned the paper. In the best, that is, of all worlds.

A favorite essay in Paragraph City is G. K. Chesteron’s piece on forging your own reality (or at least your own reaction to it): “On Running After One’s Hat” located here ( http://essays.quotidiana.org/chesterton/running_after_ones_hat/ ), in a lovely hodge-podge of public domain essays called Quotidiana. It’s been particularly windy in Paragraph City these last several months, with the result that I’ve spent more time indignantly chasing my hat than I have speny laughing at myself. It’s a trend worth reversing.

On the theme of creating our realities, I’ve been thinking of how students occasionally create their own versions of my assignments, though not in the positive, creative, way that intuitively aligns with the intent of the assignment, but rather the revision that defeats or alienates the assignment’s nature.  (And yes, I’m still stuck singing the song of the alien-minded student.) Three examples:

• In an introductory literature class students research to support/extend their understanding of a poem; a Marge Piercy poem is one of the choices. I caution students against easy-to-find, unexpert sources and remind them about source standards for academic essays at the college level. When the papers come in, I find a student citing as a source a handsome website on Marge Piercy with fine generic information on the poet, but posted by a capable middle school student. In what way is an 8th grader an expert any self-respecting college student would quote? (Yet since the first, two more students have cited the same site.)
• For a Comp 2 essay, a student paraphrases a work on Martin Luther King Jr. with a title that strikes me as odd. Amazon has the book and a review from a children’s book reviewer: it’s a graphic novel, “comic book style,” 32 pages long, “targeted to middle school readers.” Shouldn’t a college student feel uneasy using a picture book for a source?
• In an online course, where both quantity and quality of discussion response carry some weight, a student writes a well phrased general response praising another student’s comment, then copy & pastes it to every other student comment in the discussion. When I asked why, she says she misunderstood the assignment.

Now these choices may have been poor, but I don’t think any of these students are stupid. So why did they redefine the assignment in ways that seem bizarre – at least to me? I can only come up with two explanations:

• to make the assignment easier in ways they thought I would not notice (enough students seem surprised that I read all of what they write to make me think they’ve encountered faculty who did not – or so the student thought).
• to make the assignment suit the time or energy or resources they had at hand.

So they made what they thought were reasonable alterations in  the assignment, in ways that seemed “good enough.” Perhaps they learned from my response that it wasn’t good enough, that they set the bar for themselves too far below where I set it. But one other thing separates these students from students who score high on the same assignments:  the alien mind students bent the assignment out of shape because they viewed themselves (and their schedules and their way of doing homework and the amount of time a piece of writing “should take”) as inflexible, certainly less flexible than the assignment itself. The reverse is true of the more successful students I speak with; they flex their plans, schedules, and abilities to adapt to the assignment.

The reason that’s a more successful strategy is because, it seems to me, that’s how most assignments are used to teach, and here I am thinking of teaching as producing change in understanding and ability. The assignment is meant as a workout; your workout changes you. Less successful students expect to stay unchanged, to “serve time” in school, and to make an assignment into whatever they can already do so they don’t have to break a sweat.  As I write this, it occurs to me that this is probably a successful strategy in some some other field of endeavor, but isn’t it a design for failure in the college classroom?

The city council of Paragraph City has decided that should aliens land in the city, a team of faculty who teach first year composition will be assembled to make first contact, since they are already well versed in communicating with the bizarre and inscrutable minds of alien beings. 

Some examples:

• B. falsefied information on one paper, received her warning cheerfully, plagiarized material on her next paper, and failed the course as a result. Last week she “friended” me on Facebook.
• R. participated in her online course once, an enthusiastic introduction. Then nothing for two weeks, at which point our NY state census policy requires us to administratively withdraw any non-participating student. That week I saw her in Wal*Mart, where, before gigantic packages of Twizzlers, Skittles, and Air Heads, she promised she was getting back into the course and this was “a real priority in my life.” Yesterday, in an effort to get her tuition refunded she told the registrar I made an error in retaining her in class since she had attended only the first day.
• T., who should have graduated from high school in June, except she was missing an English credit, worked out a deal with a high school counselor to register for my summer writing class. T. couldn’t come up with tuition, so the counselor passed the hat and T’s teachers chipped in over $300 so she could register for the course. T. logged on once, posted a one sentence introduction, couldn’t find the course syllabus, and waited for me to contact her. For nine weeks she waited. On the day final grades were due, the counselor called me to tell me this story and ask what I could do for T.
• D., an adult, native-English user with a B+ GPA plagiarized a literature paper — everything except the title, a couple of conjunctions and a handful of words used to patch together the edited down version of the online paper he used. Plagiarism was discussed in class, described in the syllabus, and covered in an assigned reading. Upon learning he had failed the course for plagiarizing, he wrote me this: “For what it’s worth, I am not a cheater or a liar. My perception of plagiarism was not tacit. Your class and your teaching abilities are of the up most eminence. Thank you for your time.”
• L. had his work hours radically changed and was given responsibility for completing a project before this summer was out. While requesting an incomplete for my Writing About Lit course, required for his degree, he explained to me how pointless it is for him to be taking a course that has no relevance to him, his profession, or the real world in general. The class, of course, deals with building an argument based upon evidence for a targeted audience.

So, an encounter with non-carbon based, methane breathing, blue protoplasm coagulations which communicate by secreting mandallas on college-ruled bluebooks? No problem.