In “Professormatic,” an anonymous blogging professor at InsideHigherEd laments the impersonality of teachers lecturing from Powerpoint and busily writing comments in word processors and Blackboard. He, or she, opens the blog entry with quotes from Georgetown University students complaining about the lack of the reassuring presence of the professor’s hand-writing in typed paper comments. The brief essay goes on to argue passionately for a pedagogy of touching and being touched by the traces of bodily presence left by the pen. The essay ends by suggesting that all this technology, laptops in class especially, have left us alienated from one another, ships passing in the night, or to be scrupulous, “passing truckers on a freeway,” fellow members of the “Society of I'm not really here.”
I will offer in return a brief comment from an accomplished (and admired) senior professor who evaluated my teaching this fall. When I told him of an evaluative rubric I used to respond to student essays, a form ranking specific requirements of student work as unsatisfactory or satisfactory, with summary end comments, his response was a mournful and sympathetic “I guess you have to do something to manage the load.”
The world does indeed look different to him. This spring he’s teaching one grad course with about a dozen students. I’m teaching 116 sophomores. But I believe there’s something else at work. Like many younger faculty, by the time I had my defense, I had taught many, many sections of freshman composition and general education literature. I had taken courses in teaching writing, in composition theory, had roundtable discussions of grading strategies, read essays like “The Genre of the End-Comment” and “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting out Three Forms of Judgment.”
When students receive from me this evaluative rubric, they’re not getting extensive comments on the content of their work. At most, they get a few sentences. The other 100-150 words address extent of revision, thesis, organization, use of evidence, mechanics and how well the specific objectives of the assignment are realized in the final draft. Content? We’ve talked about that at the proposal stage, the bibliography stage, and at least one draft stage. We’ve talked about that in small groups. We’ve talked about it in a class discussion, and we’ve talked about it one-on-one. In my comp classes, in my lit classes, in my public writing classes.
And all the written comments I’ve given were offered up in legible, typed form, readily transferred by e-mail or flash drive, readily read when I need to write a recommendation or consider a grade change, and ready for me to consider when I’m writing a new assignment for the same course.
Yesterday, I returned a stack of papers to a section of public writing students, the final evaluation of their first LONG research project. A group of three in the middle of the room were wide-eyed, baffled looking. I was worried; had something gone awry? So I asked them what was wrong. The woman in the middle of the group said “No one has ever done this for me before.”
It’s not my idea. In fact, it’s old news. It’s from Elbow’s “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking,” College English (55.2 1993). For a counter-point, you can check out “The Genre of the End-Comment” in CCC (48.2 1997).
I remember hand-written comments from my tenure as an undergraduate. Often hastily scrawled, they were often illegible and more frequently unclear in explaining my grade. I often felt out at sea, left to wave or drown as I was able. When I was a senior and later a student, I no longer felt so unconfident. Wrong or right, I generally (thought I) knew where I was going. And, by then, my professors were offering me a half-page or more of single-spaced prose discussing my work. Those were small, small classes, and our discussions provided much necessary feedback that informed my writing, and I had competent fellow students who would join me for a walk or a coffee or a beer, and we talked. We had a community.
I would love to teach only, say, 50 students a semester. I’d love for everyone teaching full-time to receive 150% of the median individual income for their area. I’d also like an office with a window; I already have a lovely philodendron for it. Free parking would also be nice.
But those things wouldn’t change my method of interacting with students writing. I’m not teaching this way to “manage the load.” And I don’t aspire to be an éminence grise blessing students with his touch, however reassuring that may be to my students or my self.
Update: A nice piece on how to use laptops in the classroom, “Laptop Bans Are a Terrible Idea.”
