On Fri, 11 Jul 1997, Dr. Robert K. Irish wrote:
> But first, isn't the
> student who wants to impress the prof with a term paper simply
> understanding the rhetorical situation? Rhetoric is to convince after
> all. I see nothing wrong with this as a stated goal.
Hmm, I dunno . . . I think you have to take this on a case by
case basis. None of us would say that we want students to write term
papers to impress us; we want them to learn something and then write
about what they've learned. Granted, it would be nice to be impressed
with what they've learned. But one without the other isn't going to cut
it.
> I actually have
> more trouble with the student who sets up a desire to "research" which
> is so often an excuse for poorly thought out ideas and shoddy argument.
Whenever I hear this line of reasoning I'm reminded of the
student I had a few years ago who wrote an absolutely _awful_ paper on
gays in the military. Well, the paper was awful by any standards I
might've applied up until then: the student couldn't seem to decide
whether or not it was acceptable to him to allow openly gay people in the
military, and he had evidence from all over the rhetorical map to support
his non-position. But what really disturbed me about the paper was that
I thought I could see where the student's confusion was coming from:
many of the ideas and points of view he'd expressed had been previously
expressed on the class discussion list, and he was clearly (to me,
anyway) attempting to reconcile the rhetorical and ideological positions
of his readers with his _own_ (very ill-defined) position. He thought
that it might be okay to allow gays in the military, but he sure didn't
like the idea of homosexuality, and the paper was visible evidence of his
ideological struggle and the inconsistencies in his viewpoint which he'd not
yet worked out.
And he wasn't _going_ to work them out in the fourteen weeks of
my class, either. But if part of the goal of a liberal arts education is
to encounter new points of view and think about them seriously and
respectfully, that guy was well on the way to becoming educated. He was
probably further along than some of the writers who'd expressed their
opinions in more polished form on the class discussion list. If I'd been
forced to grade his paper, I'm sure the grade wouldn't have reflected
that assessment, and nothing I could have said would have conveyed it to
him, either. Similarly, nothing I could say to the folks whose writing
was polished but whose thought was less ambitious could have convinced
_them_ of the importance of ambitious thought if they'd gotten an A on
their paper . . .
> Actually, last term my Shakespeare students produced some amazing
> results out of their final term papers. I think though that part of the
> reason for that was that I had a pretty thorough journal assignment
> through the year (no compromise there, but the endless reading and
> commenting almost killed me).
Well, I think that it's possible to achieve a lot of the same
benefits from journals without killing yourself, Rob; you can have
students do the same kind of writing and responding in an on-line
discussion format, and you don't have to read and respond to all of it.
Students will lose something by not having your commentary, but they will
also gain a great deal by reading each others' journal entries and
responding back to their classmates. And I don't think that's a lesser
gain: many students will probably get _more_ out of reading and
responding to each other than they will from a teacher's commentary.
Marcy
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Marcy Bauman
Writing Program, University of Michigan-Dearborn
4901 Evergreen Rd, Dearborn, MI 48128
fax: 313-593-5552
http://www.umd.umich.edu/~marcyb
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