My first batch of composition papers are about to come in. I'm dreading it. The students turned in drafts last time-- after looking them over, I told them that they're not ready to turn these in for grades by Monday. I identified what I thought were common problems in many of them, and told them that instead of turning in their papers for a grade on Monday, they'll all meet with me for one-on-one conferences. They're supposed to bring substantial revisions to those conferences.... we'll see how many do. It's not just that many of these essays are terribly written (a disappointment, considering they've all already had one semester of composition), but I'm finding the content of a few of them in particular to be ideologically nauseating. The assignment asked them to think and write about an issue related to human rights that they don't yet know much about-- without doing additional research (which will come later, in a future assignment). Rather than having them present themselves as experts on a particular issue, I've asked them to query where their knowledge about their issue comes from and what the limitations of those sources of knowledge might be. I've also asked them to think through how their own gender, race, class, religion, etc., might position them to view their topic in a particular way. A good number of them get it, and are doing interesting things, exploring why it is they don't know more about X, Y, or Z. But others are still in uninformed expert mode, and are saying some very, very, troubling things like these:
- from a paper on homelessness: "Many people dress as [if] they are homeless, just to get extra money for themselves. They might even live in million dollar mansions and still feel it would be nice to have more than what they need..... Greed is one of the seven deadly sins. It says in the bible that all sins are bad but greed is one of the worst."
- from a paper on the Rwanda genocide: "The fact of the matter is the death total by the time American troops would have entered Rwanda to the time we left would have been likely to be just as high [as the number of Tutsis killed by Hutus]."
- Most troublingly, this from a paper about racisim in the United States: Freudian typo? "In reallity I have friends of all racists and view them all as human beings but some of the actions of the African American Race have lead me to believe that people play the race card too much."
So I try to be as tactful and pleasant as possible, rescuing something from their essays they can work with... but papers like these make me wantto throttle someone.
And then there's my decidedly anti-feminist Shakespeare student... Today we were discussing an early modern
ballad in which a man tames his wife by beating her bloody and senseless and then wrapping her in a salted horse hide. According to my student, this was an appropriate punishment-- after all, that wife
was being pretty bitchy. I'm totally boggled. I can understand those women who, because of their religious upbringing, etc., believe that "wives should submit to their husbands" hooey, but to hear a woman claim that domestic abuse is not just fine, but desirable.... What the fuck?
2 comments:
Oh, wow. The only good thing is that if you get some of these students to think critically, it will be a huge accomplishment and you will have really changed their lives.
I once had a student who said in class "The only reason bell hooks got this book published is because she was poor and black. " Ah, yes. Being poor and black is SUCH a help in the competitive publishing game.
Luckily in my classroom this kind of student is in the minority so peer review is often effective.
Thinking about your anti-feminist Shakespeare student: Do you know Ozment's The Burgermeister's Daughter? (I ask because it is early modern, though about Germany, and, well, it's history, so you may not be familiar with it.) It's about a woman who gets thrown out of her father's house for having 2 boyfriends (i.e., being a slut of course!), and then later she sues her father (and then her siblings) for part of her inheritance. She gets a settlement at some point, but keeps pushing her legal case - unsuccessfully. Anyway, the vast majority of my students are UTTERLY unsympathetic, because, you know, she was a slut. (They can be so judgmental sometimes!) Of course, Ozment is pretty conservative, so I think they kind of pick up on Ozment's biases, even though at the end O. tries to throw in this pseudo-feminist-but-not-really reading at the end. Very weird.
Sorry, that got longer than I'd intended - just meant to say, it is strange sometimes running up against student assumptions!
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