Ow.

My parents never gave me that line about hoping I had kids exactly like me. They were too nice to wish that on anyone, but if they had, their wish would be coming true right now.

I was an unenthusiastic student in high school (understatement of the year candidate right there). Slept through Uncle Jimmy's Algebra class, meandered my way through Money Matters twice, did homework only when threatened. My parents heard the same thing at every conference: "He'd do well if he'd only apply himself."

And that's a good way to describe my Comp students--many of them, anyway. They're smart, they articulate their ideas well at times, and they're interested in improving themselves. But they are capable of some stone-headed statements. Such as:

I also believe sending Soldiers to Iraq was a good idea, and that the nine/eleven attack was Saddam Hussein’s way of declaring war on us, so it was necessary for his capture.

This is the kind of stubborn ignorance that earns the conservatives their reputation for willful stupidity. Wow.

Or this gem:

I believe that by partially eliminating suffrage in the United States, we have inevitably created suffrage in other countries.

On what planet do you spend five weeks writing an essay, submit two drafts for peer review, pretend to assemble an argument about a topic, and fail to learn the meaning of the word at the core of said essay? Blergh.

Then there's the need to point out the durability of certain phenomena:

Abortion has been around for a long time.

Immigration has been around for centuries.

The career of nursing has been around longer than I have been a live.

Poorly-developed essays have been around for longer than they should have been. Yikes.

Some of the ideas can't be classified as anything other than WTF?:

Is abortion safer than childhood?

Tuition should be considered highly for picking a university as don’t let it be in the way of a dream for there is many scholarships and grants available for students if they only search hard enough.

In June 2007, Louisiana passed the law that any undergarments being exposed due to their pants not being pulled up enough, will be charged with indecent exposure.

Everybody cares about their belongings right? Well we belong to the earth and it can’t take care of us we have to take care of it.

When the experiment was over the scientist got the results that water was just as good for you than water and that Gatorade did not do any good for you than water.

At least those nefarious undergarments are facing punishment. And so is my brain. Maybe even capital punishment:

The Death Penalty speaks to us all; everyone has an opinion on it.

And euthanasia is always an option:

There are a couple different types of ways to apply euthanasia. The two most common are a lethal dose of narcotics or a narcotic that cancels out the drug that the patient needs to survive. Most times the patient’s doctor will only hook them up to a device which holds the lethal dose. Then the patient pushes a button to release it whenever he or she likes. This is the only way I know about. I don’t think it would be very professional for a doctor to use a gun instead. More importantly it would hurt everyone’s ears.

I can appreciate when a student knows that he's not doing what he needs to be doing and embraces the humor in his failure. Because that's how I see these examples of bad writing. My failure. How did I let this happen? I'm glad it was only a few of them.

Stunt Wife?

Today is a day for packing, laundering, cleaning, running errands, and--most painful of all--grading. I'm going through my Comp students' Evaluation essays, for which they were allowed to evaluate a movie, if they wanted to. One student picked The Prestige, a movie about magicians. I haven't seen the film, but I think I'll have to, just to understand the essay.

The confusing part? This:

As Robert and Alfred partnership breaks apart or disappears when Alfred tied the wrong knot on Roberts stunt wife during a magic show causing her to drown.

Do I need to take some sort of hallucinogenic drug to understand that? Is there a decoder ring? I had to get this in the proper file pronto, before I lost consciousness.

Guess Which File This Goes In

From a student's in-class writing from Thursday:

"There was a huge traylur that I had to pull behind the tractor."

"What's the problem with that?" Cletus and Durnell want to know.

This is not a dumb student. This student's speech is articulate, and all assignments so far indicate that this student is capable of college-level work. It has to be that this student hasn't read much. And apparently got no help to this point in working out some dramatic spelling issues.

Here I come to save the day.

Dumb Things I Have Read

I had a good week teaching, and now I'm looking over the Incoming Assessment essays my composition students wrote on Thursday. The essays are mostly what you'd expect: some students already know what they're doing, and I'll need to find ways to challenge them beyond the basics; some kids can put a sentence together but can't organize a body of thought yet; and others can't find their asses with both hands.

In her introduction, one of my students wrote this sentence:

“This statement is very true for the most part.”

That sentence provided an unfortunate first impression of what was actually a competent essay. It's an indication that this student is in the right place--if her writing had no flaws she wouldn't need my class, and if she and I both do what we're supposed to she'll stop writing like that soon.

But I couldn't help laughing. And retyping the sentence in a file marked "Dumb Things I Have Read."

The first year I was a teaching assistant we were all forced into Portfolio Assessment. Every essay our students wrote during the semester was revised and placed in a plastic folder, their names were removed from their work and replaced by numbers, and the piles of folders--huge, slippery stacks of yellow plastic--were given to other TAs at random.

We had two days from the time we could pick up the portfolios to the time we had to submit them. Most classes had around twenty students, and each of those students wrote about five essays. That left each of us with about 100 essays to read and only 48 hours to read them in.

We crammed into our office, a converted classroom with eight desks for sixteen TAs. And a nasty couch. Everyone made an appearance, and some of us were there for the whole day. I spent sixteen straight hours reading essays, and at some point something broke in my mind. I'd read an essay and the errors caused me hysterics. I laughed until I cried. The unintentional comedy of freshman writing imposed on my overstimulated mind was too much.

Weeks later I wished I had recorded some of the sentences that made me laugh so hard. The next semester I started my file. It contains some real gems:

“When this happened the world was hit with many sexually transmitted diseases and soon the condom was being enforced to use more during intercourse.”

And any subject could produce a winner:

“I have one word of advice for young ladies that might be in the same shoes as I once was, never give up on your dreams because of your economic status.”

“But a inhumane act on a developmentally disabled person is an act of utter repulsion and insolence.”

I continued recording these nuggets through my Intermediate Writing class and while I taught Intro to Creative Writing. Short stories seemed like a rich source of nonsense:

“While standing at the proofing machine, Jamie was sitting at her desk slumped over just waiting for some work and had a look on her face as if she could have been doing something better than sitting there.”

“My supervisor came rushing over like a busy bee trying to shuffle for work to conjure up for the people in the napkin area.”

“Now my tears came pouring down like an erupting water fall.”

“Jane, trying to remember who Claire was, started to shed tears, realizing that she couldn’t even remember what she had done the following day.”

“The call was made to Susan’s parent who lived in a small farming community outside of Chattanooga Tennessee at eleven thirty six p.m.”

And this is why I teach. To help students learn how not to do this. And to amuse myself. Some ill-considered sentences, while uncomfortable, are great for a laugh:

“I remember opening the door and seeing nothing but plain white walls, ceramic tiled floors, a very tiny window, and my new roommate sitting at his desk with his computer in his boxers.”

Ouch.