Teaching in the age of the internet- First drafts

Here's the thing. With the invention of the internet, and email especially, the nature of the student teacher relationship has changed. At one time, if you had a stupid question, you could call the teacher (and they would never check their phone) or you could show up at their office and wait. This self edited a lot of stupid questions. Now, there is no apparatus for this blatant stupidity. That, combined with a high turnaround rate, has created a forum that has made the teacher a kind of slave to their students.

Let me try to explain further. This semester, a couple of students, before they turned in their midterm paper, asked me if I'd look it over. Now, try to imagine how this would have worked pre-email. If you gave a paper to your professor and expected to get feedback on that draft, you'd have to give it to them a few weeks ahead of time. The professor would get it one day in class, read it, send it back another day. At the very least, we're talking a prep time of a week, but professors have lives, so I'm saying two.

But with email, that turnaround is possibly immediate. You can send the professor the paper, ask him or her to check it over, get it back, make corrections, send it back to the professor, etc., and do all this before the next class. What's more, doesn't this practice sound just like what you learned in your freshman comp class? You should write drafts and they do.

So, let me set the stage for this. I'm teaching a class with fifty students and at the beginning of the semester, a couple of them asked me, a week early, if they could send me their essays and have me look them over. So, I did. They told their friends. I probably saw three drafts of each of the original papers, plus another round from other people who handed me their papers a couple of days in advance, plus a few who waited until the last day and sent me emails in desperation.

As I'm a hard grader, after the first round, the entire class caught onto the idea that if they wanted to get a better grade, they shouldn't try harder, they should just push their papers past me more often. This last round of papers, about twenty of my fifty students expected me to read their papers in advance. A few had nothing that was worth reading and wanted me to not only make vast corrections but to instill in them ideas about what they should write about. Others could not take the criticism. They'd hand me biographies of Sylvia Plath and I'd say, "you're paper doesn't have an argument." To which they'd reply either: "what should my argument be," "is it okay that I don't have an argument," or "I thought I did have an argument."

In short, rather than writing their papers better, or even practicing any skill in essay writing, they would hand me plot summaries or biographies and expect me to turn their papers into literature essays. After the first three or four, I finally sent out a mass email explaining that I simply didn't have time to proofread all of their papers.

The response was interesting. First, begging. Then, a commentary on the unfairness of the situation ("But I'm not an English major"), and finally, they voiced their opinion that my unwillingness to read multiple drafts of their essays should be reflected in THEIR grade.

It has been--in that participation portion.

This is, strangely enough, the mentality of the contemporary college students. The teacher is no longer a wise expert whose advice is to be sought out; he or she is a stumbling block to the A. My job is to get the student to learn, taking all onus of responsibility off of the student. If they don't learn, for whatever reason, then it's my fault. Their paper is no longer their's--or at least the grade isn't--I am to tell them how to write the paper that will earn an A and not in general terms. They want (demand) specificity: "what should my next paragraph be about and what part of the book should I discuss to make that point you just said." Moreover, they expect this specificity at all hours with a minimum turnaround rate. As they no longer have to operate at the whim of the professor--as they no longer have to go to office hours for this, or rely on the professor even being on campus--their belief is that the professor must, in all cases, do whatever is necessary to get them an A.

So, I think I'm going to stop handing out my email address to my students, or perhaps I will hand out someone else's. Any takers?