. . . can't work with sources. I've just read the most *horrendous* source-based essays that I've ever read in my life. Seriously, in my twenty-plus-year teaching life. Not even my own elementary school children wrote essays this terrible: disjointed, inaccurate, pointless, rambling, copied, unclear. Now I'm curious about where my previous students bought their essays.
I'm stumped: I stepped them through the process, with tour of the library and its databases, required annotated bibliography, conference with me, pre-research-paper essay persuading me that they had a reasonable research question and some idea of where to go to find their answer(s), rhetorical analysis of a sample student essay, three in-class workshops on drafts (for content [a variation of Elbow's Believer/Doubter exercises], for structure, and for citations).
I don't know what else to do. Are students that stretched that they can't do any work outside of class? We spent almost five weeks on this "unit," five weeks to produce a "researched essay" based on a question that they had related to our college common book.
The saddest thing is that I won't be teaching FYC again for at least a year. So what do I do with my terrible job this semester?
Evacuation roots
5 hours ago
3 comments:
I feel your pain... really. I have very low standards for citations and they still can't (or won't) follow a very simple set of directions. I can't tell you how many times I've said "just a citation page at the end of the paper is not sufficient because I cannot tell where your information comes from based on your prose, you MUST use parenthetical citations, footnotes or endnotes -- your choice."
are any so bad that they can be returned for changed before you grade? this doesn't work well for me for content, but those works cited pages that are numbered and/or incomplete? I've sent them back ungraded and they come up with MLA format pretty quickly. Of course, that's just tip of the iceberg (or glacier in your case) and really isn't enough.
Do you have only one section? I've had significant differences between my two comp classes this semester which helps me keep my balance -- I know I'm not saying anything that different between 8 and 11 am.
I don't know what else to say. You are a fine and thoughtful teacher. Some semesters just don't work out.
ps - I'll be interested in seeing how the papers with the common book turn out. I'm buried in two other sets before I get to the comp folks.
Thanks, folks. These are essays based on the Common Book - which many students despised because they couldn't understand it (I'll let you into the class blog about it if you want).
The students do have the option to revise, and some may do so, but some seem to have put little effort in because they knew they'd drop this essay (they can do that).
Live and learn - again.
Kris - we DID MLA in CLASS (switched an APA essay to MLA) and still students messed up. *Sigh*.
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