It Gets Worse

[robinturner]

I have now read thirteen of the twenty-three essay drafts submitted. Of these, I have only found six that I was actually able to give detailed feedback and a grade to, the rest being either way under the word limit, riddled with plagiarism or so ungrammatical and badly typed that I couldn't bear to read them. Of the six I managed to grade, three of them got a "D".

It's not as though I set extremely difficult tasks. OK, one option was a bit tricky, especially for non-native speakers: "Compare Tolkien's use of language in TLOTR with either another work by Tolkien or a fantasy/SF/historical novel by another author." Only two students attempted this: one wrote a pretty good essay and the other only failed because she pasted in part of an essay she'd written in high school that she had forgotten was plagiarised. The second option, to compare Tolkien's view of evil with that expressed in any other imaginative novel or film, was a bog-standard ENG 101 question, and the final choice, to compare TLOTR with Star Wars in terms of Campbell's Hero's Journey, was an absolute give-away (though I suppose it was also an invitation to plagiarise).

So what, I wonder, is the problem? It's not as though the students aren't interested in the subject matter. I could understand getting short, sloppily written, partially plagiarised essays if I'd set a question like "Compare the use of kennings in The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf." Anglo-Saxon poetry is not everyone's cup of tea, which is why I only included a short extract from Maldon and spiced it up with dramatisations of Saxon and Viking military tactics. But TLOTR is something you love or hate, and if you hate it, you don't sign up for a course on it.

Anyway, I need to take a long break before I go back to reading essays, otherwise I might write something that would hurt someone's feelings (assuming I haven't already done so). Students may irritate the hell out of me sometimes, but I don't like to actually make them cry. Oh well, the bright side is that they've saved me some time - it takes much less time to dismiss a bad essay than it does to give feedback on an acceptable one.

Comments

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Why don't students understand that the difference between creating awful and quality work is the difference between dreading the drudgery of the assignment and having fun with it?

[solri.livejournal.com]

You're right, but we all make that mistake sometimes. I do it with housework all the time!

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

So true. I don't even really know how to have fun with housework...

[vret.livejournal.com]

Have you never given your house a strip clean?

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

We probably keep the temperature too low for that, if you mean what I think you mean.

[vret.livejournal.com]

I think I'm sure I mean what I think you think I mean.

[ironed_orchid]

Those sounds like they could be fun assignments.

Re: Context switching

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

When, in their normal lives, would any of your students run into "What do you think of Tolkien's concept of evil?" ... it just won't happen.

I don't know about that. Lots of role-playing gamers get into elaborate discussions on the nature of evil and its depictions in fantasy literature. Now, you could argue that these people aren't leading "normal lives" in the first place...

Re: Context switching

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Hey, it's only fair to respond to one sweeping overgeneralization ("When would any of them?") with another.

Re: p.s. On actualities VS plausible fictions

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Your assertion: When would students encounter X in normal lives? It won’t happen.

My playful counterassertion: Lots of people in a particular group encounter X.

The sort of casual, friendly response I would have expected: Ah, but what are the odds that any of solri’s students are in that particular group?

Instead, you wanted to criticize my debating style (as if I’d been debating, rather than engaging in friendly banter): Statements referring to “lots of” are not valid without quantitative evidence.

My response: You made a broad unsupported statement, and I made one too.

Your reply: You (a) call me passive-aggressive. (Huh? Where?) You (b) claim I was demeaning your point entirely. (How so? And by the way, were you not criticizing solri’s assignment-creation decision-making?) And you are apparently unhappy that (c) I did not provide links to evidence to support my counterassertion. Then you go on to (d) call me a sophist.

Maybe you’re just having an unusually bad day and attacking strangers makes you feel better?

Re: p.s. On actualities VS plausible fictions

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

You're certainly welcome to do your own web searches on discussions of types of evil among gamers. I suggest starting with the Wizards of the Coast forums: forums.gleemax.com.

Re: p.s. On actualities VS plausible fictions

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that maybe the reason you're so offended by me is that you took my joke about RPG-ers the wrong way, not realizing that I am one.

Re: p.s. On actualities VS plausible fictions

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Good grief. My original reply had joking elements in it, most certainly. Humor and irony. You made an assertion, which also happened to be an overgeneralization; those are not mutually exclusive.

I don't know whose definition of sophistry you're using, but at no point have I engaged in deception or providing superficially plausible but ultimately fallacious arguments. At any rate, let us call a halt to our conversation, so that solri won't have to read even more of this unpleasantness when he returns to his journal.

Re: Context switching

[solri.livejournal.com]

I'd say a good half of my students are the type who would have that kind of discussion in their everyday lives - they're as nerdy as I am. they do fine when we discuss things in class; it's just essays that give them problems.

Re: Context switching

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

It's the order/chaos distinction that's got me enthralled.

[sandokai.livejournal.com]

OH dear, I think your kennings assignments sound the most fun.... ;)


I wish I had ever written an essay on kennings.

[vret.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I would have done the second one, and compared it with Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars series, a titanic struggle of Good vs Good.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I've read some Poul Anderson a long time ago, but not that one.

One thing I've noticed - to make a huge generalisaton - is that fantasy writers tend to see evil as a force, and SF writers tend to see it as a fuckup.