Dear colleague who has the classroom before me:

First, let me say that I feel we share a certain bond, even though we’ve never met. Actually, I’ve never to my knowledge laid eyes on you. Our two class periods are separated by 15 minutes. I’m slogging over from the far side of campus, rushing just to get to class on time, and you’re always long gone before I arrive. But believe me when I say that I can still feel your presence in the room–mostly because you leave so much evidence of it behind.

Which brings me to my point, and that is to say, with as much genuine affection as I can muster: Please leave behind less evidence of your presence.

For example, I think it’s wonderful that you like to arrange the desks in a circle. Walking into the room and seeing them like that brings back fond memories of my own undergraduate days and of certain professors in particular. In my mind’s…

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Who knew how polarizing the issue of classroom management could be? I certainly didn’t, until I read the comments on my December Two-Year Track column, “The Rules about Classroom Rules.”

Clearly, there are two distinct schools of thought regarding how best to manage one’s teaching environment: the “libertarian” approach, which basically allows students to behave more or less as they like as long as they’re not disturbing others, and what I’ll call (at the risk of much additional abuse) the “authoritarian” approach, which calls for strict rules and swift punishments.

Consider the very first response to my column, a long and (I thought) rather nasty comment in which the writer basically accused me of being single-handedly responsible for the decay of America’s youth because I don’t snatch up students’ cell phones whenever I see them texting in class. My reply, I admit, was hardly…

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Speaking of annoying questions students ask–see Isaac Sweeney’s excellent recent post on the topic–I was returning essays a couple of months ago when one of my students blurted out, “Do you ever give A’s?”

In point of fact, I do. Seven students in that very section (out of 23) actually got A’s, not just on the assignment but for the course. Of course it was a bit of an unusual class, with a number of dually enrolled students (that is, advanced high-school students). I don’t usually see that many A’s in a single section. So I guess it was a fair question (if slightly annoying) from a student who obviously didn’t get an A himself.

The pat answer is that professors don’t “give” A’s; students have to earn them. And of course that’s true. But a better answer is that, no, in a first-year writing course at a community college, not many students typically get A’s. That has to do with the…

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According to the Web site Livestrong.com (yes, my students’ research habits are rubbing off on me), carrots are an excellent source of vitamin B. I think about that sometimes when, as a writing instructor, I hold out the B grade as a kind of carrot before the horse, to use a hoary old metaphor.

Okay, so in this case it’s also a pretty tortured metaphor. But I think you get my drift: I use the B grade, whenever possible, to try and motivate my writing students to learn and achieve more than they might otherwise.

My basic philosophy is that not everybody can get an A–more on that in my next post–but most students are capable of getting B’s if they work hard enough. True, statistically speaking, most of them are C-level writers, but I make it clear from the beginning of the class that I’m going to do everything in my power to make it possible for them to get B’s.

I don’t try to a…

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Grading essays involves a fair amount of subjectivity, as those of us who do it for a living know very well. It’s not like feeding multiple-choice answer sheets through a Scantron machine. Even if you use a rubric, you still have to make a number of judgment calls: What exactly does “clear” mean? “Appropriate”? “Coherent”?

I’m often reminded of the time one of my fellow graduate students presented a seminar paper that he had written in reader-response style. At the time, back in the mid-80s, I had never heard anything like it. I found it fascinating and thought it was pretty well done.

The professor, though, was not impressed. He was a venerable southern literary critic in the formalist tradition who, as a young man, had been associated with the agrarians. Reader response wasn’t exactly what he was looking for in his seminar. He gave my friend a C. I remember wondering what might…

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A recent experience involving a high-school student I know has led me to re-evaluate the way I, well, evaluate.

The student, an 11th grader, brought me an English essay — excuse me, a language-arts paper — on which she had received a failing grade. She was devastated by the grade because she had never failed a writing assignment before. In fact, in her previous 11 years of public schooling, she had never made less than an A on any test or assignment in language arts, which, she told me solemnly (and her mother affirmed), was her “best subject.”

I confess: as I wrote that last paragraph, I could hear the collective voices of hundreds of my own students, protesting after getting C’s on their first writing assignments that they had “always made A’s in language arts.” I could also hear myself responding, “This isn’t high school anymore.”

In this case, there was some objective…

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