Instructor Torture
Miriam Burstein at The Little Professor has some interesting comments about freshman composition classes, in response to a New York Times op-ed by Stanley Fish. Fish speaks rapturously of teaching freshmen writing without content by making them devise their own language.
This sounds like an interesting idea, but also one that's fraught with disaster potential. I don't think I'd like to see what this would end up being like with an instructor who wasn't completely sold on the concept. (And if this leads to a whole spate of pseudo-Tolkien novels written by people who started devising cultures to go along with their made-up languages, Fish may be in for some fearsome retribution.) I'm also not convinced that this is necessarily the One True Solution to the problem of bad student writing-- I tend to agree with the argument that the real problem is how to overcome the compartmentalizing that students are so prone to. But it's an interesting approach all the same.
Writing isn't a huge point of emphasis in physics, but I do seem to end up spending an inordinate amount of time on dealing with written work, mostly because I'm a very text-oriented person in general. So I'm always interested in hearing good suggestions for how to teach students to write.
Some weeks back at a faculty lunch, I sat down with a colleague from the English department who asked "How did you learn how to write?" (I think she'd been polling the other faculty at the table before I got there.) I had to think about it for a minute or two, because I don't really remember a time when I had difficulty writing. I remember a few how-to-write-an-essay classes back in high school, but I regarded those as a gigantic waste of time, because I already more or less knew what to do.
When it comes to technical writing, though, I can nail down where and how I learned to write, and it wasn't in a class. It was at NIST, writing up articles for publication, and going through the process of "paper torture."
I've alluded to the paper torture process a few times before, most recently when talking about journals. The basic process was as follows: whoever had been the lead person on a given experiment would write up a complete draft of a paper, and then a meeting would be arranged with all the people who were going to be listed as authors, and we would go over it word by word.
And when I saw "word by word," I mean that literally. There were always big-picture comments made in those meetings, dealing with how to structure the argument, and likely questions that would need to be addressed, but in the end, it always got down to the level of grammar and word choice. Things like "Do we really want to call this 'simple,' given that it took weeks to figure out?" or "Shouldn't this 'that' be a 'which' instead?
It was frequently excruciating (though the xenon experiment paper torture sessions never reached the heights of absurdity of the BEC experiment, where they once devoted an entire three-hour meeting to the first paragraph of a paper), but tremendously instructive. Not so much because it taught me more about the rules of writing proper English (a cursory glance through the archives will show that that stuff never really stuck), but because it got me to really think things through when writing a paper draft.
I started to internalize the paper torture process, looking at my own text with a more critical eye, and asking "What is Steve likely to complain about in this paragraph?" My first drafts still look about the same (and what you get on this blog is mostly first drafts), but I know what to take out in the second draft (all instances of "however" and "indeed," for example). By the time I was writing the squeezed state paper at Yale, I was going through something like five internal drafts for every one I passed on to my co-authors. And in the end, revision is the key to good writing, completely independent of the subject.
I explained all that to my colleague at lunch, and she thought that sounded really interesting. And then she asked "Have you tried implementing that in your classes?" Which sort of threw me.
If you think about it, though, it's not a totally ridiculous idea (though I wouldn't attempt it in the class with the freshman engineers). I have some other colleagues who swear by oral lab reports, which work for a similar reason: the students are so terrified of looking foolish in front of their friends that they actually do the background work you would like them to do all the time.
The tricky part is finding a way to make the whole thing fair, and not unduly burdensome for the instructor. The optimum arrangement would be something that broke the students into groups and got them to do the "paper torture" process themselves, without the faculty member providing the bulk of the commentary. And, of course, you also need to avoid the inherent problem of group work, namely having one student stuck doing all the work for everyone else.
You could probably make it work for something like a lab class, though, by breaking the students into groups of, say, four, and having each student take one turn as the "first author" for one experiment, with separate grades for the first draft, the comments provided by other students, and the final draft. It'd be a bitch and a half to keep straight, but there might be something to the idea.
I still don't have the foggiest idea how to deal with the compartmentalization issue (that is, getting them to apply the same process to any other class), though.
Posted at 8:17 PM | link | follow-ups |