Student Expectations

It seems like a constant struggle in classes today to keep students engaged yet also make sure they learn. The truth is exactly what Durst said, student’s want to do as little work as possible but also have such high expectations for their writing course. They seem to think this one class should transform their writing, even if they write a five or six page paper the night before. As teachers we can only show them the paths they need to take with their writing and hope they follow. What we are really doing is asking them to change. Change the idea that a five paragraph essay is not the best way to write. Change their writing styles based on their audience. The barrier becomes change and if they are willing to change or not. It is so routine and easy for a freshman to think of the five paragraph essay style and still want to lean on it, but suggesting to them they can use six or even eight paragraphs is a very new and scary concept for some.

Last year at this time, during my last semester of undergrad work, I took an introductory-type literature class with one of my favorite professors. For our first short essay she tried to assign the paper like she did our higher level literature courses; she told us the essay was short but did not assign a set number of pages. The first question after she finished explaining the essay was of course paper length. Her response, as was always her response, was the reiterate that it was a shorter essay, unlike most of my essays in her other courses, and that there was not so much a set paper length, just as many pages as it would take you to answer the question. Everyone panicked. I saw them give each other horrified looks and some raised their hands and still asked, more indirectly, for a page number. She finally assigned a paper length, much to her dismay.

Where my professor tried to get away from the structure and confines of an essay the student’s rebelled. Even though she said it was perfectly alright to write two pages or ten pages they still panicked. It seems to me that although students may complain about paper lengths and the structure or rules of a course that is what they want. In high school many of these students know their teachers well. They have had them for numerous classes, so they know how they grade. When they come to college, especially for their fist year of taking required courses, they go from the familiarity of how a teacher grades to having no clue how they will be graded. They may have been more apt to take freedoms in writing styles and paper lengths in high school when they were comfortable with the teacher, but with a new teacher it becomes harder. I think it is the uncertainty and unfamiliarity, not a lack of confidence, that holds many freshman back and makes them beg for some sort of structure, more than you may have wanted to give them.

As Durst concludes, “There is thus a serious discontinuity between what we expect students to learn in college composition and what they hope to learn.” As Durst points out earlier in the chapter students want to learn “greater speed and the development of a more compact and readily applicable set of writing strategies.” These goals, he says, go against what the goals of the curriculum should be. So what do we do as teachers? Do we teach students what they want to learn? Do we teach them writing techniques that may not challenge them, but will help them write adequate papers? The many concerns from students in Durst’s article show that students are in fact concerned with their writing, and they expect us to help them, whether it is with grammar or clarity in their writing. For many students they know they will not be writing papers on a regular basis, so learning the nuts and bolts of writing for the college level instead of the high school level is all the want to get out of a writing course. They don’t want to explore their writing or different writing styles. Do we not teach them grammar and vocabulary if that is what they want to gain from the course? I think the class should be a combination between what we expect and think they should gain from a freshman level composition course and what they expect to learn. I think students should leave my course at the end of the semester with as much knowledge about writing as I can give them, whether it is from the classes I plan ahead, or just from their questions and concerns about writing.