What I wrote to my students this week

MIDTERM: THE CARROT AND THE STICK

Some students in my English 1102 classes start to feel confused at this point in the semester. It's just midterm, and we just about have a full draft of your long paper assigned. What's left that's going to take up the rest of the term, you might wonder.

What's left is the possibility of taking that essay to a much better place - and the learning that is possible for you in the process. If you have looked carefully at the grading rubric for the final essay, you may have begun to realize how many arts of writing are involved in getting a good grade. These arts take practice, effort, and focus. They can also have great payoffs in building your confidence as a writer and developing skills that you can use in the many writing projects you will face in the future.

If you bring the best possible essay draft that you can write on your own into the feedback process (which includes both peer reviews and an instructor conference), then you will be much more likely to get feedback you can really use. If we spend our time giving you feedback on basic stuff that you could have completed on your own if you had done more work sooner, you won't get the feedback you need to actually do better.

So that's the carrot: learning is available to you in this process if you work this process, do the assignments faithfully, read and review the textbook and apply what it says. You can improve your writing arts, and you can get a better grade that way.

(You know the carrot and stick metaphor, right??)

So here's the stick: I am going to grade your final essay really, really hard. If you want to know what I'll be looking for, study the rubric. By the end of the term, you will have had many weeks to try to do your best to achieve what it demands. There won't really be any excuses left that I'll be interested in at that point.

I always promise my students that I will do my best to be a good teacher. But I know, after many years of teaching, that students have to be full partners in their own education. Many of you are excellent partners, and it's my great pleasure to work with you.

If you are one who has not been doing your best up to now, please step up. It's not too late to go back and learn from assignments that you haven't done yet. It's not too late to meet with me and get extra help. It's not too late to become one of the students who asks questions in class, who does more research to fill the gaps, who suddenly realizes that doing better work is worth the personal satisfaction.

There's an ironic element of pride involved in working hard in a class like this. Often the students who work the hardest are not prideful during the process of developing big writing projects - they ask a lot of questions, they seem like they don't have a lot of confidence, they realize how much they don't know, they struggle to get things right. But in the end, when they get their good grade, and they know they did their best and they realize how much they learned, they are excited and filled with pride!

Every one of you still has the potential to be one of those students.