Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!dykimber From: dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg) Newsgroups: comp.edu Subject: Re: Writing and eng'ing ed Message-ID: <5823@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> Date: 26 Jan 89 03:41:15 GMT References: <412@cwjcc.CWRU.Edu> Reply-To: dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg) Distribution: na Organization: Princeton University, NJ Lines: 71 In article <412@cwjcc.CWRU.Edu> pjd@alpha.ces.cwru.edu (dr. funk) writes: >2. I teach the lab course which co-ordinates with the tech writing class. > The students get a "World War III" briefing on day one about the need > for good communication skills. The bottom line is, "Your communications > reflect who you are. If you can't spell and consistently use bad grammar, > you are sloppy, apparently stupid and deserve to be stuck in an entry > level programming/logic design job." Heavy handed? Yes. (I worked in > industry, too, so flames to /dev/null.) This isn't intended as a flame, so I hope you don't pipe it to /dev/null, but I have at least one gripe with heavy-handed teaching styles, which is that as far as I can tell, and from my own experience, most of the people on the high tail of the curve (i.e. the people who need instruction in that area less) are going to be instantly turned off, and have a very frustrating and counterproductive experience. I'm sure many of the people on the net can remember learning experiences in which they refused to put forth any unnecessary effort for reasons similar to this. If a teacher starts off by essentially insulting the top students (the insult is implicit - i think the example sentences you use up there would be taken as insulting when directed towards someone with good communications skills), I think that this would instantly set an adversarial tone for the class, which I don't think is good in any case. Also, just because it's only the top students (the ones without the communications problem) for whom the warning is less necessary, it doesn't mean the other students are going to be any less insulted. The other thing that irks me about heavy-handedness in teachers is that very often they are wrong. Not necessarily any more often than more personable teachers, but compare "you should probably do it this way, since it's more convenient for me to read" with "IN COLLEGE, YOU WOULD INSTANTLY BE FAILED FOR THIS, SO I'M FAILING YOU FOR YOUR OWN GOOD." In the former case, no harm done. In the latter, someone's academic record is scarred, they're week is ruined, and they've been educationally traumatized. And all because some idiot high school teacher doesn't realize that no, despite what he remembers from his/her experience at Matchbook U., college professors no longer fail students for having their papers stapled together with a horizontal rather than a vertical staple, or even for having their text displaced 1/4 of an inch to the right. I don't mean this to be insulting, and obviously this isn't the same thing - telling student they should learn how to write well is a fairly harmless recommendation, and a good idea in any case. But WWIII strategies may do more harm than good. >4. Why do I have to teach people remedial communication skills in the junior > and senior year of university? And, at a "selective" university to boot? > All I know is that Sister Gertrude would kick butt until her seventh grade > students could speak and write grammatically (and that included us budding > juvenile delinquents, too. :-) God bless that woman! I have a feeling that some of Sister Gertrude's students are the ones who accept blindly everything they've been taught, and wander around for the rest of their lives trying to "correct" everyone else. Some of my favorite examples: never use quotation marks unless you're quoting someone; never begin a sentence with the word "it"; always put punctuation inside the quotation marks; never use the word "got". These are rules that usually involve words like "always" and "never" and which vary considerably between teachers (you can get a good showing for either 'always' or 'never' with "do you put a comma after 'foo' in the sentence 'please buy me some bar, foo[,] and baz'"). The upshot of all this being that I think the World War III style is in general a lousy way to teach, and I'm glad that it wasn't the prevalent style while I was brought up because if it had been, I would probably be in jail or a mental institution right now, or maybe even worse, an airport. -Dan p.s. i won't direct flames to /dev/null, but send them by mail please - especially all the grammar and spelling flames i know i'm going to get from all of Sister Gertrude's loyal disciples. p.p.s. i didn't intend this as a flame against the orginal poster, since for all i know he has a good relationship with his students. i only meant to criticize heavy-handed WWIII teaching in general.