Section 1: Composition at Missouri: Philosophy and Peculiarities 1-1 Definition of Composition 1-2 Rationale for This View of Composition 1-3 Problems of Authority Created by this View of Composition 1-4 Some Peculiarities of the Program 1-5 Descriptions of English Department Composition Courses Section 2: Assignment Design 2-1 Typical Writing Intensive Assignments 2-2 Sample English 1000 Assignments 2-3 A One Source, Two Source, Multi-Source Sample Section 3: A Sample Syllabus Section 4: Marking and Grading 4-1 Ranking and Evaluating 4-2 Guidelines for Commenting on Student Papers 4-3 Grades in Context 4-4 Some Practices that Regularly Produce Grade Protests Section 5: Forms and Procedures 5-1 Requests to Change Rooms 5-2 Overrides 5-3 Moving Students from One Section to Another 5-4 Absences: Submitting Reports and Dropping Students 5-5 Early Alert Forms 5-6 Report of Plagiarism 5-7 Evaluations 5-8 Grade Reports 5-9 Incomplete Grades 5-10 Grade Changes 5-11 Grade Complaints/Appeals 5-12 Teaching Request Forms 5-13 Textbook Order Forms 5-14 End of Semester Responsibilities Section 6: Support 6-1 The Supervisory System • Checklist 1: Syllabus and Class Plan •  Checklist 2: Instructor's Teaching Record • Checklist 3: Grading and Marking, Problem Students • Checklist 4: Class Observation • Checklist 5: Debriefing 6-2 The Writing Lab 6-3 Counseling Center 6-4 Academic Support Services 6-5 Library Orientation/Instruction 6-6 Computer Use in English 1000 6-7 Workshops/Brown Bags 6-8 Further Information Section 7: Some Common Problems 7-1 The Assignment the Produces Distressingly High Low Grades 7-2 The Uncooperative or Disruptive Student 7-3 Complaints, Grade Protests, Poor Evaluations 7-4 The Student Who Must Have an A or B 7-5 Plagiarism 7-6 Problematic Relationships with Students 7-7 Breaches of Confidentiality Section 8: Calendar of Important Dates

English 1000

Instructor Guide: Section 1, Composition at Missouri: Philosophy and Peculiarities

Ballyhough railway station has two clocks which disagree by some six minutes. When one helpful Englishman pointed the fact out to a porter, his reply was ‘Faith, sir, if they was to tell the same time, why would we be having two of them?'

--Martin Joos, The Five Clocks

This opening chapter is intended primarily to help those just joining the composition staff get a sense of how teaching here may be different from teaching at another institution. One way that it is different is that we encourage our teachers to develop their own syllabi and assignments, each reflecting personal interests and intellectual commitments. There is so much diversity among classes that it may be difficult to see the underlying unity. Such unity as there is comes officially via the four "musts" listed in the box on the following page and unofficially via an ongoing conversation among graduate students and faculty members who teach the course. This chapter should be viewed as part of the unofficial conversation.

1-1 Definition of Composition

By composition, we could simply mean the study of the sentence- and paragraph-level skills that make a person a "literate" user of standard, edited written English. That we don't define the word—and the course—this way is a source of small daily frictions and misunderstandings. We live in a society, after all, that is sentimentally attached to literacy, but that measures knowledge by counting right and wrong answers. The tests that determine placement in most college composition programs in the U.S. (including Missouri's) are "objective," meaning that they involve no writing at all. Even the written CLEP and AP examinations are objective in spirit: a half-hour essay on a topic about which students are expected to know nothing in particular becomes, in practice, a test of whether they can fill a page without making conspicuous errors. No wonder some freshmen who receive low grades on illogical or unpersuasive papers complain that there was nothing wrong with the writing.

Such students may have trouble accepting the view that a paper may be mechanically flawless and nonetheless badly composed by the standards applicable in college and beyond. And this brings us to our counter-definition of composition. We see composition as the set of disciplines that allows a writer to produce

1. papers on questions about which reasonable people can disagree,

2. papers that can be read with respect and interest by an audience of strangers, some of them quite well-informed,

3. papers that can't be produced in a single sitting, but involve a campaign of research, drafting, and revision extending over several days.

Some papers that were considered exemplary in this program a quarter-century ago—papers in which students compare their mothers to 1954 Fords, summarize a biography of Sylvia Plath, or describe an event that changed their lives—are not part of the curriculum.

What must an English 1000 class cover? We believe there is a range of successful ways in which to teach English 1000, and we encourage thoughtful experimentation as teachers find and develop their own pedagogical strengths.  We see the diversity of teaching approaches as variations on a set of central themes that all sections of the course must share: the focus is on student writing, which means that students write regularly: writing fewer than three papers would likely not offer students sufficient writing experience, while writing more than five papers would probably not offer them the chance to focus on a particular paper in a sustained way; the course includes at least one paper that fits each of the following descriptions: an academic argument grounded in an interpretation or analysis of a single text. an academic argument grounded in or concerning the relationship between two texts. an academic argument using multiple sources. throughout the semester, students write and revise papers whose ideas arise from careful work with sources that extend beyond personal experience and general knowledge: these sources might include texts, images, cultural practices, etc., and the quantity of source material ought to facilitate rather than overshadow the focus on student writing; student papers address subjects that invite more than one formulation, interpretation, critique, explanation, or analysis; students have the opportunity to revise each of their papers after receiving substantial response and critique from their instructor and from their peers.

1-2 Rationale for This View of Composition

The emphasis on writing persuasive papers addressed to an audience of strangers reflects a view of our students' development as writers and thinkers. Because Missouri is now a selective institution, most of our students write tolerably well at the sentence level. Even the weaker writers have had lessons in English usage for twelve years; they need individual correction and criticism, but few will benefit from another lecture on subject-verb agreement.

Most do need a better understanding of their work as public writers. With few exceptions, they have written only for people who know them well and who have an investment in their success. They have not written documents—as adults often must—that will be read by strangers with no notion of the context in which the writing takes place. As a result, there is often an egocentric quality to their writing: a failure to explain what needs explanation, a failure to anticipate differing points of view and experiences.

Some of our students' writing may also seem egocentric because they can't marshal their thoughts for the several days it takes to write a mature paper. Their papers are often snapshots of their thinking on the evening before the due date. They don't incubate a thought, fold it back on itself, examine it from several angles. Typically, our students need guided practice in heuristics, drafting, research, soliciting feedback, revising, and being self-critical without becoming paralyzed. Students often envision writers as Supermen who can leap tall buildings at a single bound. A composition course may be the place where they learn how to take the stairs.

Both the egocentrism and the inability to sustain a long thought are connected with the typical freshman view of knowledge. Many freshmen are just emerging from a well-studied phase of adolescent development where thinking is dualistic. For them, statements are either right or wrong: no two ways about it. And if teachers in the humanities say that there are two ways about it, then these teachers are just trading in flimflam. Knowledge is out there, as objective facts; true experts have this knowledge. We can get it (in principle) by scientific experimentation or (in reality) by copying it from books with little changes to show that we are doing our own work. Beyond the realm of scientific, expert knowledge, there is only opinion, and one person's opinion is as good as another. If this is the typical freshman view of knowledge, no wonder many students have difficulty being self-critical or concentrating for several days or weeks on a writing project. If they see all writing as either summarizing the experts or laying down a line of bull, how can we expect them to undertake the hard work of building and presenting a persuasive case? Thus, for practical reasons, composition teachers need to help students develop a more sophisticated understanding of what knowledge is and how it is constructed.

1-3 Problems of Authority Created by this View of Composition

Our typical freshman is about nineteen years old. That many nineteen-year-olds have trouble dealing with authority is hardly news. Students uneasily balanced between adolescence and adulthood become uneasy when a teacher, sometimes one only five years older than they are, criticizes not only the formal correctness of their writing, but its persuasiveness and tone. Some accept the teacher's authority reluctantly, some challenge it directly, some snipe. Experience tells us that the friction between oppositional students and general education instructors is a predictable part of the drama of intellectual development on a college campus.

In Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years (1970) psychologist and former English teacher William Perry describes the friction from the perspective of a student who is asked to write a paper on a subject raised by class readings. The student is pleased when the teacher tells the class "not to write a mere summary of the author's views, but to state our own ideas, our own opinions." She produces a paper that states her opinion in clear, correct language—and receives a D. The incensed student, who has received A's on papers no better than this in high school, assumes that the teacher is grading her down because he disagrees with her opinion. She spends the next several class sessions trying to smoke out his biases. She brings him a preliminary draft of her next paper to find out "what he wants":

He informs me that I state too many generalizations with too little data. Suppressing my retort, "But sir, you said . . .," I leave to fill my next paper with data with a vengeance. The D on this paper is attributed to my lack of ideas.

Understandably, many students throw up their hands at this point, feeling that the game is rigged. Every semester we see evaluations of instructors we admire with comments like these:

He wanted us to read his mind or something. He wouldn't tell us what he wanted. You had to think like he did about the subject, or he would grade you down, but he only told you what you were "wrong" about after you handed the paper in.

or, less helpfully,

This teacher sucks donkey dick. She hated everything I wrote.

While we have to take students' comments about our courses seriously, it seems clear that some of them reveal more about the students' immaturity than they do about the faults of the instructor.

Perry, taking the long view, gives a more positive result. When the irate student comes to discuss the situation with her instructor, he is patient and ready with wise counsel.

"Look," says the section man, and for a moment we face each other, even across my resentment, "You must learn to show how the facts relate to each other to generate your ideas, to support them. The ideas and the facts must go together, and you must not let them fly in the face of the implication of some other fact to which you do not refer. And furthermore," he says as he sees me to the door, "the privilege of having your ideas respected depends on your presenting them for what they are, not the truth, but interpretations which you prefer among other interpretations. You may not have to spell other interpretations out but you must let your reader know that you are aware that they exist as relevant qualifications of what you have to say."

This is as good a description of the goal of a college level writing class as we could hope for, though not one every freshman is ready to hear. In Perry's scenario, which compresses months of struggle into a few sentences, it works. What begins as a cynical effort to "give them what they want" becomes an increasingly sincere attempt to compose a text that has its own authority. Finally the student reports, "I can then put forward my interpretation with pride in its integrity."

Occasionally we see course evaluations that suggest students are progressing along the path Perry describes. The old concerns about the teacher's right to make subjective judgments may still be there, but they are fading in light of a new feeling of autonomy. Listen, for instance, to one of our students talking about her drafting of a paper in a class taught by Rachel Harper, one of our instructors:

I didn't begin writing the first draft until two days before it was due. And at that time, I just wrote for six hours. And it just, like, came to me. I wrote, like, five hours on Monday and then six hours on Tuesday. There are so many things I didn't write at all, so many things that could have been covered. I mean, I could have used the whole paper just to focus on Japanese women or something. And my finished paper was, like, eight pages long with the works cited. It's just unbelievable. And I was running around, like, ‘This is a masterpiece! This is a great paper! I'm so proud of it!" And, like the thing with the water, that didn't even come to me until, like 11 at night, and I want to say it was the day before it was due, and I was just putting on the finishing touches. And I looked at that quote, and it said ‘the joy welled up inside of them' and I'm like, ‘Wow! That's where the water imagery comes from!' And, like, then it just fell into place.

And it was so funny because, when I was reading Rachel's comments on my first submission, she wrote in that paragraph about the water—to the right of it—‘Significance?' And then, later, ‘Oh, never mind! I got it!'(She laughs.) I was so proud of myself! I'm going to keep that paper for a long time! (She laughs again.)

As the student takes charge of her meaning-making, the authority of the teacher becomes a less troublesome issue. At some point, for some students, writing becomes a joy because they feel their own authority increasing.

It would be disingenuous to claim that such happy endings are the norm in English 1000. Instructors more often encounter a student's struggle to claim authority in its turbulent mid-course rather than at its satisfying conclusion. Here are some practical ways to keep the encounter productive.

1. Assign papers on subjects where you know the material and the lines of argument. It is difficult to ask students to consider alternative points of view unless you know what possibilities are available to them.

2. Manage the logistics of the class professionally. Some students will dismiss as a phony and incompetent the teacher who doesn't follow his or her own syllabus, who comes to class late, who doesn't return papers on time, or who loses the gradebook. Teachers who keep the system running smoothly are not so easily dismissed; their comments on student work have a better chance of getting through.

3. Be definitive on matters of usage where there are definitive answers. Good writing instruction inevitably involves much relative, contingent language, and often requires questions rather than answers: "If your intention in this paragraph is X, then don't you think there is a danger that Y? Can you think of another means to the same end? Might Z work?" Right as such an approach is, it leaves in some students' minds the impression that the teacher knows nothing. If, however, the teacher does know the handbook rules and mixes contingent comments with comments like "Don't use commas around restrictive appositives" or, "14d," then students realize she can't be a complete know-nothing, and they may make an effort to make sense of her more tentative advice.

4. Don't be baited into an authoritarian response. You may encounter one or two students in a class who are spoiling for a fight with an authority figure. If you react according to the student's agenda, with fulmination, threats, points off, etc., you may be confirming the student's view that the Management has no legitimate basis for authority and only maintains its position by brute force. A better response is react strongly only when a student's behavior interferes with the work of other students. If you must respond, don't take a tone that reminds the student of his or her parents. If you aren't sure how to respond, consult your coordinator or the Director of Composition.

1-4 Some Peculiarities of the Program

The comments above may give instructors new to the program a context for understanding three of its peculiarities.

1. We don't have a standard syllabus and standard textbooks. Since we want our instructors to work with material that allows them a natural authority in the classroom, we ask them to make their syllabi and class plans themselves. We make an exception for Ph.D. candidates in their first semester, who may work from a standard syllabus while they make their own. M.A. candidates do no autonomous teaching in their first year, and so have time to develop their syllabi. The proliferation of texts caused by this system creates obvious headaches for the University Bookstore. The bookstore now advises students not to buy texts before the first day of class. Be sure, therefore, that your syllabus includes a list of required texts, and do not plan a first-day lesson that depends on students having them.

2. We encourage instructors to write assignments that require students to go beyond the narration of personal experience and beyond the summary of sources. The epistemological development we are hoping for requires students to deal with conflicting views and interpretations. The purpose of their essays should, therefore, be to persuade readers to change their minds or at least to give serious consideration to a view that some would dispute.

3. We put less emphasis than some programs do on lectures or drills, more emphasis on the student's out-of-class drafts and the teacher's response to these efforts. Our classes typically feature a good deal of "workshopping" of students' drafts.

1-5 Descriptions of English Department Composition Courses

• English 1000, Exposition and Argumentation
  Stresses writing as a process, with due attention given to critical reading and thinking skills applicable to all college classes, as well as to invention, drafting, revising, and rewriting. English 1000 is a prerequisite for any Writing Intensive course.
  
• English 2010, Intermediate Composition
  Provides intensive guided practice in expository and persuasive writing. Prerequisite: 1000 or equivalent.
  
• English 2030, Professional Writing
  Introduction to the communication required in any professional field, including basic letters and resumes, reviews, reports, and electronic networking, culminating in an extensive report and a related oral presentation. Prerequisite: English 1000 .
  
• English 3010, Advanced Composition
  An intensive writing workshop in which the student essays and related texts received close reading and analysis. Focus (e.g. The Essay, The Research Paper) announced at time of registration. Prerequisite: 2010 or instructor's consent.
  
• English 4040, Writing Nonfiction Prose
  An advanced writing workshop in nonfiction prose. Topics (The Personal Narrative, Nature Writing) announced at time of registration. May repeat to six hours with departmental consent. Prerequisite: 2010 or instructor's consent.