Progress/regress report: summer term, week 6.

This is a tale of regress. We wind down the summer term, finally, and my students are feeling the crunch. This is the time: bleary eyes, mopey faces, downcast expressions.

Research essays have come in for one class, and the other class turns in theirs today. Bad habits have caught up with everyone. In Comp I, I surmise it's easy enough to shuck and jive through my first two essay processes; they're largely narrative and descriptive. But boy, when that research essay comes around, and when they're faced with devising a workable solution to a problem they have some interest in--well, the same old habits (read: bad habits) just can't fly.

In this tiny nine-student Comp I class, five of them turned in their essay on time; one folder I gave back because it lacked all the required supplementary materials. Three more came in yesterday, and one student still hasn't turned in anything; if she doesn't do so today, she gets a big hairy zero.

Of the six essays I've graded, the grades are 85, 84, 76, 67, 62, and 59. A couple of those incurred late penalties, true. But I fully expect the 85 to be the top grade, and I may well see some lower than the 59 before I'm done.

The Comp II research essays are a series of disasters waiting to happen, by and large. I feel it. It's in the air.

Needless to say, this pisses me off beyond all measure. It makes me feel as though I'm not doing my job. Maybe I'm not.

Comp II is where this all comes to a head. I have a few students in there who shouldn't have gotten through Comp I, yet there they are. Comp II is a humdinger of a course: it's writing-based, but the writing assignments are analytical and argumentative and take poetry, fiction, and drama as their texts. So for example, if you're some dude from overseas still learning English as a second language, and you don't have much reading knowledge of literature, and your writing skills are suspect, you're going to have an exceedingly difficult time.

I hasten to add this problem isn't limited to non-native speakers. If your writing skills are suspect, if you don't read much, if your tendency is to do it all at the last minute, if you have little interest in language--all of which is true of, I'd say, 65-70% of our student population--you'll be blown over by Comp II. And Comp I, for that matter.

So the word for today is "frustration."