blood on the page

Music: O. Children: self-titled (2010)

I've spent this weekend reading and commenting on graduate student papers for the rhetorical criticism seminar. I'll spend the next two weeks or so doing the same (I average one or two papers a day---yes, I'm slow). By and large, what I've read so far is pretty damn good. We did a peer review exercise, so the papers have been through a number of rounds of revision; there's no mystery why they are better than the norm.

As I've been grading, I've been reflecting lately on my gradual move toward bluntness as a grader/commenter. When I started grading graduate work, I was careful to build in a lot of praise for what is done well. I still do this, but I find myself grading harder and harder. I'm tending, especially, to the micro-stuff: commas and errant punctuation, splices and spelling, unclear referents, and documentation style. I am, in a phrase, sweating the small stuff.

Why am I an increasingly hard grader? Well, I have a number of answers for this, but the most important one is that I don't like letter grades, and I'd rather give a student an "A+" and then tell them where the paper needs work. It's like saying, "yo, this rocks, but you could work on _______." I definitely get this from my advisor, who would sometimes mark seminar papers with a "Z" or a "W" just to remind us that the almighty "A" is a stupid pursuit for a scholar. Curiosity is the coin of the realm, and it's not something you can measure with a numeric or letter (ok, yes, the money metaphor is mixed, but chocolate can also be a coin). So, my thinking is this: if a grad student did her best, she gets an "A." Let's not have people worry about grades as a graduate student; they got in, they've jumped through enough hoops already. Let's focus, I reason, on the writing. If they got into our program, they're the cream of the crop. They're all smart. They're all good. What we gotta work on is packaging. Of course, I have given grades that are not good, and almost always because a graduate student took advantage of my "everyone get's As if they do their best" policy. I had a terrible student at LSU who never came to class and turned in plagiarized papers from her undergraduate classes; somehow she interpreted my "do your best work" policy for "setting the bar pretty low" (her words). But that is an exception, and I digress.

I'm grading harder, I'm realizing, for a number of reasons. The first is my "upbringing." I basically had two academic parents: my advisor, and my mentor. Well, both were mentors and advisors. It's complicated. Suffice it to say my advisor was patient, very rarely criticized, often encouraged curiosity and rewarded it with praise. My mentor (well, the professor I assisted for years and the chair of my dissertation committee) was very different---and she was also a fellow advisee of my advisor! She marks up papers in red-pen. Those who have received her critiques have affectionately termed this "blood on the page." Her comments were blunt (can I get a shout-out for the "egad!???"), but never demoralizing. I'd say between the two it was akin to "good cop/bad cop," except there was no bad cop. It was, well, good cop/blunt cop.

I am realizing that "good cop" sustained me and kept me going, but "blunt cop" taught me the ropes. Both were essential to becoming a scholar, and as a team they served me well. For any grad students reading, let me underscore this is the key to a good education: you assemble a "team," not pick an advisor. Your advisor is your principal administrator, but your committee or team is really who teaches you. Trust me here.

Anyhoo, I realized some years ago I may be too much "good cop" and not enough "blunt cop," so I'm trying do both. I don't know if I'm succeeding. But, yes, I’m trying to achieve the Baby-Bear's porridge status of commenting on graduate papers: how do I encourage, yet prepare?

And this brings me to the other reasons I am an increasingly harder grader. Although not every student passing through the program is destined for a research career, training them to do so is my charge. That is, training students to do research is in my job description. It's also the case that students who wish to pursue teaching careers need to publish; having a publication or two when going on the job market will land someone that teaching job because even teaching-focused colleges and universities value a publication here and there.

I've done this gig long enough to know that research jobs and teaching jobs have their advantages and disadvantages. A research focused career and a teaching focused career are equally noble and valid. Valuing one over the other is silly; they’re both good, and I hope our students are getting that message. It's apples and oranges, as they say. But---and this is a "but" that is hard to enforce---publication is the key to both. At LSU and UT, I've had students who had no desire for a research job---but I've been preaching it's still necessary to publish something.

And because that's my philosophy, I've started to come down a bit harder on "the details." I deliberately grade more lightly with the MA students than I do the Ph.D. students, but still, only by a hair. As a graduate instructor, I see my mission as twofold: (1) to foster curiosity and let it lead us to thinking aloud; and (2) to professionalize (and in that order). My latter mission means that I need to grade in a way that gets students thinking about publication. And because of that, I am increasingly grading in ways that anticipate what a blind reviewer might say on a seminar paper.

Here is the crisis of graduate education: most folks in graduate school were the "smart kids" in college. I was that "smart kid," too. What happened to me is that my creativity and ideas were so different from the norm that my professors gave me good grades for the ideas and creativity; they let the compositional gaffs slide. When I got to graduate school, I suddenly had to confront "details"---citation, documentation, grammar. My feet were never held to the fire on the details---the commas, the quotation marks. Admittedly, even in graduate school my feet were pretty cool---few professors took me to task for mechanics. It was only when I started trying to publish that "the small stuff" became an issue. My work was routinely rejected for grammar problems, for not citing sources correctly. That is to say, much of my education in writing was done in peer review.

That's not how it should have been. Nor do I fault my professors in graduate school for not teaching me---they were the products of a much better secondary educational system. I was not. My high school history class was taught by a high school coach who showed us Gone with the Wind to teach the Civil War. I remember that my best education in grammar was in the seventh grade by a teacher who wore leg braces from polio; thank gosh for that class. But I never got that kind of attention since.

The thing about peer review is that a reviewer will reject your work for bad writing or style, irrelevant of the brilliance of your argument. So in these last many years I've been commenting on graduate papers, with a keen attention to documentation styles, punctuation, and grammar.

Commenting on graduate papers today, I got to feeling guilty for being so nit-picky. But then again, I figure that being "nit-picky" at "home" is better than suffering nit-picky rejections from a stranger. Blood on the page is necessary to help folks prepare for a career in the academy---teaching or research. Blood on the page is not sadism, it's preparation. I keep telling myself that, at least. I hope my students understand this: one's grammar is not equivalent to one's argument. I critique argument too, but lately, I've been focused on the mechanics when I grade.

All of our graduate students are smart, and have smart things to say. Increasingly, packaging saying smart stuff has been the issue I've focused on as a graduate instructor.