Provocative reading in The Chronicle of Higher Education : Joseph R. Teller, “Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong?” A sample:
I have tried requiring students to write only three essays developed over several drafts, each of which I comment on without a grade. I have used peer workshops to help students respond to each other’s writing. I have used portfolio systems and deferred-grading schemes. I have cajoled; I have encouraged; I have experimented with more rubrics than I can count.Teller’s conclusion: these strategies rarely work.
One comment on this essay (quoting from and taking issue with a previous comment) signals some of the troubles that beset the world of English:
This is not an “experienced professional” in the field of writing and rhetoric: “English professor” means the person teaches in the English department, and there are many literature professors, as is Mr. Teller, who also have to teach First-year composition. Look to the professionals with credentials in rhetoric and composition to give you a “clear understanding” of the topic.“As is Mr. Teller?”
comments: 5
Oh lord, that commenter!
Don't know where my mind was when I read your title, but I thought you were asking if we were teaching compassion all wrong.
To which I would have answered I didn't realize we were teaching compassion at all! (Except at home, of course.)
I think that good teaching can model compassion. A student is lucky to have one or two teachers who can do that. But it’s a world apart from “Open your books to page 212,” and so on.
I've thought about my misunderstanding throughout the day. I think I learned compassion by seeing it in others, watching and hearing them express their compassion to and for others. But that might be to narrow a definition.
In that way, learning by example - and certainly teachers show the way, the good ones do; I've known many - the lessons made a stronger impression on me. I never noticed if my guides were actively teaching. Most probably weren't; seemed to flow naturally from them, like an exhaled breath or the sound of a heartbeat, or a smile so tender and kind it made me want to cry. I don't know if compassion can be purposefully taught, or planned to be a lesson, but it is taken in to the soul by the observer, remembered and built upon. Compassion has to be experienced to be understood, I think.
Compassion makes us infinitely human, and unbelievably beautiful.
Heavens! where did that come from?
A good place. :)
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