All Posts Tagged With: "papers"
We’re not laughing at you. Well, sometimes we are…
A little knowledge is a hilarious thing.
One of the guilty pleasures of being a professor is laughing at students’ writing. We probably shouldn’t, but when so many papers induce wincing, and so many more induce snoring, it’s hard not to chuckle when the opportunity presents itself.
The best bloopers (including many of these reported at Inside Higher Ed) are those where a simple but crucial spelling mistake, malapropism, or badly structured sentence results in students asserting things that are still meaningful, but entirely different than what they must have intended. That is, if the student is just completely wrong, it’s not funny; it’s only funny if they are almost right and yet still completely wrong.
For example, Milton lost his vision and could not see when he composed Paradise Lost. This, then, is not funny:
Surprisingly, when Milton composed his greatest poem he was completely deaf.
But this is funny:
Surprisingly, when Milton composed his greatest poem he was completely blonde.
I just made that up, but the IHE piece gives a real-life example of Pettigrew’s Principle on bloopers:
In a drama examination, one student explained Adolphe Appia’s revolutionary contribution to scenography thus: “He moved projectors on to surfaces and shuddered at moments of climax.”
Ask anyone who has been teaching at university for a while, and they will give you more examples. I, for instance, often have students of Doctor Faustus tell me that Faustus sold his soul to satin, and Shakespeare students earnestly explain that Othello was tricked into believing in Desdemona’s quilt. Once, in a paper on Arthur C. Clarke’s story “The Star” (in which a scientist’s religious faith is challenged when he proves The Star of Bethlehem was a supernova that destroyed a thriving civilization), a student suggested that the main character could not fathom why God “could not have chosen an uninhibited planet.”
Student bloopers not only provide much-needed moments of catharsis during long marking sessions, they also allow for professors to bond. You see, not only do your professors laugh at silly student errors, they share them with their colleagues. A psychologist down the hall once came to my office door and told me about a student defining “avoidance behaviour.” In class, the professor had explained that one argument against corporal punishment in schools is that the kids so punished simply stop coming to school altogether — avoiding the situation, not changing their behaviours. The student dutifully reproduced the example on the exam: “Schools should not use capital punishment on students, or the students might stop coming.” Yeah, no kidding.
Profs share these unintentional howlers not to belittle the particular students — the code of the blooper says you must never give the student’s name — but rather to remind themselves that they are not alone. We all deal with the half-hearted and the half-witted. You think you have it bad? Just listen to this.
If it seems cruel that I, safely nestled behind my Ph.D. and my tenured position, am making light of those young strivers who are just trying to get through their classes, remember that I too was once an undergraduate struggling to show I knew what I was supposed to know and not always getting it right. Thus, as a first-year history student I wrote,
Napoleon’s soldiers returned from Russia a fraction of their former size.
If you are a student, feel free to have a good laugh at that. I have no doubt my prof did back then. And she probably showed it to the guy in the next office.
Why professors hate marking
You think writing papers is tough? Try grading them
Sitting on my desk are this year’s first piles of student papers waiting to be graded. But I’m not grading them. Instead, I’m writing this blog entry about why I dislike grading papers.
Many people assume that grading papers is the worst thing about being a professor. They are right, but for the wrong reason. People think it’s onerous because, as they often say to me, “some of them must be so bad.” And some of them are bad, but those aren’t the ones that make marking such a chore; in fact, really bad papers are almost a pleasure to grade because at least they get me excited — if only by rage.
No, the worst papers are the papers that populate the vast, bland wasteland of mediocrity. They are not good, mind you, and they are not bad. They are, to adapt Wolfgan Pauli’s famous quip, not even bad. They make no huge blunders, but they don’t say anything either. They are not off-track exactly; they just don’t know there is a track to be on. It’s hard to know where to even start with such essays. And they’re waiting in those piles to torment me with their insipidity.
Part of the difficulty comes from the fact that most essay grading involves a fictional bargain between student and professor. In theory, the student has worked hard on the paper: she’s thought through the topic, done relevant research, made notes and outlines, completed several drafts, and finally, at long last, handed it in. The professor evaluates the work, notes its strengths and weakness, and provides thoughtful advice for how to do even better next time. The student takes that advice gratefully and can’t wait ’til the next paper comes due to show off what she’s learned.
In reality, though, most students do only about as much as they think they need to pass the course, or stay in their program, or get into their next program. Similarly, professors know that their comments will go largely or entirely unread, and those that are read will not likely be taken to heart. They pretend to work hard; we pretend they want to get better.
This enduring game of academic make-believe was brought into focus for me the other day when I overheard a student amusedly complaining to her friend that her professor was suggesting ways to improve a paper that had already received a good grade. “I’m fine with an 80!” she laughed. Of course. Why settle for better when you can do good?
Every once in a while, there is a genuinely good paper to help break the monotony. I once had an excellent student whose name put her papers at the top of the pile (I grade in alphabetical order), but I always used to move her essay to the middle because I knew by then I would need an excellent paper to help keep me going. Maybe such a student is waiting patiently in one of those piles right now.
I guess it’s time to find out…
