Teacher Resources: Special Concerns

Though there are any number of questions that can arise for teachers during the course of the term, we have found that there are several areas of special concern for teachers, which we have tried to address below.

First-Day Rosters and Writing Samples.
Your first-day class rosters and writing samples will be placed in your mailbox on the campus where you will be teaching (College Ave: Murray 101; Douglass: 135 George St, 1st floor; Livingston: Lucy Stone Hall B106; Busch: ARC 316).  This roster will list the students officially registered for your 101 section about a week before classes begin.  Be sure to announce your section and room number so that your students can check that they are in the correct room.  Please refer to the "Rosters and Registration Information" and "First Day Writing Samples" memos for additional instructions about first-day issues.

A week after the semester begins, you will receive an updated roster in your mailbox.  You will need to come to the Writing Program Office on your campus to check this roster against ours.  This "initial roster check" takes place by the third week of September.  By this time, university registration has stabilized, and we check to make sure that everyone in your 101 section is registered for it.

Student Attendance and Punctuality.
We suggest that you tell your students that they should not skip class, as illness or emergencies are unexpected and unplanned.  Attendance at all classes is expected. We generally depend upon the individual instructor to determine the validity of student absences and the degree to which they will affect the final grade.  As a guideline, our course descriptions carefully state that after 4 missed classes students "risk" failing the course.  This does not mean, however, that after 4 absences a student may be excluded from your classroom.  Although you may inform a student that he or she is failing the course because of absences and/or missing work, you cannot bar the student from the class.  Some teachers also penalize students for excessive or repeated lateness to class, and most teachers penalize students for handing in work late.

If you have doubts about the validity of a student's claim to a justified absence, you can speak to a Director on your campus, or you can tell the student that you will need to receive a "Dean's Excuse."  This is a note from the student's dean, sent directly to you, establishing the validity of the student's absences.  Even with such a note, however, students cannot pass a writing course after an extended absence from the classroom.

Experienced teachers find it is worthwhile to provide students with a written policy on these matters.  This should be part of your syllabus, and you should remind students of these policies periodically (e.g., on the days when drafts are due).

Pacing.
The page-length requirement for 101 is 30 pages of typed work.  It's not a difficult requirement to meet if you move students into the writing fairly quickly, no later than the end of the second week of classes.  To maintain this pace, it's also very important that you return work to students promptly: a good rule of thumb is that you should never collect a new set of final drafts before you have returned the previous set.  Once you establish this pace, you can carry it through to the end of the semester.  Because students need to write regularly and in a sustained way to improve their writing, a weak student who never writes essays longer than three pages is not going to improve very much.  For this reason, it is certainly legitimate to request a rewrite of a paper when it does not meet the page requirement for a particular assignment.

The pace we suggest will also sustain a level of difficulty that leads to perceptible change.  Most students begin to consolidate gains after about the fourth essay.  The fifth and sixth essays assure them and us of the degree of improvement.  After six or seven essays, most students leave 101 with more than a vague sense of conceptual advance or of having "passed" the course.  Most, in fact, seem to leave with a clearer and stronger sense of what it means to encounter texts and to make meaning.

Writing Comments.
Although this will be covered in the orientation in some detail, the importance of your making careful and extensive comments on students' final drafts cannot be over-emphasized.  The preferred approach is to write marginal comments that are very specific, followed by an end-comment—about a paragraph long—that points out at least one success of the paper, and then summarizes your two or three most pressing points of concern. It's especially useful to students if your end-comment refers to particular places in the body of the essay.  The end-comment especially should also be written with the next assignment in mind.  So if a student has had trouble with an idea of Drucker's that you know will come up in the next essay, you could redirect him or her to the appropriate passage in the text; or, if you find that a student in several places does not demonstrate in detail how a key term from Drucker applies to a moment in Pollan, you may assume that such demonstration will be called for again, and so needs to be highlighted.  There are several useful pages on writing womments in Things That Work.

Folder Review.
All teachers in the Writing Program must meet with the Director or a member of his staff twice during the semester. In folder review you will meet individually with one of the Writing Program Assistant Directors for one hour to review your teaching work.  This gives us an opportunity to talk about how your class is going, to share pedagogical strategies, and to ensure that course objectives, levels of difficulty, and grading are consistent throughout the Writing Program.

During folder review, teachers should present copies of their assignments, and they should bring their grade rosters.  They should also bring their students' folders in order to discuss individual students and their progress.  At mid-semester review, folders for 101 should contain two papers that have gone through the full process of student revision and instructor response, and a third paper at the rough draft or final stage. During the final meeting, teachers should again bring their students' folders, containing all six final essays and the final exams, and their grade rosters. This meeting usually focuses on those students whose grades seem borderline. The Directors often assist in making pass/fail decisions.

Support for Instructors.
Occasionally during the semester, there will be a workshop on classroom issues conducted by the Assistant Directors and/or experienced teachers in the Writing Program. We will address such concerns as peer revision groups, grading, responding to writing, structuring class conversations, and the like. These sessions should extend the work done during orientation, and they should provide an opportunity for everyone to share ideas and help each other out.

For new English Department TAs in the Writing Program, the "Teaching Writing: Theory and Practice" course will serve as a practicum. New TAs from other departments will participate in "Mentoring Seminars" with Writing Program Directors and experienced 101 teachers from a variety of disciplines. New PTLs are encouraged (though not required) to attend the teaching workshops mentioned above.

Finally, feel free to make time for individual discussions with Writing Program Assistant Directors. All teachers in the Program are strongly urged to seek out staff members for advice, assistance, and/or discussion whenever needed or desired.

Evaluations.
You will receive course evaluation forms two or three classes before the end of the semester, at which time you will ask your students to evaluate your work and their own  experience in the course.  You will need to allow students 20-30 minutes to complete both sides of the evaluation form, which asks for written responses as well as check-offs on standardized questions.  We recommend that you give the evaluations at the beginning of your class and that you ask your students to give detailed, written answers to the questions.  You can use these evaluations to help improve your teaching, and they will also be useful to you when you are seeking future employment.

Plagiarism.
Please photocopy the Writing Program's plagiarism statement (also available to students on the 101 Course Homepage) and attach it to your first paper assignment. Make sure that all students read it, and ask them if they have any questions about the statement. Also visit GetIT for activities about plagiarism that use technology to teach students about this issue. We are concerned about plagiarism in our writing courses. Please report any suspected incidence of plagiarism to Kurt Spellmeyer, Director of the Writing Program, Murray 108D.