I Teach

So the papers were pretty much what I expected. They were generally good but reflected the writer's status. Remember, many of them are in their first year and were writing their first college papers ever. The average grade was an 84 after a small curve. This has to be the highest average grade I have ever given on any single assignment. What's odd is that I firmly expect the grades to get worse, not better. I expect that the good students will begin to separate themselves from the rest of the pack as the assignments get harder. However, this doesn't mean that the overall grade will go down as we are at the point in the semester when extra credit opportunities start to roll in. The better students almost all seemed to share the same opinion. They pretty much agreed that what ails the U.S. education system is not a problem that can be fixed by addressing the education system but rather is a neighborhood problem whose roots lie in the lack of truly equal opportunities or anything approaching equal opportunities (although the paper with the highest grade did not share this opinion). The poorer students thought the problem was one of individual student motivation. Um, okay, but the sociological question would be "If students aren't learning due to lack of motivation, what is it that causes this problem." Then you repeat that question until the answer ceases to be one that is an individual based explanation.

I must say, however, that I was stunned about one thing. I required them to underline their thesis sentence or they would fail the paper, and EVERY SINGLE ONE of them did it. I was certain that somebody would forget. I'm thankful that nobody did. I'm convinced that it helped them as these were generally much better in terms of focus than most of the undergraduate papers I have read.
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