In her article, “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children,” Lisa Delpit states, “Teachers do students no service to suggest, even implicitly, the ‘product’ is not important. In this country, students will be judged on their product regardless of the process they utilized to achieve it. And that product, based as it is on the specific codes of a particular culture, is more readily produced when the directives of how to produce it are made explicit” (90). This is where the product oriented side of wants to just say “Ha! I was right!” I can’t tell you (anyone who decides to read this) how many times I have tried to get it through people’s heads how important the final product is. Now, I realize we are human, and no product will be mistake and error free, however, this does not mean we should not work toward producing the best possible product.
It annoys me to no end when I get a paper that is not properly formatted from my 110 and 210 classes; I just don’t understand why it is so “hard” to format something. I have tried everything I can think of. I’ve taken them to the computer lab and shown them the quirks to fixing things in Word 2007. I’ve made handouts that outline everything they need to know about where things should appear on the page. And I’ve even shown them where to look in Hacker. The only thing I have left to do is take off points for it. My view on the whole format issue is that if you can’t follow simple instructions for how to format, then why should I believe you are properly citing things and so on. This is where the tech writer side of me surfaces.
I still think that the process is important. When I am put into a situation where my process has to be thrown out the window (so to speak) then it becomes hard for me to compose. I enjoy the act of writing; I mean handwriting things with pen and paper. Once I’ve composed a good “chunk” by hand I go to the computer. Very rarely do I compose strictly on the computer. I tend to handwrite, input the words into the computer, print and continue handwriting.
I think we need to teach our students to discover their process, what works best for them to compose a “document” or an essay. But we also need to teach them to pay attention to the product. Beyond the writing classroom, very few people see the process, so the final product is incredibly important. When I grade I am able to see the evolution of the piece and have the ability to grade accordingly, but others do not.
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2 comments:
I feel much the same way you do about product. While I acknowledge that writing can be and is always revisable, there is a point when the students turn the papers in, and at that point, some kind of evaluation needs to take place, or the students aren't actually working toward a tangible goal of some sort.
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It's funny how we are! One of my biggest pet peeves is formatting. Students will lose more points for not following instructions on formatting than all other mistakes that they make combined. Like you, I figure that they must be able to follow simple directions for formatting or they will never survive in college. How can these students ever follow directions for filling in the bubbles for those scanatron tests that are administered in other courses? I get so frustrated that sometimes I feel like I need to remind them to breathe.
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