Remedial Writers
The Teacher's Job as Corrector of Papers
1980 article by John Butler
Source: College Composition and Communication , Oct., 1980, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Oct., 1980), pp. 270-277
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/356487
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[Transcribed with difficulty — and errors, probably — from a PDF]
I want to start with some distinctions about the evaluations made of a remedial student's paper.
(1) An experienced teacher probably has a hundred or more responses to a two-page remedial paper, silent responses made instantly to errors, ideas, shapes of sentences, handwriting, and so on. By mid-term he has double responses to each of those things, as he is aware, with each, of progress or lack of it. The silent evaluations as the teacher makes his way through the paper are like flashes of hundreds of little bulbs going off one after another, each with its own meaning, and of course most of those responses and the reasons for them remain locked in the teacher's mind. The student never hears about them.
Curiously, I sometimes find myself thinking, as I watch a student re-read the paper I have just returned, he must be catching more than a glimpse of how I responded to everything I didn't mark, a hilarious illusion. And I may be wrong in assuming some other teachers share it occasionally.
(2) The markings and comments a teacher does put on a paper, even the simplest, have complex meanings for the teacher, meanings which again remain locked in his head. A teacher who reads, in the middle of a paper, "Things you do regularly, your personality should be the same and not fake to try impressing other," can quickly inscribe a question mark in the margin, or write "Frag," or "Is something off here?" but it would take a long time to explain exactly, and completely, the thoughts-the systems of measuring, of judging-behind those notations. A teacher writes "Awk," but the meaning, for the particular occasion, stays in his mind.
(3) As a student evaluates his paper and my comments, what do my comments mean to him? My guess is that to the remedial student, any traditional comments mean so little as to render my having bothered to make them a farce. Suppose, as I read the sentence, "We'll naturlly your'll act different in each place, but you can still be yourself in each Place," I decide to restrain myself. I merely underline the errors, so the student sees the following when he looks at his returned paper: "We'll_naturlly_your'll act different_in each place, but you can still be yourself in each Place." Behind each mark, in my tired brain, is a speech I could give in a couple of seconds ("'naturally' is spelled with an a after the r") or in several minutes ("When you start a sentence with 'Well,' in certain instances you need to follow it with a comma...") My comments, for me, are thoroughly meaningful, even though they are no more than horizontal lines across the paper. They speak volumes. But the student has not read those volumes, and he has no way of reading my mind. If I ask him to read the sentence to me aloud, he'll frown down at it (from his chair in my office) as if it were an ugly mess someone had scooped up off the ground, lean forward, and haltingly say, "Well, naturally, you'll act different in each place.. . ," just as he would have done if I had not marked anything. If I ask him to read it two or three more times, he'll continue to read it correctly, except for "different." My underlinings bother him but do not enlighten him. They are, for him, no more than a puzzle. Their meaning remains locked inside my head. And it is, alas, the same with nearly all of my other traditional corrections. However much pleasure I may take in making them, as I dream of how much I am helping him, it is indeed a dream. They do him no good, since he does not know what is behind them, what they stand for. All of this is not true, thank heaven, for the better-prepared student, who would look at "naturlly," whack himself on the forehead, and say "Oh, no!"
(4) I now want to return to the distinction made earlier between what my comments express (or mean) to the student, in a substantive way, and what they imply to him. If my comments are expressed in our traditional shorthand (dict.), or in a human voice (I don't get this part), they mean to the remedial student, as I say, next to nothing, but they imply a lot. Half-a-sentence with six underlinings means his relation to me is a disaster. I can imagine my own response if, in a speech course, I uttered five words and was told I'd just made six mistakes. The humiliation would be too horrible to contemplate. It would be even worse if the teacher explained in a word or two why each error was an error and I found I didn't understand a single explanation, just as my student doesn't understand a single one of my underlinings. This subject -- humiliation and embarrassment -- is so excruciating I am going to leave it right there. Yet I don't want to leave the larger subject, the teacher's relation to the remedial student, and the role played in that relation by the teacher's written responses to the student's papers. Let us imagine a genuinely humane teacher, steeped in the traditions of the liberal arts, who believes (as I do) that good writing is produced by expressing good ideas, and who also believes that commas and apostrophes and spelling are frosting on the cake, not the cake itself. Such a teacher, as he reads a remedial student's paper, will be looking for, and trying to evaluate, the quality of the thought, and trying to keep some perspective on the unimportance of the dozens of trivial, exasperating errors. As he underlines the apostrophe in "We'll," he'll think to himself, "This is so minor I won't make an issue of it by writing a note; I'll just scrawl a thin line under it, and he'll get the idea." But if he does that four or five times a page, the remedial student gets a different idea, even if the teacher has made a speech about Ideas vs. Mechanics in the first class. Again, a student cannot read a teacher's mind, and actions speak louder than words. If I say to my students, "I am mainly interested in your ideas, but I owe it to you in the long run to point out your errors," they will respond to such a statement positively. But if the remedial students, when they get back their first papers, find I have marked a dozen or more errors, they will collapse, thinking, "He didn't mean what he said." I may be quite pleased with myself for marking only a quarter of the errors I saw, "only the most serious ones," but my students will know nothing of my forbearance. They will be thinking, "He marks every little thing!" Actions, as I say, do speak louder than words, not just to our students but to you and me. After speaking of four kinds of evaluations of a student's paper, two by the teacher and two by the student, I now want to turn to the fifth, and, in this article, the last.
(5) To my mind, grades on papers are an evil, but not a necessary one. I have known hundreds of college teachers who have given up putting grades on papers, though they do stand ready, after the first few weeks, to give a student a grade for his performance to date. It was 28 years ago that I last put a grade on a freshman's paper.
That paragraph was a digression. I have spoken against grades for so long that when the subject comes up, no matter what the circumstances, I launch automatically into the same old speech. As a method of evaluation, a grade is exactly like any other notation I make on a student's paper: behind it, in my head, are all kinds of complex thoughts which would take me ten to thirty or more minutes to write out. As a student looks at his grade, I am hoping he will see it as standing for all of the thoughts, in my head, which I see it as symbolizing, or at least some of them. Surely it is not too much to hope he will understand some of them? But the student can only stare at the grade, not look inside my mind, and make up whatever kind of story he is disposed to about what it is supposed to mean. If he is a remedial student, and the grade is poor, there is no chance in the world the story he constructs about its meaning will bear the slightest resemblance to the story I had in mind.
One thing we know about remedial writers is that most of them are also remedial readers. What is often forgotten, I think, is that such a person is a poor reader not just of essays, stories, poems, and so on, but of his teacher's comments. He is a poor reader of stories because he cannot transform words on a page into social situations, speakers, tones of voice, nuances, and so on. He can't create voices that sound anything like -- as expressors of meaning -- the voices you and I hear as we read the same words. And I would suggest that he is no more expert a reader of my comments than he is of the first paragraph of a short story. Is there any reason to suppose that, as soon as he began reading a lengthy comment by me, or a carefully worded question fraught with meaning, he would suddenly become a good reader? I'm afraid not. I have no evidence that my corrections and comments have ever taught any of my poorest writers anything-that is, changed their behavior. That is not true for my better writers. On their papers I try to write comments, mostly questions, that I hope will start an intellectual dialogue within them, or between them and me, and I assume they will interpret my comments and questions pretty much as I meant them. But I respond differently to a paper by a poorly prepared writer. With his paper, I try to make my comments express no more than the simple responses of an averagely intelligent reader who is trying his best to understand the ideas.
What is needed now is an example, which I shall draw from the fall semester of 1978 after sketching a bit of background. The course, called "Composition," was for freshmen. In the last thirty minutes of the first class, the students wrote a short paper, so that I could get us started, by looking at a duplicated paper or two, in the second class. Thereafter, the students wrote a paper, out of class, for each meeting, and in class we spent each hour looking at, and talking about, the implications of the language in one or at most two papers. The assignments followed a pattern: in part one, I asked the student to tell me about a particular occasion in his life when he'd had a certain kind of experience, giving me all the important details in three or four pages; in the second part, I asked him a difficult intellectual question that could be answered by examining, and pointing back to, his writing in part one. In each class, we spent a good deal of time on the intellectual questions. In a typical assignment, I wrote perhaps half-a-page (duplicated) of instructions, and each assignment built on the previous one, often in ways that only I (and my colleagues) could see. The paper I want to quote is an answer to the eleventh assignment in the series, so I shall give a shorthand version of the assignments leading up to it:
1. What makes something that is "obvious" obvious?
2. An occasion when something that was obvious to you wasn't to someone else.
3. How do I see something as evidence of something else?
Let me pause here for a moment. In writing about that, many students would talk about the way in which "evidence" is "relevant" to something, whereas non-evidence is not. "Relevant" to what? Well, to an "event," or "situation," or "fact," or "experience," and so on. As I make up assignments, I can sometimes anticipate the key words that students will use to answer them, and sometimes I use my best guesses about such things to make the assignments "build on" previous ones.
4. What makes something "relevant to a situation"?
5. What's the difference between a fact, an opinion, and a piece of evidence?
6. What do you mean by "the event itself'?
7. What then do you mean by "a situation"?
8. How do you take a situation or event or remark "at face value"? What exactly does that mean?
9. What do you mean when you say you are playing a role?
10. What do you mean when you say you are behaving naturally?
11. Let's pause and examine where we are. Get out your notebook, find a pen or pencil and some paper, and look for a quiet place where you can spend a couple of uninterrupted hours. In your notebook, re-read all of the papers you have written, and the comments on them. Also re-read all of the duplicated papers we have discussed in class. Recall as well as you can our class discussions. Then write out one important question you have at this point, a question you would like to be able to answer more clearly, a question you take to be relevant to the main concerns of the course as you see them. In a second section, try to write a page or so about why your question is important to you, why you would like to be able to answer it more clearly.
NOTE: If you would like to attempt an answer, or partial answer, to the question, what you write will be read, and responded to, with interest, but please do not feel obliged to do so.
SECOND NOTE: This assignment can be done perfunctorily, in five or ten minutes, or well, in 2-3 hours. I have no interest of course in reading perfunctory answers to it, and I hope you have no interest in writing such a response. I'd like to see you do well on this one. I shall now return to the subject of this article, the teacher's job in "correcting" papers by remedial students, by quoting the paper one such student submitted in response to Assignment 11, and by copying in the margin and at the end my comments. If I had circled or underlined any errors, I would indicate that too, but I did not.
Being Yourself
You hear people saying all the time be yourself, act naturlly. When someone tells you to be yourself they are telling you to be you and to do things you like to do, Things you do regularly, your personality should be the same and not OK. I see fake to try impressing other. [OK. I see all this.]
Sometimes people try to change the way you act. But everyone act differently in different situations, [I see this too.]
... like in church, on a football field, or in a bar or club, are you "being yourself' in each place or are you playing a role-doing what people expect of you. We'll naturlly your'll act different in each place, but you can still be yourself in each Place. For an example, In church your'll bring out more of the quiet, peaceful, honest and careing side of you which I think everyone has in them somewhere, some may not show it but [Yes, I see all of this.]
... it's in them. On the football feild your bring out more of the tough, mean, and aggressive side of you. In a bar or club your bring out the partying side of yourself, your be in more of a dancing move, you'll like to find some one of the opposite to get with and have a few drink together while you are talking or dancing, but you would'nt want to do that in church or on a football feild because they would'nt be the place for that. I just gave three examples of the way you'll act in different [All right. I see your point.]
... situation, and in all three situations you are being yourself in different ways. I think this is important to the class because it give you an idea of being yourself and what it mean to be yourself. The better you understand yourself, the better you see situations, I, think everyone should be thereself because you're better at being yourself than anyone else. [Nice! Progress! You're continuing to improve! Hang in there! Be sure to take enough time with each paper.]
It is obvious what my comments amount to. I am telling this writer (a talented football player on full scholarship at a major university) that I understand what he's saying, and indeed I do understand. I am expressing the same response as I would if he rushed up to me on the campus and said, with some excitement, as if he'd just been struck by a Great Idea, "You hear people saying, all the time, 'Be yourself!' 'Act naturally!"'"-"Right!" I would say, with plenty of enthusiasm. I would never dream of saying, "Wait a minute! How do you spell naturally"? If I did question him about his spelling, however, I assume he would not bother to try to pass on to me any of his great insights in the future.
Although I am somewhat embarrassed about the banality of my comments on that student's paper, and about their sameness, I have given them here just as I wrote them, under the pressure of time and with no thought whatever that I might be transcribing them for another audience later. Other comments on similar papers, or even poorer papers, I can list quickly: I get the picture; I'm following you; OK so far; I need more help here; I don't think I get this; I need an example here; This is clear to me; I don't think I understand this; OK, I see all of this, but what do you mean by ... ; I think I follow this but am not absolutely sure. Cd you give me an ex.?; This is the best section so far; I'd like to hear more about this, as I'm not sure I really understand-I think I do, but I'm not sure. Tell me abt this after class. I like what you're trying to do here; Delightful!; Let's get together and go over this one. OK?
By treating the "Being Yourself' writer's papers as I have, I have accomplished one crucial thing: I have kept him in the course. He has not dropped, has not stopped coming to class, has not stopped turning in papers. I do not think I am wrong in thinking of that as a major accomplishment. After all, I want to help educate this young man, not help prove to him he is unworthy. I have encouraged him, and I have made him feel fairly good about something he has felt awful about all of his school life, his writing. I think I have done well by him. His first papers for me were less than half as long as the one I have reproduced here, and they contained more than twice as many errors.
In not marking the more than thirty errors in that paper, did I mislead the student into thinking he was doing well, or that he was a good writer? For a moment, or even a day or two, perhaps yes, which might not be a bad thing. I mean, if he is feeling good about himself as a writer three or four days a week, and not so good the rest of the week, that is better than feeling miserable all the time? I meet with my remedial students once or twice a week, after the third week of the course, and they read their papers to me, an experience that astounds them as much as it astounded me the first time I went through it. For example, the poor fellow who wrote the paper I've quoted, as I've indicated above, makes all the necessary corrections but one in reading aloud "We'll naturlly your'll act different in each place," and he thinks he's reading exactly what he's written. When he reads aloud "In a bar or club, your bring out the partying side of yourself," he changes "your" to "you" without noticing it. Five weeks earlier he would have written "In a bar club your bring out the party side yourself," and he would have read that aloud correctly too, and also without seeing that he was correcting what was on the page. Like my other remedial students when I first talk to them privately, instead of seeing the words on the page, he sees the words he meant to put there. That perhaps is the chief reason he cannot benefit from traditional comments on his papers, and why the writing of such comments is not just a waste of the teacher's time but worse: although the comments can do the student no good, they do do him harm in that they discourage him in a most frustrating way. They say "Something's wrong here!" when he can't for the life of him figure out what. A student who, in my office, looks at the word "your" ten times, and ten times reads it aloud as "you," is not going to read it correctly back in his room if he finds I have underlined it or aimed a bigSP. at it. He will read it as "you" and toss my mystifying notation into his huge mental box labeled Unsolved Puzzles from my Life at School.
The remedial writer, I am saying, is also a remedial reader, and benefits little, or not at all, from, or is pushed backward by, the kinds of notations and comments I put on the papers of better students. In my experience, some remedial writers can begin to benefit from such comments after six or eight weeks, if, and only if, after that time they have 1) learned to read their own writing, and 2) come to trust me. To express exactly what is meant by "trust me" is probably not possible in an essay-the novelist, of course, can do it-but I shall try to indicate something of what I mean by describing a scene.
When the writer of "Being Yourself' walks through my office doorway, he is smiling broadly. He shakes my hand as if he were an insurance salesman, sometimes even pats me on the shoulder, and seems eager to sit down to inspect his horrible writing. When he leaves, he smiles broadly, and thanks me either two or three times. Just for the fun of it, let me render the scene.
Thanks a lot, Mr. Butler! (Big smiles on both sides. We shake hands.)
OK, Gerald. I'm glad you came in. Let's get together again in three or four days. OK?
OK. I'll see ya around. Thanks a lot.
OK. See you later.
OK. Have a good day. See ya tomorrow in class. Thanks a lot.
And off he goes to football practice, or, in other words, the Real World.
I try to educate my better students by discussions in class, by comments and questions on their papers, and by noting their errors. I try to educate my remedial students only in the classroom, through discussions about ideas, and in my office, by talking about their sentences. I am not misleading those students by my written evaluations of their papers, as they all know they are poor writers, and have been poor writers ever since they can remember, and they know they are struggling. But they also know, after a few weeks, that they are improving, and that I am looking seriously at their ideas. Just as important, they know that I am in their corner instead of at the opposite side of the ring.