It Takes Time to Avoid Hooking Engfish

This week's readings have me thinking about class time usage, particularly since this past Monday's class felt far too short to teach reading strategies, writing summaries strategies, and writing paraphrases strategies.

I don't wish to complain about only teaching class one day a week--I definitely need the time off to focus on my graduate courses--but this is the first time I've ever taught a 3-credit course for only an hour and twenty minutes a week. My students aren't getting the same lessons I'm used to teaching. While I'm a fan of cutting things down to their essences, stripping away extra words, time, and tasks, I feel like I don't have the time in class to promote the kind of conversations and activities that this week's readings have suggested.

There is no time to discuss freewriting and drafts. I have one day a week to come to class, tell them what they will be graded on this week, and push them into the deep end.

I'm used to teaching summaries as a series of 2-3 classes, giving me a chance to have them bring summary drafts to class, sharing them with each other, and learning how to polish their works.

This composition program pushes for product, not process. Even the assignment Draft 1.1 is misleading, because the students will be getting a grade for it as if it were a final draft, not a 1.1. Since there is no room for error or experimentation, I cannot reward my students for going out on a limb or for taking risks. Instead, I feel like I must prepare them for the typical graders' response to a product. We skip all the steps leading from invention to showcase and force them to be polished down to the sentence level for every assignment per week.

I think having one week to learn summaries and to write up a polished product is ample time. But not on only an hour's instruction. And not without discussing reading strategies and text annotation first.

I still don't know how my fellow teachers managed to cover reading strategies, summaries, paraphrases, plagiarism, and MLA documentation in an hour and twenty minutes.

I feel like the course is designed to require Engfish, because when graders (particularly when they have never met the students they are grading) look at assignment after assignment after assignment, sometimes Engfish can look rewarding because it sounds like someone who is "in the club"--someone who can walk the walk of academia. Someone who can look up a word like "mesodiplosis" and use it in a sentence to look legit, and, even though it may not be used particularly accurately, this student knows that dropping a word like that into an essay will get the graders' attention.

So, actually, I might be changing my mind...that definitely is something of an understanding of rhetoric and appealing to one's audience.

Still, rhetorical analyses don't exactly beg to be written by an authentic voice. Engfish will get our students by in this class just fine.