Academia: May 2005 Archive Page

The traditional, dominant method for getting academic work, research and ideas reviewed and accepted by peers is for work to be published via a recognised source. Publication in a acknowledged journal demonstrates the work meets a required standard for acceptance into the academic community.

When an academic is working on an idea at a very low level they may call upon colleagues within their department to revise and pass comments. However, this process is less well suited for work that is at the ?working or draft stage?; i.e., not quite ready for submission for publication, but well past the beginning stages of development. It would be ideal if a wider body of reviewers could assess the work. --David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller --Weblogs: a contributory element to the research dissemination process (ePortfolio Research and Development Community)

If you like, you can see Google's HTML translation. [Update, 31 May: Karissa tells me that the URL is broken. Oh, well.]

It's kind of nice to see, in the opening paragraph, references to blogging at Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, the University of British Columbia... and our own Seton Hill University. We weren't worth mentioning by name in the body of the article, apparently, but there we are, in footnote 5.

Between 1990 and 2000, the over-all mean G.P.A. of high-school students increased from 2.68 to 2.94, which is attributable in part to grade inflation and in part to the fact that students are working harder. Last year, more than a million students took at least one A.P. course. During the nineteen-nineties, the percentage of students taking A.P. or International Baccalaureate classes in math more than doubled, from 4.4 per cent of graduating seniors to 9.5 per cent. My own high school, North Hollywood High, in Los Angeles, had three or four A.P. classes when I graduated, in 1979 (a time when we were told that our most illustrious alumnus was Bert Convy, the game-show host; Susan Sontag had gone there, too, but nobody mentioned her). Now it has twenty-two.

Some schools, responding to the critique that competition has got too bruising, have decided that naming a single valedictorian is part of the reason that today?s students have become so anxious. (Many small private schools came to this conclusion long ago, and never adopted the valedictorian tradition.) --Margaret Talbog --Best in Class (New Yorker)

The educator's anonymous Web log, set at an unnamed university "in the South," spun tales of spoiled-rich "Ashleys" with their $500 sandals and $1,500 handbags, eating disorders, plagiarism and drug use, legal and illegal.

"At this school it seems like every kid is on multiple medications," the professor wrote, describing her charges as "barely literate," prone to emotional problems and "terrified of displeasing Mommy and Daddy." --Thomas Korosec --SMU lecturer takes heat for telling blog (Houston Chronicle)

Liner, the author of "Phantom Professor" weblog, is actively shopping her story around.

"I heard the two words every writer waits a lifetime to hear," she said. "Movie deal."

Ah! Leave it to Hollywood to rescue us from all that pesky soul-searching about boundaries and ethics.

Researchers and educators blame the gap between books and boys on everything from a built-in fidgetiness to low expectations to a lifelong association of reading with their mothers, teachers, librarians -- all female role models.

But now more are suggesting that the problem may not lie entirely within the boys themselves. Some educators believe that the way schools teach reading tends to favor girls, both in terms of teaching style and reading materials chosen. It's a concern that has pushed teachers to work harder to both find materials that boys like to read, and to find more "boy-friendly" ways to present that material.

"Boys have a more tactile, 'hands-on' learning style," and they favor subject matter which reflects that, says Linda Milliken, reading specialist at Chester County Intermediate Unit near Philadelphia. "They like lots of nature topics -- bugs, dinosaurs, how things work," she explains. "They like to identify with a character who has his life in control."

What they may not like is the problem-focused reading popular with many teachers today -- stories about divorce, abuse, single-parenthood, addiction, and such.

Girl readers are generally drawn to narratives that focus on relationships between people, while boys tend to prefer adventure, science fiction, war stories, history, and, of course, sports. --Mary Beth McCauley --How to Get Boys to Sit Down with a Book (ABC News)

My son (age seven) recently selected a series of books on the elements (Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen... we even tracked down Magnesium) for me to read to him at bedtime. We're working our way through another series of books on Energy of the Future (we finished Biofuel of the Future the other day, and we're on Solar Power of the Future now.

The men in my American Lit course generally liked The Great Gatsby and James McBride's Miracle at St. Anna, though one student who has called herself a literary snob spoke out against both works. But some of the female students who didn't get into the heavier literary works also liked McBride, so clearly gender is only one factor in a complex equation.

As for gender differences in literary styles, see this great spoof of a tandem writing assignment, an e-mail that has been passed around for years.

Random things that I will not miss about high school:

- listening to my classmates whine
- my business law teacher parroting back everything I say in the form of a question
- never getting any input on anything I turn in
- disgusting bathrooms
- listening to my male teachers flaunt their "big, tough guy" persona
- not having enough writing or literature classes
- hearing my teachers talk more about their social life than the subject they teach
- wasting six hours and accomplishing nothing
- tedium
- watching my peers create loud, violent disturbances in class after class, and having teacher after teacher stand back and say helplessly "I don't know what to do with them."
- getting up at 6:21a.m.
- never getting any advice on my assignments and therefore, never becoming a better writer
- watching the teachers try even harder than students to invent excuses for us to not do any work
- counting the seconds and the minutes and the hours until I could go home and have my time truly be mine again

I am ready for college. I am ready to learn how to think and feel for myself again. --Kayla Sawyer --I am dead inside, and I have the educational system to thank (Shameless Digressions)

Kayla wrote this the evening that she finished her last day of classes as a high school student. She's on her way to Seton Hill University in the fall.

She contacted me the other day, saying that she heard SHU journalism majors used blogs, and she wanted to get sarted.

If you have a moment, I hope you'll visit her blog and let her know what you think about her writing. I know I'm looking forward to having her in class.

An English teacher's heart will go pitter-pat whenever he or she sees close engagement with the language of the text.

That means reading every word: it's not enough to have a vague sense of the plot. Maybe that sounds obvious, but few people pay serious attention to the words that make up every work of literature. Remember, English papers aren't about the real world; they're about representations of the world in language. Words are all we have to work with, and you have to pay attention to them.

The problem's most acute in poetry. Here, for instance, is the opening of Gray's famous "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard":

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

The surface-level meaning is something like this: "At evening, when the curfew bell rings, the cows and the plowman go home and leave me in the dark." Many students read passages like this, "decode" them into something they can understand, and then ask, "Why didn't he just say that?"

That's usually a dismissive rhetorical question, with the implication, "Why is that nasty old author making my life difficult when he could have said it simply?" But in fact "Why didn't he just say that?" can be a great question, and you should learn to take it seriously. Why did he say it in the denser way? Answer that, and you're on your way to a good thesis. (Hint: with good writers, the answer is almost never "Because he had to rhyme" or "Because he couldn't do it any better.")--Jack Lynch --Close Reading (Getting an A on an English Paper)

It's really little wonder that college students want to talk about "the real world," since their high school English teachers often rewarded them for being able to apply a literary work to their own life. Thus, when reading a poem that invokes fear, students were encouraged to talk about times that they felt afraid. This is fine if it's presented as a way to get into the text, or if it is part of an informal response journal. But students who can't get beyond their vague impressions (perhaps because they didn't actually do the readings) can distract and stifle a classroom discussion.

Few things give me "that sinking feeling" more sharply than when, during a rickety class discussion, where a few students who haven't done the readings are still trying to fake me out by asking clarifying questions, and the students who have done the reading aren't ready to take a stand, someone makes a reference to a movie or TV show they just watched, and then hands suddenly shoot up all over the room, and I ask, "Can we relate Desperate Houswives to Arthur Miller?" and the hands go back down.

Working on ''Drama as Literature'' Syllabus (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm working on my goals statement for a 200-level “Major Writers and Genres” course. I'm still working it out -- the final version will be less chatty and more infused with academicspeak.

The primary research method I teach in a survey course is close reading – the extended examination of the particular words, style, and form of a particular literary work, gained by the sustained reading of a script. A secondary methodology is historical context – the identification and explication of contemporary cultural influences (including theatrical conventions of the period).

Students are asked to move quickly beyond plot summary and personal responses (which served them well in high school), and are asked to demonstrate critical thinking skills by participating in lively classroom discussions, by writing short expository and analytical exercises, and by writing two longer papers that support a non-obvious claim about the texts under scrutiny.

Literary research in English involves both primary sources (that is, literary works) and secondary sources (theoretical, biographical, and comparative explication, analysis, and evaluation). This method is introduced in a spring-semester EL150, “Intro to Literary Study,” and reiterated in a junior-level “Critical Theory” course. In a first-semester EL 250 course, which is typically packed with incoming freshmen, there will not be enough time for me to introduce the concept of academic scholarship, and the specific way it is practiced in English, to students who are at the same time taking the first semester of freshman composition.

Part of the historical research is a formal examination of theatrical conventions (sets and costumes, acting styles, audience expectations, critical response, etc.) that contributed to the reception of the work’s initial performance, and which continue to affect the reception of later performances. For instance, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice was historically played as a comic villain, but modern productions use the same dialogue, but present him as a tragic figure. The historical method includes occasional reference to live or videotaped performances of the works, as well as published reviews, and such sources as memoirs of actors, directors, or other theatre professionals. But this course does not aim to examine a definitive, optimized, particular performance (something they are used to in the form of “Director’s Cut DVDs).

Students are often drawn to parallels between the author's biography and events in the story, a kind of mythic parallelism that drives the movie Shakespeare in Love, which shows the Bard incapable of any creativity that does not involve writing down (without any apparent revision) a thinly veiled version of what just happened to him last night. (I get lots of that when I ask students to write narrative essays.)

Where a dramatic work makes an ambiguous statement (such as in the matter of Hamlet’s madness), I aim to get students to identify ambiguity inherent in the text, and to rely upon textual evidence from elsewhere in the literary work to argue for a particular point. For example, when reading Ibsen’s A Doll House, students typically respond so negatively to Torvald’s patronizing and infantilizing of his wife Nora, that they prefer to see Torvald as a moustache-twirling oppressor, completely ignoring the textual evidence that argues he is a good provider and a good man, that she manipulates him into treating her like a child, and that both are equally victims of their prescribed gender roles.

Thus, a little-known 1913 play about anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernardhi, must be understood in the original context in pre-war Europe, but may also be re-read in 2005 in the context of American anti-Islamic tensions and anti-Christian and anti-American tensions in the Islamic world. The fourteenth-century “Everyman,” which uses the central merchant-class metaphor of an accounting book to teach a lesson about the inevitability of sin and death, must be understood in a certain historical context as a piece of didactic entertainment for a largely illiterate, wholly Catholic society. Yet the presence in the play of a brief aside, containing a stern warning directed at corrupt priests, resonates even more strongly today in light of the recent sexual scandals faced by the Church.

Hmm... thunder is booming outside my window, so I'm gonna cut this short and head home.

If blogging is both the construction of a personal knowledge artefact and an ecological practice, which reveals emergent knowledges as a series of dynamically linked spaces, this immediately focuses any pedagogy of blogging on questions of connectivity and the evolution of ideas over time.

I am therefore becoming increasingly convinced that blogs used across classes over the duration of a degree course, rather than blogs focused on specific assignment tasks or blogs developed for single semester units are a more congruent use of this technology.

If students were encouraged to establish a blog at the beginning of their course and continued to use it to post research notes, stories and reflections throughout their degree studies, this would become a unique and powerful teaching and learning tool. The blog would evolve together with (and record) the student's learning and practice experience. --Marcus O'Donnell --Blogging as pedagogic practice: artefact and ecology (Blogtalk Downunder)

I agree. The panel I proposed for next year's 4Cs was sparked by the realization that more and more students are coming into our classes with experience as social bloggers (or with a knowledge of other social networking programs, like friendster, P2P file sharing, and IM culture in general), and on the role of their academic blogging as it is situated in the larger context of the blogosphere. Only the very young or the very cutting-edge people in the composition field have the proper experience to assess this dynamic.

O'Donnell's article also references Patricia Remmell's KairosNews posting, "Falling out of love with blogging," which sparked an excellent discussion of a topic rarely discussed in the blogosphere (for perhaps obvious reasons).

Via Kairosnews.

It has been more than 40 years since Marshall McLuhan wrote that the “medium is the message,” a lesson that Duke University has had to relearn the hard way concerning its iPod giveaway this academic year to some 1,650 first-year students. Almost immediately, the “iPod First-Year Experience” was dubbed a trendy gimmick, and the university went on the defensive, emphasizing that the Apple music player was the device of choice for a variety of educational tasks meant to keep pace with a mobile generation of learners. --Michael Bugeja --The Medium is the Moral (Inside Higher Ed)

At the grave yard Hamlet does not manifest any feelings towards his late father who according to the traditional interpretation, must have been buried there only a couple of months before that. Hamlet's behavior remains the same even when the grave-digger mentions king Hamlet. There appears an impression as if Hamlet had two different fathers: the one whose death he mourns, and the other one whom he does not remember. This is not strange because in the text, there are two Hamlets : the one who is about twenty, and the other one of thirty years of age.

According to the applied version of the Literary Theory, the only possible explanation is that Shakespeare created Hamlet as a menippeah containing several full-scale plots based on the same text. In every such work, there always exists an 'inner story' ? in this case, in a form of a drama reflecting the events in Elsinore, while its characters should correspond to 'real' persons with altered biographies.

An attentive reading reveals that the 'now living King' married Gertrude not a couple of months before the described events began but rather more than twenty years earlier, when prince Hamlet was a baby. This conclusion is supported with multiple facts scattered over the text of Hamlet. By employing them, several strictly logical conclusions are made:

King Hamlet and king Fortinbras were brothers; King Hamlet won Denmark by having killed his brother. (That is only too obvious. 'King Claudius' mentions the Norway as his brother. The Norway and the late king Fortinbras were brothers as well. Therefore, 'King Claudius' and Fortinbras were brothers. Further, 'King Claudius' assassinated king Hamlet who was his brother. Therefore, king Hamlet and king Fortinbras were brothers.) ? Well, is not that obvious, indeed? Did we really need four centuries to reveal that?

Prince Hamlet is king Hamlet's son only within the 'inner drama'; in 'reality' he is the last son to king Fortinbras. (Queen Gertrude delivered prince Hamlet in Elsinore on the very day of the battle. The castle was still in the possession of Fortinbras, therefore only his spouse could deliver Hamlet there.) (2)

Prince Hamlet and young Fortinbras were brothers as they were both the children to the same king Fortinbras?queen Gertrude couple. That explains why before his death prince Hamlet gives his vote for the throne in favor of prince Fortinbras.

In 'reality', King Hamlet was never poisoned by his brother. On the contrary, having killed his brother Fortinbras, he has been living with Gertrude for thirty years. We see him 'alive' for all five Acts, until his nephew Hamlet kills him. The act of poisoning took place only within the plot of the inner drama.

In 'reality', king Claudius does not exist at all; that is merely a character of the inner drama.

As Hamlet appears to be a menippeah with an 'inner story', there follows the necessity to perform certain steps:

Within the menippeah, there should exist a special character narrating the text. He must be the main object at whom Shakespeare's satire is aimed. The hidden intention of that character is the most important composition element of Hamlet.

Within the main plot of Shakespeare's work, it is necessary to define the identity of the 'proxy author' who has created the inner story. That might be the Narrator himself or some other person, but in any case that must be one of the characters of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

It is imperative that the borders delimiting the 'main' body of Hamlet and the inner story should be defined. --Alfred Barkov --Hamlet: A Tragedy of Errors or the Fate of Shakespeare? (Wiliam Shakespeare Authorship -- Geocities)

Extremely interesting close reading. I'm going to spend some more time reading this more closely. The argument is remarkably consistent and thorough -- for instance, the author argues that a "real" plot takes place in prose, while a nested "performance" takes place in verse -- that The Mousetrap (the play that Hamlet asks the players to perform) actually encompasses many sequences that we have taken to be the text of Hamlet. Barkov suggests that the interruption of the play-within-the play is scripted, so that much of the action that follows the interruption is still part of the play. I'd love to have the chance to stage something like this, but the founding principles (such as the claim that Hamlet from the outermost drama is really the son of Fortinbras senior, who was killed by Hamlet senior in battle) don't stand up too well to even a casual application of Occam's razor.

I'm scheduled to teach "Drama as Literature" this fall, and Hamlet (and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern) are probably going to be on the syllabus. Thus, yet another attempt to find meaning within meaning will make good reading. (See also Laura Bohannon's wonderful "Shakespeare in the Bush," in which an American anthropologist, convinced that Hamlet has a single, universal meaning, tests her theory by telling the story to the elders of an African tribe.)

But while the goal of rewarding good teachers is laudable, the awards can sap the morale and productivity of faculty members who try too hard to receive them. For young professors in particular, paying too much attention to teaching awards is dangerous. [...] A professor whose goal is to win a teaching award can be tempted to focus on using varied and creative teaching styles, rather than on student learning and its assessment. The abundance of recent literature on teaching styles, with its endless debate about the effectiveness of different strategies, exacerbates the problem. Adopting different teaching strategies is terribly time-consuming. Junior faculty members must decide if it is worth it. --David G. Evans --How Not to Reward Outstanding Teachers (Chronicle)

It is very tempting to teach everything the same way I taught it last time, shooting for polish and refinement rather than radical re-vision.

This year in my American Lit class, in response to the unusually high stress signals the students were giving off, I turned what had been on the syllabus as the final date for the term paper into the due date for a rough draft. I pulled an all-nighter marking those drafts and turned them back to students within a few days. In a class of about 25, only four students took advantage of the opportunity to revise.

It takes about a half hour for me to read and comment on a term paper, if I assume the paper is a draft and that the student will use my comments to revise. If, on the other hand, I am simply assigning a grade, I can easily sort the papers holistically -- Susie's paper is better than Billy's, which is not quite as good as Frankie's -- and then go back and assign grades based on whether each paper meets the assignment criteria.

A handful of others did benefit from the extension, in that they didn't bother to turn in the rough draft, and only turned in the final draft -- but that means I had to mark their papers closer to the end-of-term crunch. And some students didn't need to revise because they were happy with the As or Bs their draft earned them. But a significant chunk -- including most of the ones whose papers took the most time for me to evaluate -- decided they would rather live with their C or D.

Was the benefit to those four students worth the extra effort I put into the assignment? One one level, yes. On another level, I'm not so sure. I knew I couldn't force the students to take advantage of the opportunity, but I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by simply writing a letter grade on the draft, and then simply let those students who were unhappy with their grade make an appointment with me to discuss it.

I have recently decided that not being in a class that requires blogging is a bad thing. Because i am not required to do blogging, i don't do it. This isn't because i don't want to, it is because i don't have time to. If it were required, i would make time to do it, seeing as how blogging would be a part of my homework. I fear that in mentioning this, i am going to be bombed with blog-required classes, but, i almost look forward to it *shudder* So, next semester blogs, come on, bring it on. I will be attempting to blog over the summer, although i don't know how often this will be... --Lori Rupert --I bid thee farewell (Kaleidoscope)

One of my students posted this pretty much on her way out the door for the summer.

The main cost of starting a Web-based startup is food and rent. Which means it doesn't cost much more to start a company than to be a total slacker.

[...]

Most startups fail. It's the nature of the business. But it's not necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90% chance of failing, if you can afford the risk. Failing at 40, when you have a family to support, could be serious. But if you fail at 22, so what? If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you'll end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program. --Paul Graham --Hiring is Obsolete (PaulGraham.com)

No one at Southern Methodist University knew -- for sure -- who The Phantom Professor was. The professor's blog, like those of many untenured academics, was anonymous and the university was never named. --Scott Jaschik --'The Phantom Professor' (Inside Higher Ed)

A professor blogs anonymously, venting about the campus crime and the wealthy socialites in her classes. SMU officials admit that they know about the blog, they admit that they worry about the blog, and they admit that they think Elaine Liner might be the blogger. I'm not sure about the timeline of events, but an editorial in the school paper is involved.

Elaine Liner doesn't get rehired.

Fired for blogging? Is this a first amendment issue?

The First Amendment reads, in its entirety, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

What, exactly, does Congress have to do with Southern Methodist University's decision not to rehire a popular and talented writing professor?

"SMUAshley" is right: "You had free speech -- your blog was published. What you don't want is consequences of that speech."

Liner might have been better off saving all those stories for a tell-all book, after she has carefully scrubbed it clean from any details that might identify individuals.

Come to think of it, might sell even better now, given the publicity it has received.

Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: "It's pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It's the news value that is most important."

He said that after his own team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review - despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field.

As a result, says Prof Spencer, flawed research is finding its way into the leading journals, while attempts to get rebuttals published fail. --Robert Matthews --Leading scientific journals 'are censoring debate on global warming' (Telegraph)

This is my favorite conspiracy theory.

I spend so much time trying to drill into the heads of my students that information published in peer-reviewed academic journals is more valuable in a term paper than random stuff you find on the internet. But here's another reminder that the peer-review process is only as good as the peers doing the reviewing.

College administrators have been enthusiastic supporters Eve Ensler?s play The Vagina Monologues and schools across the nation celebrate ?V-Day? (short for Vagina Day) every year. But when the College Republicans at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island rained on the celebrations of V-Day by inaugurating Penis Day and staging a satire called The Penis Monologues, the official reaction was horror. --Christina Hoff Sommers --Why Can?t They ?Just Get Along?? (National Review Online)

At first, I thought this was an Onion article. This is both sad and hilarious.

In interviews, Margaret Edson has expressed mild surprise that critics have not paid more attention to the religious aspect of her play. "The play is about redemption, and I'm surprised no one mentions it. Grace is the opportunity to experience God in spite of yourself, which is what Dr. Bearing ultimately achieves" (Martini 24). Despite notable exceptions in essays by Betty Carter and especially Martha Greene Eads, most commentators have fastened upon the medical aspects of the play. Victims of ovarian cancer have used it as a rallying point. Medical professionals have employed it to discuss patient rights and research ethics. In several American cities, sold out performances have been followed by lengthy talk-back sessions that have focused on these issues. The play thus seems valuable to much of its audience for its realistic portrayal of courageous suffering and its attack on the indifference of doctors. At its moral center, the play is not about kindness, but redemption. --John D. Sykes, Jr. --Wit, Pride and Resurrection: Margaret Edson's Play and John Donne's PoetryRenascence 55.2 (2003))

I've taught Wit in several different classes. I used to show clips from the Emma Thompson video, but a few students cried, and since I typically teach this play at the end of the semester, I didn't really want to send them away with that experience. Still, at a Catholic school, I think it's completely appropriate to bring religion into the classroom, and as a class everyone knows each other well enough that I hope they'll feel comfortable disagreeing (politely, with specific reference to the text).

Students have turned in their term paper already, but there's a short final paper due on Wit on the last day of classes, because I want to see how the students' ability to respond personally to a text has developed after a semester in which I introduced them to literary research.

I've also carefully prepared students to make the most of this play, by introducing them to Donne's "Death, Be Not Proud," the punctuation of which plays an important role in the play; they've also read Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which asked students to look at punctuation more closely than they ever have.

Armstrong.edu has a bibliography (though the links only work if you have an Armstrong account) and links to some useful news articles.

I'm bummed that the blogs were down for half the day yesterday, which means that some students who might otherwise have blogged in advance of the class didn't. But Valerie Masciarelli, who wrote a paper on the humor in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, touches on how wit can't solve all our human problems; Vanessa Kolberg wishes she could see a production, and Chris Ulicne, in a reflective mood, compares his own love of literature to the motives Vivian Bearing offers.

Research papers, correct grammar, and deadlines are important. But it's days like this that I remember why I did such a stupid thing as go to grad school in English. I love talking about literary works that mean something to me. Even more so, I love sharing those works with students who use them (or reject them) as part of their process of defining who they are and how they are going to live the rest of their lives.

As Sykes puts it,

This is why both Christian intellectuals such as Carol Iannone and secular interpreters such as the makers of the HBO film get the play wrong. It is neither about simple kindness, as Iannone believes, nor can a wishful (and fully clothed!) return to youth convey Bearing's redemption,l as it is made to do in the film version of the play [where, instead of the actress emerging from her deathbed and reaching, naked, for light, the screen shows a black and white headshot of the scholarly Bearing, as she might have appeared on the back cover of a book --DGJ]

Impact of the Writing Tests on Curriculum and Classroom Instruction

The kind of writing valued by the SAT reflects a set of assumptions about writing?and about ?good? writing?that we find problematic and which diverge from what the best current scholarship tells us about the nature of writing.

• Although it is possible that the new SAT will promote more writing instruction, preparation for the test is likely to take precious time away from high quality writing instruction.
  
• The kind of writing required for success on the timed essay component of the SAT is likely to encourage writing instruction that emphasizes formulaic writing with specific but limited textual features.
• Research suggests that writing instruction focused on following patterns, writing one draft, and adhering to specific criteria for the text?just the kind of instruction likely to be used to prepare students for the new SAT?prepares students poorly for college-level writing tasks and for workplace writing tasks. --Conclusions and Key Points: ?The Impact of the SAT and ACT Timed Writing Tests? (National Council of Teachers of English)

Inside Higher Ed has a good piece on this.

Since SHU uses a timed essay (written during freshman orientation) to place students in developmental courses, the faculty voted to drop our own testing procedure (which was conducted hurriedly, by faculty volunteers) for the more formal, controlled test.

I do sympathize with the plight of high school graduates who don't go on to college, but whose English teachers might now spend a lot of time teaching the formula for a college-entry essay.

While composition is not my specialty, I have taught a comp course every year since leaving grad school (in 1998). If more students come into my class knowing the basics of how to plan and execute this kind of timed essay, then my task as a comp instructor will probably be easier than it is right now.

But I'm already struggling with gen-ed students who are producing formulaic writing in my lit classes (either too much plot summary, character analysis, or a stand-alone research paper on an issue such as racism or women's rights, with occasional references to how a particular character has an experience that validates -- but does not prove -- the student's non-literary thesis).