20131216.1625

That I am so relatively tardy in posting today is an artifact of the down-time that the intersession break allows.  I do not at present have the pressure of having to head off to work or to one of the other things that I have to do during a regular semester at the moment, which has its benefits.  It also has drawbacks in its promotion of laziness, and I have noted that I already suffer from that particularly human plight enough.  I do not need things to add to it; I rather need the opposite, but it seems that I am not likely to find it in the next few days.

My tardiness and laziness, however, do not mean that I do not have things to do or things to say.  For instance, I can comment about Rebecca Schuman's 13 December 2013 Salon.com article "The End of the College Essay."  In the article, Schuman argues " that the required-course college essay is a failure," citing rampant plagiarism, the overall disdain students have for the comments that instructors leave on student papers, and the dissatisfaction many college instructors voice regarding their students' work as reasons to abandon the practice.  Since, Schuman argues, college is more about getting a job (something I have discussed before), and the jobs students are likely to do will not really require them to put together a coherent argument, and since students generally do not engage with the work of essay-writing in any event, there is no point to requiring students to write essays.  The exercise is wasteful and unpleasant, and therefore to be avoided.

I  know from having looked at their comments that some of my colleagues have already voiced their disagreement with Schuman (although I have not read their comments in detail).  At the risk of sounding once again like I am saying "Me, too," in a desperate attempt to fit in, I offer my own disagreements with Schuman:

1. Schuman notes the increasingly vocational aspect of undergraduate education.  It is part of work that it is not always pleasant, that tasks are required of employees that they would rather not do.  In some of my older jobs, I was obliged to clean restrooms--and I hated doing so, particularly given whom I knew used them.  Yet it was either do so or cease earning a paycheck--and the paycheck was worth more.  Students need to learn such lessons, and I have had many who never had jobs before they came into my classes; better with me than with their solvency at stake.
2. There are work issues that will bear in on writing.  Despite hopes, sometimes there are legal problems, and those problems depend largely on written documentation for their resolution.  The skills developed in essay writing therefore do have a direct bearing on work--even for the non-writer.
3. As many have noted, there are other skills developed in essay writing than in essay writing---if students are obliged to develop them.  I discuss the matter with my own students as being, if nothing else, practice in attending to small details--and that skill applies in every discipline.
4. Students are typically quite young.  What they think they want may well not be what they actually want.  That they do not want to write essays does not mean that they will not want to do so.
5. There is more to the student than the intended job.  The essay offers an avenue into that "more."  It is not the only avenue, certainly, but it is one.

I am sure there are other ways to argue against Schuman.  I am equally sure that as a person whose professional existence is largely justified through the teaching and evaluation of essays, my defense of the required assignment can be considered somewhat...suspect (although I am one of the many whom Schuman notes view grading with disfavor).  To borrow something of a cliché, however, the choir still needs to hear the preaching.