20190130.0430

It seems I come back again and again to the topic of writing, in this webspace and in others I maintain. It is a fitting enough topic, to be sure; the very fact of this webspace marks me as a writer, and that mark is made bolder and more emphatic by the work I do in the several other venues where I write. Too, I continue to teach writing, although I seem to be doing less and less of that as time goes on; I do not carry nearly the course load now that I once did, and if I do not earn as much money from my teaching as I did, nor am I as dependent upon that money for my livelihood. I mean, I do still need the money, but not with the same kind of hungry need I have needed it in days gone by. And I am grateful for that.
One thing that I am often at pains to get my students to do is revise their own work, either before the initial submission or as a revision of an assignment already submitted. At other schools where I've taught, I've had a liberal revision policy; students could come to me to discuss their papers and what is needed to improve them, and, if they did what needed doing, I would assess the revised paper and take the higher of the two grades earned as what the gradebook reported. My current institution does not allow quite that flexibility, to be sure, but it does insist on multiple drafts of papers coming in as standard assignments, with the later, supposedly more polished drafts offering more reward than the earlier ones.
Such structures should be enough to encourage devoted attention to improvement. Experience shows me over and over again that the students who do act with such devotion do far better, not only on assignments for my classes, but on assignments for others', as well as in other activities outside the classroom. But they are relatively few who will dedicate themselves thus, whether it is because they have not the time and energy to devote to such ends or because they believe it will not matter (and I have been accused of a certain bluntness in my responses that conduces towards the latter belief); I rarely get the opportunity to see students improve in such ways. I lament that rarity, because it is a wonderful thing to see when it is done well; even when it is not done well, it is a thing that gets respect from me, and I try to show that respect in other ways than more points on the assignment itself.
But there is another issue. Much as I encourage revision by my students, and much as I do put my own formal(ish) work though cycles of revision (my conference papers, for example, get worked over repeatedly), I do not tend to revise much those pieces I write for my various webspaces. And while this webspace might well admit of such off-the-cuff work, others are far less amenable to it. So perhaps the students who do see what I write online see that I do not do as much of what I ask them to do as I ought (even as they see more of it from me than from other instructors; how many other writing instructors will write the kinds of papers their students do when the students are asked to write them?), and, seeing that I do not always do as I bid, they decide that they need not do so either, despite the differences in our backgrounds and expertise that allow me more latitude to act as I do and the clear need for me to do more of it, anyway.
I do not know that I can hold them to blame in such an event.