Using Personal Examples to Respond to "My Teacher Hates Me"

 Blog Entry 1

When we read the article “My Teacher Hates Me” for our last class I found it to be very applicable to my own experience teaching and as a high school student. When Perry says that “students often engage in “pseudo-academese,” an artificially inflated prose style that they believe is a key to success,” I felt as if I was back in my Senior Year struggling to figure out why my teacher in my creative writing class had given me a B when I had worked so much harder than anyone else in the class who had received an A and I concluded that she just disliked me. However, several months afterwards when I was cleaning my file cabinet, I found a copy of my paper again and finally understood. I had written it in an attempt to sound more creative and intelligent and therefore, more mature. In actuality however, all I had really done was leave my paper bleeding with too many adjectives and had lost my reader by using words I didn’t really know how to use effectively, but that I thought sounded “good” in my paper.

Although I have yet to have any experience working as a Writing Consultant, I have for several months worked as a writing tutor for international students whose first language is something other than English. I have found several common trends amongst my students that this article also addresses, but the most applicable is the statement that students often “express frustration over the “devaluing” of personal observations and experience in the sciences, and the need to couch everything in order to achieve credibility.” The sentiments that the article expressed by making this claim were often, in my experiences, translated into two types of writing: unsupported arguments and summary of one particular authors ideas, as well as, repetition of previously stated thoughts. I remember the first student I tutored came to me with his essay that was supposed to be a research paper on a topic of his choosing. I read through the paper and it not only became clear to me that he was doing everything he could to be “done” with the paper, but also, I was amazed to find that, although he summarized the ideas of a few authors, repeating himself, he had failed to use a single quotation in his entire paper. Although shocked at first, when I asked him about what he was arguing, I realized he himself had very little idea. I have seen this patter repeat with several of my students. I find that its not necessarily just a frustration in having to reiterate someone’s words the way Perry states, but more over this problem stems from having an unclear argument or lack of thesis, but wanting to just “get it done” and therefore, the student just writes a brain dump of information that often only shares the common trend of being about the same topic. When I finally figured out that the statement explaining what my student seemed to want to talk about and argue was actually on page 3, it became clear to me that his inability to find quotes to support his argument came from his not really having any focus when he started writing, but had just kept writing to finish it. When we moved those few sentences he had written from page 3 to the beginning of the paper, he seemed to feel more focused and understood how he was going to alter the rest of his paper and began thinking of evidence he could use to support his idea.