The first "big" essay for my Metro class was due Tuesday night and the results were mixed. This should never be a surprise, particularly considering my long experience with student writing, but I clearly am not a quick study.
This essay is on a significant scene, with the goal being to recreate that scene, complete with characters and details, and to avoid TELLING readers something meant a lot and instead SHOWING the meaningful moment.
Here's an example from my own writing, just yesterday, sharing some random memories with two of my brothers of being an altar boy in the later 1950s. Now, we could have settled for some vague commentary on how wacky the experience of helping the priest give communion at the alter rail, followed by "you are so right." But would that even come close to recapturing the moment?
My most superficial thought in remembering the job of altar boys to hold the patin beneath each recipient's chin, just in case the host did not make it to the tongue (and saving the consecrated host from falling to the floor), was well, to leave it there. BTW: those vague comments could be perfectly spelled, grammatically correct, with sophisticated diction and syntax... and still the narrative would be unsatisfying.
But here is what I ended up sharing, though not after a few edits and additions and clarifications:
I often boasted (likely to Mike) that I held the St. Thomas More record for most "saves," totalling three over a number of years at the altar. I did fantasize at times about how easy it would be to clip an Adam's apple with a quick wrist flick, and Mike is so right about how, well, gross the whole enterprise was. Monsignor Conway was quite dextrous with his dispensations of the host, but there was some other guy (the name escapes me) who was quite erratic. Sometimes he seemed to reach the wafer right to the back of a person's throat, taking advantage of a wide-open mouth. Other times he might hit the side of the mouth, but continue on, bending the host and cramming it in there. The "saves" tended to be the fault of the congregant who might withdraw his or her outstretched tongue prematurely, creating a limbo with the host neither grasped by the priest nor resting snugly on the tongue. I lived for those moments but they did add some stress to what should have been a routine gig. Of course, hosts DID occasionally fall to the floor, despite our best efforts, and they were considered grave errors by all. I often thought that each save of a consecrated host might pay off with some Purgatory waivers. I always assumed I would not be admitted to Heaven without some further penance, even when I was 8. That likely explains much about me.
Of course, exploring that combination of fear and hope that is so nicely captured by the concept of Purgatory (sort of a waiting room for Heaven, according to the nuns, where things would be OK compared with Hell but always frustrating... until the eventual invitation to enter the pearly gates would arrive) would take much more thought and exploration. But that little scrap of memory at least recreates a sense of a scene that has significance to me.
I was looking for a few more things from that first essay, though exploring a specific scene was the key to success. A few students submitted the entire essay in ONE paragraph, and my response was to insert a zero in the grade (to grab their attention) and then suggest that they submit a second draft. I even suggested specific places where the shift in scene, speaker, or voice should be a new graf. Others clearly could not be bothered to right click on typos, which continues to surprise me after all these years.
After all, the university provides a free Microsoft Word license to all students and the built-in artificial intelligence comes as a default setting. I often wonder about how much some students hate the idea of writing... they can't even be bothered to right click on the underlined word or phrase and choose the "solution" to the problem.
The most common problem grew from students simply not following their own internal logic and adding some sort of example.
The good news for the students (maybe)? They all have a chance to submit a second draft NLT Sunday night and I will replace their original grade (if things improve at all). The potential benefit for me? Future assignments may be less error-filled, allowing me to respond more about their content and use of rhetoric. Hey, it's win-win.
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