Time flies when... well, it certainly flies whether we like it or not. And suddenly it's been three weeks since my last post. My excuse for two Fridays ago is that I was in the midst of the "Beauty and the Beast" show (as Belle's father, Maurice) and I didn't have the bandwidth to think about much else. The March 8 excuse? I was critiquing four Florida high school publications and was on deadline.
Could I have found a few minutes to post something? No excuse there. I was lazy... but I'm back. Were I in charge of my own snow shoveling, I might be using that for yet another excuse. We had about two feet of snow and the storm did not end until last night. It's that wet spring Colorado snow that we tend to get during our snowiest month of the year, and that might be a bit too much for an old guy to handle. Glad to see trucks with blades clearing our shared drive. If I had to I could get out and drive somewhere.
I don't have to.
Interestingly, the "official snow total" for Denver was only 5.7 inches. That is the amount measured at DIA, which is the place such official measurements are taken, according to the National Weather Service. Another reminder that we should look for facts but never forget context.
But let's get to "top of mind."
I spent the morning grading Metro essays where I asked the students to analyze the rhetoric in six Super Bowl ads that I chose based on their popularity along with their varying uses of the three rhetorical appeals. The experience was an eye-opener. Most of those college students have only the most tenuous grasp of what each appeal might be. They really like to mix up ethos and pathos, with some students freely citing the same emotional appeals almost randomly as examples of appeals to ethos or pathos.
Several students are quite certain that "ethics" is basically the same as "ethos," which leads to all sorts of weird theories and claims.
It may have been the timing of the assignment -- it was due Tuesday and spring break starts after today (Friday) -- so maybe I'm reading too much into this. But the entire group of 17 completed assignments was, in a word, appalling. Childish (though I never can state this elsewhere -- the poor, well, children), vague, riddled with typos and comma splices and fragments, not to mention logical lapses that a fifth grader would laugh about... it was a tour de force of ignorance and apathy.
The ignorance part is forgivable. Many younger college students don't connect with what mainstream TV commercials expect their viewers to possess. If you've never even heard of Flashdance (the T-Mobile ad), good luck seeing the allusion. If it wasn't on TikTok or YouTube, forget about it. But the apathy indicated by college students who can't be bothered to run spell check or grammar check and who clearly hit "submit" the moment they feel they have completed the minimum amount of writing to get by... that's not forgivable.
If I had a relationship with those students I might be able to use some combination of shame, humor, sarcasm, and inspiration to push them to at least read over their work before they turn it in. But I don't, and I won't, and, in the end, none of us may care enough to find a solution.
Of course, I typed for hours (the online version of interacting), questioning and supplying "correct words" they meant to type, and proposing places where some sort of proof should go. If sheer effort and time invested counts as caring, maybe I do care.
Perhaps some of my students will read my comments and consider approaching their writing in different ways. I really do think they have things to share. There is at least some evidence that they don't read my comments, nor do they read the readings I share.
The problem, and I may have stated this many times before in the blog, is that they hate writing so much that they can't wait one moment to get it off their "to do" list and get back to scrolling on their phones.
I know I will later -- in a couple weeks -- feel refreshed and willing to face another set of papers with optimism and courage... but today I know this: my Metro students are not clear communicators and their future professional writing is likely to be ineffective, if not ludicrous.
Yet we press on.
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