I posed a question for my teacherly friends on Facebook because I really wanted to know: How do you react when a student repeats all or part of the prompt in the first paragraph of the essay--good thing/bad thing? And a colleague responded thus: "How
do I react when a student repeats all or part of the prompt in the
first paragraph of her or his essay? Although sometimes it can be a
good thing, often it is a bad thing."
Ha! (See what he did there?)
I've railed against this practice in the past. I see some familiar sentences in the introduction to an essay and I say, "Those are my sentences! Write your own! And don't tell me what I already know!" But then students claim that they're just doing what they've been told to do: always repeat the prompt in the introduction.
I can imagine contexts in which this would be a fine idea. If you're writing under time pressure on an essay exam and the question asks about the principle products of Peru, it makes sense to transform the question into a statement and start right in on the principle products of Peru. But for an essay written outside of class with drafts and feedback, you've got time to ruminate on the prompt and spit out an original idea--or at least an unoriginal idea cloaked in original language.
But inevitably I get that student who not only repeats the prompt as the introduction to his paper but also restates it again in the conclusion, perhaps in reverse order, which means that two major paragraphs of his paper are constructed from sentences I wrote. A highly efficient way to write a paper! And this student is well equipped to succeed in the cut-and-paste world we've created for ourselves.
So maybe I should stop screaming about students who steal my sentences and claim them as their own. (But I'll still reward such behavior with a Very Bad Grade--very quietly.)
7 comments:
In science writing, they are emphatically supposed to NOT repeat the question but rather delve right into answering the question. This is especially true on things like test where they have limited time and space. The general biology class I teach has only writing as assessments (labs, quizzes, and tests -- all short answer or essay). I often feel like an English teacher with the amount of grading I have!
I don't grade them down for repeating, per se, but I will cross out the sentence and show them where their answer should start. I will also comment sometimes when they run out of room but spent a lot of time repeating themselves. In high school, they tend to repeat both me and themselves when they're not sure how to answer a question.
They receive the "objectives" to know for each quiz/test (usually 4-6 for a quiz and double that for a test), and I ask them to practice writing them out. I write the assessments based on rephrasing those objectives questions. And still, somehow, they don't know what to write. My co-teacher and I are definitely planning to spend a little time over the summer figuring out how to embed better soft "study skills" into the class to help our students out.
This is a very helpful perspective. I have to keep reminding myself that students often don't know where to start so the prompt may seem like the ideal beginning. But the repetition--argh! I find myself repeating the comment "Repeating the same idea over and over does not count as evidence."
Given the current cultural context re: recognizing the difference between truth and falsity, I'm not sure you can repeat "repeating the same idea over and over does not count as evidence" too many times. One might add that retweeting something also does not make it any truer than it started out.
I haven't encountered the rephrasing problem, but my essay prompts are ridiculously long (or so my students tell me). Also, I'm teaching composition and they're picking their own topics. If I were teaching lit, I'd probably be trying to model appropriate questions in my prompts, and I'd probably get them repeated back to me.
I'm not sure how it is in Ohio or wherever it is most of your students are from, but you may need to consider how they were taught to answer questions at primary (elementary) school.
The way I remember things is that we were told not to write the question (prompt) down but rather incorporate it into our answer. Thus, by reading the answer you would know what the question had been without making us waste time writing the questions out too. This is still my natural response, but I'm not sure if it is in terms of my university essays/exam answers (again, not in an American context, let alone an Ohioan(?) one).
Just looking at some of my essays, I suspect the earlier ones take this form more as well as ones which have followed worse marks (the habit results in a structure that sticks closer to the question and thus thinking of the marker... a lot of my essays come back with "interesting"). The more consistent theme I noticed is "threes," which I imagine you've probably talked about before on this blog.
Anyway, interesting subject for a blog-post, glad I saw it.
I know that students are being told in (some) K-12 classes to repeat the prompt, for the reason you state: "by reading the answer you would know what the question had been without making us waste time writing the questions out too." But here's the thing: I'm trying to prepare students for real-world writing, which does not always (or often) appear in relation to a prompt. Instead, they should be responding to problems that arise in the course of their work or that engage their minds outside work, and if they want to appeal to readers outside my classroom, they need to learn to engage readers in considering interesting questions without merely parroting back what others have already said. Life is full of writing prompts, most of them unwritten. If my students can write only in response to a specific question and following a specific formula, then I have failed.
How clear do you make sentiment of "If my students can write only in response to a specific question and following a specific formula, then I have failed," to your students?
I can agree that it is ideal that students write engaging pieces that don't require the climbing frame of explicit prompts, but I am concerned that they may not realise this is something they need to think about (forgive me, I don't know what you teach/the appropriate course objectives). If you are telling them about the above sentiment (or including it in course materials), then I suspect it is less your failure and more their failure to listen (or read).
Trust me: everything I write on here has been communicated to students in several forms. Some of them listen.
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