Dear fellow teachers,
have you ever written the following comments on your students’ work:
“Your writing is dreadful.”
“Gobbledygook.”
“God, your writing is awful.”
“This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever read.”
“I’m sure there are people whose writing is worse than yours but I’ve never met them.”
“You seem schizoid.”
“Pathetic writing.”
“This is garbage.”
Do you feel like there is pedagogic value to this kind of comments?
P.S. I know somebody (khm, khm) who got every single one of these comments from her professor.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is garbage teaching
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Thank you for the support, Pish Posh!
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Ouch. I do have a professor who occasionally writes comments like “Really?” and “What were you thinking?” on papers of *graduate* students who have known him for awhile and understand that he’s really trying to help, but nothing at this level. And I might say these things out loud while grading, but I would never write them on a paper.
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My grade 4 teacher liked to gather the class around after marking a writing assignment and read what she considered to be particularly attrocious writing aloud for the amusement of the other students. I deeply disliked that teacher.
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This makes me feel appreciative of my prof because at least this wasn’t done to me in public. Until, of course, I made it public in this post.
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The single best piece of responding to writing — and therefore teaching writing — advice that I’ve received is to tell writers what they do well so that they can do more of it. While I don’t skimp on the “criticism” part of “constructive criticism,” I do try to let the above statement be my guiding principle. That is, I do make specific criticisms and suggestions of improvement — but I also make sure to identify each writer’s strengths.
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Oh yes, there was also praise: “Compared to the rest of the chapter, this paragraph is OK.”
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I agree with the sentiment (and definitely got my fair share of really bad grades and comments on essays – I was a *terrible* analytical writer in high school, though I like to think I’ve improved some since then), and as someone who’s TA’d* for a variety of classes, some with more written work than others, I have had those thoughts go through my head as well.
HOWEVER, I feel that snark and sarcasm doesn’t translate well to written word in essay comments. I have found it far more helpful to have comments that say: “I had a very hard time understanding your main points, as the writing is extremely jumbled, especially in the 2nd and 4th paragraphs”, or highlighting particular sentences and saying “this is completely unclear”. Yes, sometimes people need to face up to the fact that their writing is garbage. But saying in written comments “this is garbage” isn’t that constructive. And I certainly don’t think you need to tell them all what they did well without touching on the negatives – if you aren’t told that something is bad, how will you know to fix it for next time?
*I’ve always wondered, verbally we say “T.A.-ed” a class for the past-tense of having been a teaching assistant. How do you represent that in written form?
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Critiques in competitive art schools often require a thick skin. In one design class, we had weekly assignments. On the day the class met we would put them all up on the wall and scrutinize each others’ work. Then the instructor would call on someone to remove the least successful piece, and so on.
When we were working in class he would walk around and if a piece was coming along well, he would mumble, with a scowl on his face, “well, don’t fuck it up” and walk away. Another instructor would become annoyed if we liked something too much in a painting or became to proud of it or too satisfied- he would insist that we paint over that part.
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I’m anything but thick skinned. It’s especially horrible to be given these comments when you don’t have the power to talk back.
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I have been known to write “This does not make sense.” on mathematical arguemnts that did not make sense. Sometimes I add “Please see me and explain what you wanted to say.” or words to that effect.
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I have done that too. Also “Imprecise” and “Not relevant”.
Once during a 12-hour grading spree, I wrote a “But so what?” on an irrelevant mathematical argument that did not lead to the conclusion, but I’d never do it again.
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No, but here is a joke for you:
http://dentatasuprano.blogspot.com/2012/02/symbology.html
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Being thin or thick skinned has little to do with temperament, I find, but has a lot to do with the amount of respect one automatically confers to authorities. If one is very much in awe of them, their statements will feel quite cutting. Apart from this, not so much. A lot of getting a “thick skin” is realizing that people don’t know what they’re talking about half the time.
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That’s why whenever some authority has asserted that I might be thin-skinned, I make the necessary adjustments by respecting them less. It’s always solved the problem for me.
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Writing such negative comments serves no purpose, since the evaluator is not doing anything to resolve the problem. Poor writing must be addressed. That is part of the teaching responsibility too often avoided by faculty who are grubbing around for unjustified high evaluations from their students. But it should be addressed in person and from a constructive perspective. Ask the student to visit, explain to him why he received a poor grade, show him how to rewrite a couple of sentences more elegantly. If the student is foreign, and his command of English is poor, recommend that he attends courses at the English Language Institute. If it is a matter of style, recommend that he reads good novels, say by Jane Austen,(or in your case by Borges) with a dictionary to hand, and that he purchases a good book on English (or in your case Spanish) style. These are constructive raps on the knuckles that will surely help the student to make something worthwhile of his university experience.
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“Being thin or thick skinned has little to do with temperament, I find, but has a lot to do with the amount of respect one automatically confers to authorities. ”
The more merciless critiques in art school were not without some benefit- it was a way to realize your strengths and weaknesses rather quickly. And making the students take down the worst pieces one by one forced the students to not be so wishy washy with feedback, as they usually were when we just discussed the work more politely; and also then it wasn’t all coming from the authority figure (who never argued with the students’ choices).
I don’t know which was worse really, getting your work taken down early on (or first- ugh that did happen to me once) or being one of the randomly chosen students who had to go up and remove someone’s work. But over time, the process did get easier and begin to seem less personal.
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My favourite comment from my masters supervisor was on the last draft of my thesis I sent him (it wasn’t the final draft but I stopped sending them to him after this incident). His comments (all in caps) got steadily more and more irate, until he highlighted one perhaps-not-brilliant point and wrote ‘BLUTIGE HÖLLE, FROM WHAT REMOTE PART OF YOUR BRAIN DID YOU DRAG THIS FROM?’
I still have no idea why he needed to write ‘bloody hell’ in German (I was studying an unrelated arts subject), but I take some satisfaction in knowing that no one who actually spoke German, as opposed to translating academic papers with a dictionary, would ever say this.
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I haven’t written anything that harsh. But I have said something like, “There are several serious grammatical errors in this piece that need to be addressed.” I’ve never said anything like, “This is garbage.” I don’t know how hurtful the “serious errors” comment might be, but if I were the writer, I’d want to know what I was doing wrong.
I know that current writing theory talks about how marking every error is a waste of time and actually overwhelms students to the point that they no longer work on the writing or care or something. But I have seen the opposite in my class. For instance, I have a student who had some pretty bad grammar in her first two pieces of short writing. I marked her errors and told her how to fix them. We worked on it a bit together, and while her next assignment was not perfect, she had definitely improved. I recognized that in my comments to her on that assignment, and when I handed it back, the smile on her face was priceless. She learned something and was proud of herself. Duty done!
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“I know that current writing theory talks about how marking every error is a waste of time and actually overwhelms students to the point that they no longer work on the writing or care or something.”
How I was instructed to do this when grading term papers is to grade in detail for a short while, but not repetitiously. This makes sense to me; they should get the idea after a while.
I don’t know how anyone has time to write such long comments over minor errors. Even for larger problems I tend to just write “too long” “not needed” (and just cross out the whole sentence), “good point” “???” “hard to follow” “yes!”. Usually the whole class makes a lot of the same stylistic errors so we discuss it as a class.
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While I never leave ambiguous comments along the lines of “this is garbage”, I will rip something to shreds if it is. But I will always provide *useful* comments on *why* its garbage (“this sentence doesn’t make sense”, “no flow between these sentences”,”why does this matter?”, etc.). In fact, I can’t tell you how many papers by grad student colleagues I’ve read because they *want* me to make sure their paper isn’t garbage- they’d rather have me shred it than have their advisors do the job 😉
There was one time in high school though, when I shredded something and felt bad about it. My history teacher had us read and critique each other’s anonymized papers, and the one I was handed was crap- no thesis statement, didn’t address the topic of the paper other than discussing the time period, no primary sources, and written poorly to boot- it was like this kid had written the paper in hurry on the bus on the way to school in the morning and failed to understand anything about writing good essays. I explained this all to the teacher before writing any comments, and he just told me to be honest… so I let the person have it, including comments like “Did you even read the directions for this essay?” Turned out the author was one of my best friends in the class, and my comments reduced him to tears… When he went to complain to the instructor, the teacher very carefully explained that every comment of mine was justified, and this was not an acceptable level of work… But I still felt pretty bad, and I’m not sure there was any way to give him a wake up call other than that…
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I write things like:
“Your writing is not up to the acceptable standard for this level of course.” Or: “????.” Or: “I don’t understand what you mean here.”
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Thankfully I do multiple choice tests or I might succumb to the temptation one of these days 🙂
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Multiple choice tests are completely antithetical to good education. I was always very good at them, but I never thought they measured anything meaningful at all, beyond the most superficial content.
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Clarification: I was good at them when I was a student.
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“Multiple choice tests are completely antithetical to good education. I was always very good at them, but I never thought they measured anything meaningful at all, beyond the most superficial content.”
– Exactly! Many teachers use them, however, and then my students complain that I don’t. Last semester when they started asking yet again why we never have multiple choice tests, I told them that I didn’t use them because I didn’t feel like cheating my students out of an education.
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Actually the exact opposite is true, there is solid research showing it and my 16-yr teaching experience all but confirms it. MCTs are in fact fairly accurate indicators of the overall level of knowledge, surely far less ambiguous, capricious and unfair than problem-based exams.
One of the many, many advantages that MCTs have is, of course, the fact that they entirely remove any degree of subjectiveness on the part of the instructor, who is never in the condition of possibly making unfortunate and unprofessional remarks such as the ones mentioned in this post.
Students tend to resent MCTs because they are absolutely brutal in exposing ignorance, whereas with problem-based tests (especially due to the “partial credit” farce) many of them can bs their way to a C-.
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“One of the many, many advantages that MCTs have is, of course, the fact that they entirely remove any degree of subjectiveness on the part of the instructor, who is never in the condition of possibly making unfortunate and unprofessional remarks such as the ones mentioned in this post.”
– My problem with those comments wasn’t that they were “subjective.” They weren’t. My writing was, indeed, horrible. I was hurt by the offensive tone of the remarks. Which something that can easily appear on any form of testing.
The idea that grading in the Humanities is somehow “subjective” is completely and utterly wrong. WRONG.
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Clarissa, just so you know, I approved your comment on MCTs in my blog, and I even wrote a reply — I have no idea where all that went though, I do not see either your comment nor my reply. May I ask you to which post you commented ?
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The student can’t see what the prof is seeing unless it’s explained.
One of my very first jobs included editing articles in a student newspaper. I like that kind of work and subsequently would edit papers for anyone who asked; people liked it because I was clear about what they needed to do. Since I wanted to do it (editing/teaching is fun!), I never felt a need to be harsh about what they needed to change…plus I had the time to explain to them where they’d gone wrong and ways to fix it.
My kids started asking me for this kind of help in elementary school. I’d mark their papers and we’d talk about the changes, and then they’d rewrite. About the time they got to high school, I’d find there wasn’t much to mark any more, and one of my kids even won a statewide essay contest.
Good writing can be learned, but if the criticism is too harsh, the person will avoid doing any more because it’s painful.
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When criticizing, it is never necessary to do an ego-take-down on someone. That is to confuse the puritanical goal of moral improvement with more practical issues and it never ends up well. The idea that one is somehow supposed to develop a “thick skin” (a moral issue) and that this somehow correlates with artistic growth is necessarily wrong. These two factors take you on entirely different trajectories.
Harsh criticism is always about domination through morality. Artistic development requires other underlying means, like developing self-awareness and knowledge.
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Well, in terms of my art school experience, I don’t think it was so much a moral issue or an ego take-down, as getting students to move beyond the fear of an ego take-down. All these students thinking they are geniuses, and at the same time fearing that they might be imposters; afraid to criticize another because they feel superior and inferior at the same time and it might show or the other person might retaliate. It is paralyzing in a sense, and these experiences do break the paralysis. These were freshman and sophomores taking mostly general core classes.
The time my assignment was the first one taken down it was justified. The assignment was to design a particular logo and my solution was way too complicated. I knew it, but couldn’t simplify it without losing the essence as others could. That traumatic experience was a short cut into a pretty rich vein of thinking about my artistic strengths and weaknesses. Another time we were studying intro illustration and had very open assignments. One was something erotic. Most of the students were blocked on that one; some even did obvious copies from mainstream Playboy-type porn that came out pretty tacky, awkward or cartoony. I sketched my boyfriend sleeping on the couch, shirtless, and smoothed and blended the pencil completely so there were no harsh lines anywhere. The shadows revealing his muscles and other anatomy were so subtle you had to look closely. I used no dark grays or black, just soft grays, and was pretty satisfied with the result. But when I saw everyone else’s work I was afraid I had been too subtle in my approach. We were told to line up all our drawings- the professor walked back and forth once and finally announced that I was the only one who had done the assignment. That was the entire critique that day. I know this all sounds harsh, but most of us did grow from the experiences. Maybe in another milieu it wouldn’t have been necessary.
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The issue of an ego-centered approach to criticism remains a puzzle to me, although I do grasp its meaning in part. To have to overcome an ego that is both overconfident and insecure (for that state of being pretty much defines the operation of ego itself) seems like culturally limited work.
The language of ego was very foreign to me when growing up, and this differentiates me from those for whom ego was an essential part of their cultural development.
My culture was implicitly tribal, so that we kind of surged or held back as a group, depending on the mood in the wind.
My cultural background made me not just insensate, but oblivious to personal criticism. I really didn’t take it in. Comments about my progress in art, for instance, were momentarily interesting, but I considered them to be ultimately arbitrary and pointless.
I actually had no concept of self-improvement, growing up. I considered life in terms of likes and dislikes, but not in terms of being good or bad at anything in particular. My academic performance reflected this, in that sometimes I performed well in English, sometimes Art, sometimes in an entirely other subject. When I did my school leaving exam (the second year after migrating to Australia), my best mark of all subjects was in maths.
I went on to study Art, but I had no concept of Western individualism or the ideology of “genius”, so I floundered massively. If I’d developed any individual sense of ego by that stage, I would have called my problems “culture shock”. As it was, I had no way to conceptualize why I couldn’t draw any meaning from my situation. On a deep level, I felt like I needed a rite of passage as a transition from childhood to adulthood.
The concept of there being individual egos gradually began to dawn on me. I changed my course from Fine Arts to Humanities, and by the end of the course, I understood individualism a lot better.
I still didn’t understand how much the ideology of ego was suffused in language in order to give language a sense of having particular reference to the individual who spoke. I felt language was more for pointing out things objectively. However, I found that when I tried to do this, more often than not, people brought the issue back to me, as if to say, “Well that is just what YOU think, but it’s only about you. Your language doesn’t actually point to anything beyond you.”
Ego eventually seemed to me a very limiting factor because of this cultural presupposition that one could not say anything that did not relate primarily, if not exclusively to oneself.
These days, I have no time for an ego-centered approach to the world. It seems entirely self-defeating.
One simply has to be able to communicate.
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Sorry, and the Freudian slip, “insensate”, ought to have been “insensitive”. Now, I must return to teaching in three minutes.
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“have to overcome an ego that is both overconfident and insecure (for that state of being pretty much defines the operation of ego itself) seems like culturally limited work.”
Well, it’s just the beginning, something to get out of the way.
“One simply has to be able to communicate.”
yes, exactly.
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Ego isn’t an evil thing, by any means, but it is far easier to control someone who is ego-centered than someone who isn’t. I’m very difficult to control, because my first instinct, when someone criticizes me, is to think, “Surely you are mistaken!” Actually, I do accept criticism and incorporate the knowledge from it very easily, but I also entertain the high likelihood that there are cultural elements of error in many criticisms I’ve received. That’s to do with the assumption that I’m necessarily saying things “about myself”, when I am making observations in an extremely detached manner. The first fifteen years of my life, I was simply without ego, which doesn’t mean I was without hedonism.
On the good side of ego: a wounded ego, as Clarissa has pointed out, can be really useful for keeping one on a particular track. I’ve experienced that before, too. The oyster makes a pearl out of its threat of injury. Such was my PhD,
I’ve reverted to my old ways now, where, having satisfied my intellectual thirsts (indulged my hedonism), I really don’t care what people think of me, again. This attitude is deeply African. It’s a core part of African resilience, to be able to surge or contract without any reference to ego or identity.
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Such comments reflect badly on the teacher, because none of them says what is wrong with the writing, nor does it give any clue to the students on how to improve their writing.
Perhaps the teacher could say something like “I’m not sure what you mean here,” to encourage the student to try to find a better way of expressing a particular point, but general disparaging comments like the ones you cited are the marks of an incompetent teacher.
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When I teach, I say that a lot: “I’m not sure what you mean here.”
It’s a very useful thing to say, perhaps the most useful.
I find that a lot of people believe their meanings are self-evident, when this is far from being the case. It’s the kindest act to help them sort out their meanings.
A lot of the problem with understanding whether or not one is communicating is to combat psychological projection in some of its more subtle manifestations.
For instance, I always supposed my university lecturers would know what I was trying to mean because they were highly educated and must necessarily know anything of great importance. I was projecting some kind of omniscience into them that they didn’t have.
In other instances, people will project a whole world view and intellectual structure onto reality that isn’t really there. For instance, they might say, “Being single and being married are totally different things — you know what I mean?” Of course, I won’t know what they mean, since there are all sorts of cultural and historical reasons why my experiences of these would differ from theirs.
It’s always better to doubt that communication has actually taken place than to assume it follows automatic channels.
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“This attitude is deeply African. It’s a core part of African resilience, to be able to surge or contract without any reference to ego or identity.”
Like I said, you may be starting from this place, but others need a way to get there. And it is an excellent place to start from! The art school criticism wasn’t about judging people as good or bad, not at all. It was about developing the ability to take criticism, when it is useful, or leave it. But to not take it personally, as some kind of judgement. You cannot start the real work of becoming an artist if you can’t ignore criticism when it isn’t useful- and you will certainly never be able to do anything new.
The more you have confidence in yourself the better you communicate anyway. In the “erotic” assignment, my confidence wavered when I compared my work to the other students’ when I arrived in class. I wanted to hide my drawing, but it was too late. But the instructor reinforced that the comparison was irrelevant.
But in a different society this may all be unnecessary, though I don’t really understand why you felt were not able to pursue art in that case. Picasso said we need to become children again to create, I think that is true. I think the more direct and honest your work is, the more unique and simultaneously, universal it becomes. It seems like this is the basis of good communication, is it not? You seem to have encountered a conflict between work being “objective”, and being “about you” that I don’t get.
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Well, my situation in art school was that I really hadn’t developed any individuality in the form of self awareness. We all gave each other criticism, of course, but I did not understand how the criticism might be relevant to anything I’d done or failed to do. I had no particular criteria to go by. At the same time, I didn’t take any criticism personally, because I didn’t conceptualize that there were alternatives to doing what I had done. I couldn’t say, “Such a person as myself ought to have done better!” because I had in no way — either emotionally or intellectually — theorized what “such a person as myself” was. This is what I mean by being without ego. I wasn’t hurt by anything anyone said, but I didn’t benefit by it, either.
It took me a lot of experimenting and book learning to try to understand what Western egoism was about. I knew I was missing something, because people assumed I was saying things using a sub-text, when I really was, quite simply, blurting things out. Like if I said, “Is this the way we are supposed to do this task?” I really wasn’t criticizing anybody implicitly for the way they were doing something. I was just asking a simple question.
I also absolutely didn’t get the idea of identity, at all — that one person could be implicitly criticizing another on the basis of something being wrong with their identity. In retrospect, I think this was happening to me a lot. I was being criticized implicitly because of my white, African (colonial) identity. But I didn’t make much sense of this, so naturally I didn’t defend myself either.
I became more and more stressed, however, because I was way out of my depth in Western culture. When I said, “I’m becoming more and more stressed” (a simple case of blurting something out), people began to say, “You’re making it all about you. You think you’re important. You imagine you’re really great!”
That was weird, because I had no imaginings, nor indeed any concept of my “self” whatsoever.
I couldn’t understand why my attempts to communicate had to be stumped in every direction. it was extremely stressful and even more bewildering.
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That does sound stressful. I can sort of relate, but for different reasons. When I arrived at this fancy art school I was extraordinarily naive and “green”, being from a working class immigrant family far from the big city; and I was also a very attractive late bloomer (i.e. getting a lot of attention but no idea how to handle it and not even noticing the attention most of the time) as well as extremely talented and smart (I had managed to get a full tuition scholarship).
So I found myself in a lot of art world situations where I was out of my depth, mainly unaware and just trying to focus on my art, but being the subject of much interest by people who were far more sophisticated than me, and who assumed I was putting on some sort of act. I was often accused of being manipulative or other things that seem just completely out of left field to me.
My parents had barely manged to move to a nice area to get us into better schools and a healthier country environment, so I didn’t project lower class roots on the surface, and I think people were just really confused by me. The whole experience made me rather paranoid for a while, and it wasn’t until many years after I had moved away that I got some perspective.
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This part of our experience is very similar. I came from a culture which was radically different from the one I moved into — it couldn’t have been more so. The problems were cultural and historical, though, rather than to do with class status. I was perpetually misread on these bases.
To be a child of a colony isn’t what people thought it was. There had been a propaganda war fought against us “whites”, so that we appeared to be people who lounged around swimming pools and ordered our black staff to bring us cocktails, whilst we did nothing.
In actual fact, most of us came from practical classes of Britain — our parents were soldiers or farmers, or in very rare cases, managers of companies. There was no intellectual or artistic strata to our colonial culture. Our society was very simple, indeed.
Also, although my family did have a swimming pool, we lived very frugally. On Saturday at lunch, my father would open one bottle of beer for himself. We would eat a family sized packet of potato chips, which we would only just avoid, and share a family sized coca-cola between us. People don’t like to hear that this was all the “luxury” we could afford, because it raises ire and sounds like apologetics. “What about all the millions of black people you personally oppressed? What could they afford?” is the common comeback. Such an angry and resentful attitude shuts down conversation, making it impossible to proceed.
When we came to Australia, in early 1984, we sold everything to pay for the trip. We had to start again in every possible sense — psychologically, economically and socially. I didn’t have any new clothes for about five years, although I wasn’t culturally wise enough to realise I needed them. Of course, I had absolutely no social pretensions. I noticed that people were extremely unwilling to help me find my feet, and I later understood this was because I was a ‘colonial’, and was expected to pay for my sins.
I kind of became a little crazy. I turned to fundamentalist Christianity as a way of trying to inject some heart and soul into my new circumstances. This didn’t help at all, as I later discovered so much of the doctrine I’d been learning was intellectually contradictory.
I had come from a conservative to right wing culture and I ought to have stayed in that kind of cultural context where I would have been treated more sympathetically, but as I had no idea that I was being actively discriminated against, and that I was effectively cooking my own goose by doing so, I gravitated towards liberal intellectual and artistic contexts.
As time went by, I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, as a result of not being able to make sense of it all.
I also developed the paranoia about being misread, you talk about.
Nowadays, I’ve rectified all that by only associating with the sorts of people who will not be inclined to misread me. I find Japanese people wonderfully normal, black African people from my original culture generally very tolerable, and I associate with kick-boxers, who don’t care for cultural pretensions.
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