insanityWyatt was a quiet, polite, neatly dressed young man twenty-eight years old. He was about six foot one, 175 pounds, and he wore his light brown hair in a flat top. In his English class of twenty-five students Wyatt sat at the left end of the very back row in the desk nearest the door, beside the garbage can, below the light switch right behind his head. He sat in the seat I would have sought had I been a student in the class. When I was in college, I liked being able to see everyone in the room without turning my head, and the symbolism—of sitting within reach of the door knob, the light switch, and the trash—appealed to me, and I could get up and leave early if I wanted without much disruption to others. That seat offered proximity and access to power and control, and though I never exercised it neither was it merely symbolic. When class was dismissed, if I so desired I could always be the first to exit.
The course that Wyatt was in was devoted entirely to the composition of an academic research paper. Wyatt’s was on waste management. There was very little class discussion, and in what little there was Wyatt did not participate. For the most part students worked independently, identifying, locating, and gathering useful materials, reading and taking notes, formulating a thesis, outlining and organizing arguments, generating an antithesis and a rebuttal, adducing authoritative evidence, citing and documenting sources, and trying to master the forms, conventions, and mechanics of academic discourse, all according to my own detailed, step-by-step instructions and specifications. Each week one section of the final paper was due, the first week an hypothesis, the second a preliminary bibliography, the third an introduction, the fourth the thesis, the fifth the antithesis, and so on. Each weekend I read the student papers, offered suggestions, and at the bottom of each weekly assignment graded the student’s performance. The following week, in addition to the new assignment, students also submitted their revisions of the previous week’s assignment, which I reread and, if they had been improved, I regraded. Each class meeting I followed the same general procedure. I distributed the examples of and instructions to the new assignment. I read aloud its main parts and explained in further detail any aspects of it I suspected might cause students special difficulty. I invited and tried to answer their questions about the new assignment. Then I distributed photocopies of two of the best student papers from the previous week’s assignment and read them aloud, commenting on their strengths and weaknesses and answering questions about them. Each week Wyatt received a C or C+. His work was competent, but something in it seemed slightly awry, just what and why I wasn’t exactly sure.
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INSANITY to be continued
The course that Wyatt was in was devoted entirely to the composition of an academic research paper. Wyatt’s was on waste management. There was very little class discussion, and in what little there was Wyatt did not participate. For the most part students worked independently, identifying, locating, and gathering useful materials, reading and taking notes, formulating a thesis, outlining and organizing arguments, generating an antithesis and a rebuttal, adducing authoritative evidence, citing and documenting sources, and trying to master the forms, conventions, and mechanics of academic discourse, all according to my own detailed, step-by-step instructions and specifications. Each week one section of the final paper was due, the first week an hypothesis, the second a preliminary bibliography, the third an introduction, the fourth the thesis, the fifth the antithesis, and so on. Each weekend I read the student papers, offered suggestions, and at the bottom of each weekly assignment graded the student’s performance. The following week, in addition to the new assignment, students also submitted their revisions of the previous week’s assignment, which I reread and, if they had been improved, I regraded. Each class meeting I followed the same general procedure. I distributed the examples of and instructions to the new assignment. I read aloud its main parts and explained in further detail any aspects of it I suspected might cause students special difficulty. I invited and tried to answer their questions about the new assignment. Then I distributed photocopies of two of the best student papers from the previous week’s assignment and read them aloud, commenting on their strengths and weaknesses and answering questions about them. Each week Wyatt received a C or C+. His work was competent, but something in it seemed slightly awry, just what and why I wasn’t exactly sure.
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INSANITY to be continued
