by Karen McNeill, History That semester students completed the best batch of research papers I have ever received. I cannot say that the quality of student writing improved dramatically, but the quality of the research and analysis did.
by Elzbieta Benson, Sociology Well-prepared and active students make successful discussion sections. However, not all students read and not all of them participate. As a Graduate Student Instructor, I strive to encourage all students to read their assignments and engage in class discussions.
by Mayumi Takada, English I noted a startling discrepancy between the intelligent insights students provided in class and in office hours and the poor critical papers they wrote...In the language of high school math, they simply wrote out answers without showing their work. They were incapable of doing a close reading, the building block of literary writing and analysis.
by Victoria Somoff, Slavic Languages and Literatures They acutely sensed the distance "within" themselves between their ability to speak and to write. To use a metaphor, their unexpressed pathos was this: if we already understand each other so well (when speaking), why bother to hobble about on crutches (when writing)? We can run or, at least, walk much faster if we throw them away!
by Lael Gold, Comparative Literature Despite in-class instruction and a detailed handout on the subject of thesis and essay construction, the first batch of essays from students in my comparative literature course on literary depictions of woman warriors shared some fundamental shortcomings...I aimed at remedying [their] writing problems in a manner that would simultaneously deepen our engagement with the work presently under consideration, the fantastical Renaissance crusader epic Jerusalem Delivered.
by Meredith Thomsen, Integrative Biology My students' papers clearly reflected the problems they had with group writing. For some, the sections appeared to be written by different individuals and then pieced together, with big swings in quality between sections; other papers seemed to be the work of a single student who had taken over the entire project...Spring semester, I decided to break the assignment into two sections.
by Gretchen Purser, Sociology Not unlike Dante in the first canto of The Inferno, the students "found [themselves] within a shadowed forest," clutching these maps, but unable to translate the signs, symbols, and pathways of each map to the actual structures, systems and institutions that make up the social world.
by Connie Anderson, French What kind of engagement is most effective in allowing students to make the target language their own? This, it seems to me, is one of the ultimate challenges for foreign language instructors.
by Andrea Zemgulys, English The skill of analytic writing is not only difficult for students to learn, but difficult for the teacher to communicate without suggesting that students douse their work with high-faluting or apparently argumentative words (such as "hence"). My aim is to show students how the thoughtful use of simple language can transform descriptive sentences to analytic ones.