College Writing is a Changin'

Yesterday the current EBHS Rutgers Expository Writing team (so Stacey, Cunningham, Soder, Brady, and me) and my boss took a meeting with two coordinators from the Rutgers Writing Program (Abigail Reardon and Brian Becker) and they explained the direction the course would be taking next September-- they were already currently modeling this new direction with a couple classes but they were going to "scale up" and completely revamp the course next year; anyway, the class WAS a synthesis non-fiction argument course-- the kids read long, dense, fairly difficult college level non-fiction pieces about far-ranging adult ideas-- organized complexity, criminal behavior, economics, sexual selection, sexism in a self-designated military academy, etcetera . . . great stuff-- and they learned to use these texts to formulate a sophisticated independent academic argument within the parameters of the textual evidence provided, without tangential anecdotes, outside sources, and random bullshit . . . and they did the same task over and over, with different texts, but the rules were always the same and the grades were NOT averaged-- instead they received the highest grade they sustained on any two essays . . . so it was more of a sports model where the kids really struggled on the first two papers, generally did not pass them, but then got better and better and received a grade for how good they got at the task, not an average of all their attempts-- anyway, it was a great class, I wish I had it before I went to college-- it taught our students how to formulate a thesis and an argument, how to complicate that thesis and go beyond compare/contrast, how to weave evidence into a paragraph, how to synthesize terms and ideas from different texts, and how to parse and understand a dense text . . . but apparently kids are struggling to do this at Rutgers, according to Abby and Brian, so the course is changing drastically-- in their words, the old course trained students to be "scholars" while the new course will invite kids to be "writers" . . . so the new course has four "projects," and while they are not fully fleshed out, this is my best description:

1. a personal essay with some modeling of techniques-- they called this the "College Essay 2.0"-- and this is ironic because years ago, when we first teamed up with Rutgers, they were very disdainful about our Composition Class that we ran for community college credit because it had a lot of reading examples and modeling rhetorical devices-- they thought that was sophomoric silliness and said so-- but now they are doing this themselves;

2. a synthesis essay with 4-5 short articles and a proposal-- this sounds vaguely like what we are currently doing, but with easier texts;

3. some response to a Radiolab podcast-- this might be synthesis or it might be the bridge to assignment number four;

4. an investigation into some question you'd like to think about during your four years in college-- and this can be multimodal-- so a website or a video or whatever-- they showed us a "beautiful" example that did look very nice-- it was a website made on Adobe that had lovely (stock) images and a cool layout-- use of a template!-- and was about how music soothed this girl's anxiety and had a citation from her friend Todd . . . it was pretty much journal entries-- and they told a story about a lousy student who figured out a good topic -- cricket!-- and he wrote about the progression and evolution of cricket-playing in our locality . . . so a cute assignment and one that smart kids will run with and not-so-smart kids will struggle with . . .

anyway, I took a bunch of notes (and also noticed that the Rutgers folk were zooming from home . . . it must be nice) and you can present anything to me and it sounds fine-- I'm like, whatever, I'll do that-- but Cunningham and Powers and our boss Jess process things much faster than me (they don't call me Delayed Reaction Dave for nothing . . . I got all pissed off about our new schedule a year after it was implemented, much to the amusement of the fast-thinking ladies) and they realized that this course was a major dumbing down of the old synthesis course and that this course is very similar to our English 12 community college credit course (except that course might be more rigorous) and while we didn't raise all these issues with Rutgers, we now have to decide what to do . . . and we have some theories as to what happened at Rutgers, from clues from Abby and Brian and from our own thoughts-- first of all, it used to be that it was impossible to place out of the Rutgers Expository Writing course, so everyone took it-- even the smart kids-- but lately, you can place out of it a variety of ways-- community college credits, AP scores, taking the course in high school-- so that the kids who have to take it freshman year at Rutgers are not the best students AND there is a major decline in college applications this year, more kids are dropping out than ever, kids experienced learning loss during COVID, and Rutgers pulls from a wide variety of schools . . . SO the kids can't pass the old College Writing course-- my wife says that her lesson plans that worked for twenty years of fifth grade math no longer work-- the kids can't do certain abstract and creative thinking since COVID . . . this was a lot for me to take in, but Cunningham has already outlined a new course that scaffolds the old Expository synthesis stuff in some better manner and I guess we'll present this to Rutgers because our kids are capable of doing this course and it's really beneficial for them while the new class just seems watered down and not that relevant to writing in other disciplines . . . I'm sure there will be more to this story and plenty more to synthesize and figure out but it looks like College Writing is a changing.