Spring 1997

How I Learned to Laugh (Carefully) at My Students
Amanda French, TA, Department of English

We are all confronted, from time to time, with truly outrageous student errors--I call them "wonder-blunders." Lists of the funny ones, different in every discipline, even circulate on the Internet. As a novice teacher of first-year composition, I've already encountered my share; in writing classes, the worst errors are usually language-related. One that I remember vividly occurred this spring: a student of mine, clearly meaning to discuss individual "religious affiliations," instead wrote three pages--not ironic--concerning "religious afflictions."

Since students are never around when I'm grading papers, I can behave naturally when I first encounter such blunders. My first instinct, of course, is to laugh. My second instinct is to share the joke with whoever's around. Often this is another writing instructor, who will understand not only the humor but also the pathos of such an error, and who will join me in giving way to my third instinct, which is to wail and whimper.

But I opted to censor both my glee and my horror when commenting on the student's paper, circling the error and writing a quiet "Affiliations?" in the margin (in blue ink, not red). I now think that this was the wrong approach. This unemphatic correction set the student straight (I hope) on the distinction between these two particular words, but she probably never realized how much the blunder lowered her credibility, how much it mattered.

So I determined that I'd let my sense of humor have a freer range when I came across the next wonder-blunder. It seemed to me then, and does still, that students need to be told when they are making themselves ridiculous. I thought a little ribbing, and a little consequent embarrassment, might motivate my students to improve, since my various lectures on Self-Culture, Job Prospects, Communication, Scholarly Standards, and even Your Grade seemed to have little effect.

Choosing to institute this new program during a class discussion was, predictably, a major blunder of my own. When the class came to discuss the paper of a student who, bizarrely and archaically, not only capitalized the first word after every semi-colon, but also insisted that his English teacher had taught him to do so, I cracked, "Well, either he ought to be in an insane asylum, or you took that class in the eighteenth century." He was not amused, and was rather sullen for a while. More importantly, the rest of the class also reacted with definite unease, and workshop sessions were difficult for a time after that. I had not only made a rather snide remark, I had sent my class the message that my own wit took precedence over their improvement.

Based on these experiences, I now follow two policies in responding to the wonder-blunder, emphasizing the enormity of the mistake without making the student too resentful:

In class, the students are the best critics of each others' most glaring mistakes. Workshops, made possible by the blessed photocopy machine, are standard practice in beginning composition, and ought to be employed whenever possible in other classes. They teach the students that scholarly writing is a public genre, and that it's not only picky teachers, forever correcting, who will notice a blunder.

If students gang up on each other, as sometimes happens, it's still easier to defuse unhealthy tension between students than it is to resolve hostility between myself and the class. This has also proven to be a good way to address other uncomfortable issues about a student's paper apparent racism, for instance.

In writing comments, a quick joke is often the best way to show why certain mistakes are ludicrous--in a way the student isn't likely to forget. There may well be an ethical problem with making fun of my students behind their backs, but the practice has gained me so much real help from my colleagues that I'm not willing to abandon it just yet. It seems more to the point that my students be allowed to share the joke, and even have it explained to them, if necessary.

Last week, coming across an early college paper of my own, I was reminded again both of the power of a quip and of why I shouldn't allow myself to get too self-righteous: "Up to the Victorian age," I had typed, "political and economic theories had been on the whole similar."

"Try telling that to George Washington and George III," advised the margin.