[Ads-l] The English Language is the Enemy of the People

[dave@wilton.net]

I'm interested in how his "labor-based" grading system is structured. None of the news reports I've seen go into it. 
 
I bet it's less radical than it sounds. When I last taught writing, at an institution with a significant minority of L2 students, I weighted participation heavily. (Lots of ungraded assignments where the grade was based on completion.) For graded assignments, I structured the grading rubric to give more weight to the structure of the argument, sources used, and evidence presented. I didn't ignore grammar and style, but they were a smaller part of the overall grade.
 
(Compared to one political science professor I had in grad school who would reduce by one letter grade for every three grammar "errors" he found. The "errors" were often faux ones, like split infinitives. 90% of our time was spent proofreading rather than on the substance, and it wasn't a writing course.)
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: "Chris Waigl" <chris at LASCRIBE.NET>
Sent: Tuesday, November 9, 2021 10:59pm
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ADS-L] The English Language is the Enemy of the People



On Tue, Nov 9, 2021 at 5:45 PM Margaret Winters <mewinters at wayne.edu> wrote:

> What struck me was the very formal, theory-based language with which the
> speaker promoted not worrying about grammar (or, I suppose, register) in
> grading students.
>

Well, he *is *a professor of rhetoric.

I find that I'm much more welcoming of messy & polemical debate on this
kind of topic rather than the usual ones that are about whether it's ok to
discriminate against people you don't like, whether certain types of people
are not smart enough to be scientists or whether it's ok to kick someone
out of a washroom.

Chris

-- 
Chris Waigl . chris.waigl at gmail.com . chris at lascribe.net
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net . http://chryss.eu

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