{"id":35127,"date":"2017-08-27T15:26:30","date_gmt":"2017-08-27T19:26:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=35127"},"modified":"2017-08-27T15:26:30","modified_gmt":"2017-08-27T19:26:30","slug":"students-paper-shows-promise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2017\/08\/27\/students-paper-shows-promise\/","title":{"rendered":"Student’s paper shows promise"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The new semester starts this week. Let\u2019s imagine you\u2019re a TA for some freshman class in American history or sociology, something like that. Maybe poli sci, or government, or even American lit or American theology. Or maybe one of those first-year multidisciplinary orientation\u00a0classes titled something like Human Diversity and American Culture.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the professor likes to assign short essays on Day 1, just to gauge where her students are coming from. One of these assignments asks the new class to write a one-paragraph summary of race in America. This is, quite deliberately, a daunting assignment, with brevity forcing clarity (or exposing the lack thereof). But these micro-essays won\u2019t affect students\u2019 grades for the semester \u2014 the exercise isn\u2019t to determine what students know, but what they will need to learn.<\/p>\n

And but so, as the teaching assistant for the class, you\u2019ve now got a pile of these papers in front of you and one of them reads something like this:<\/p>\n

No individual, people, or nation is perfect. Among the most grievous sins committed by early Americans was the enslavement of and trafficking in Africans and African Americans.\u00a0Slavery was formally abolished in 1865, but racism was not.\u00a0Indeed, it was often institutionalized and in some ways heightened over time through Jim Crow legislation, de facto segregation, structural inequalities, and pervasively racist attitudes. And other persons of color, including Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans, have often been subjected to official and unofficial discrimination. What we have seen in Charlottesville makes it clear once again that racism is not a thing of the past, something that brothers and sisters of color have been trying to tell [white Americans]\u00a0for years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s not bad. This student writes well. And, commendably, they demonstrate some understanding that racism involves more than just the past injustices\u00a0of slavery and Jim Crow. The student is, perhaps, a bit overeager to come across as \u201cwoke,\u201d but otherwise stands out as quite well-prepared to begin this class.<\/p>\n

Now fast-forward to the end of the semester.<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s the last week of classes, leading up to the final. This is when the professor reveals to her students that they will be asked to revisit the same series of micro-essays that they were asked to write back on the first day of class. The exercise is still, in part, for the professor\u2019s benefit, again serving as a gauge for where students are at, but this time as an evaluation of how successful she and her\u00a0class have been in communicating what the students need to know. Also, unlike that first round of essays, these will be graded.<\/p>\n

In the stack of end-of-the-semester papers, you find a paragraph much like the one quoted above. (Not identical, mind you \u2014 the point of this little hypothetical is about the substance of this paragraph, not about detecting plagiarism.) At this point such a\u00a0paragraph would seem a bit more disappointing. Where it might have shown great promise for an incoming student at the beginning of the semester, now \u2014 after all of the reading and lectures and discussions of the entire course\u00a0\u2014 it fails to demonstrate the depth of understanding that one might expect or hope for after months of study.<\/p>\n

Granted, the extreme focus required by the assignment is still deucedly tough. One paragraph seems cruelly inadequate for the subject at hand and, as a fair-minded TA, you\u2019ll want to allow some leeway here for degree of difficulty. But this still doesn\u2019t read like an A paper.<\/p>\n

That initial apologetic need to convey that no nation is perfect \u2014 that racism did not end in 1865 and is not a thing of the past \u2014 might have seemed innocently naive at the start of the semester, but now\u00a0it loses some of that innocence.<\/p>\n

\"VotingRights1963\"<\/p>\n

More troubling is the way the student doesn\u2019t seem to have integrated the subject into their larger understanding of America. They seem to regard racism as a blot on the surface of the nation and its laws, history, culture, religion, politics, etc., rather than as an elemental, ontological aspect of the nation\u2019s identity. They seem to think of America as something over here, intact and of itself, while racism is something else over there, <\/em>something\u00a0<\/em>external and vestigial that occasionally, unfortunately, rubs up against American life. They recognize the possibility of structural racism as a problem requiring vigilance, rather than as an intrinsic reality. It seems, for them, to be a problem that America has,<\/em> rather than an aspect of what America is<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The essay isn\u2019t wrong, exactly, just somewhat inadequate. As the TA, you have to wonder if this student completed or comprehended all the required reading for this class. The student has, perhaps, observed those ideas, but hasn\u2019t digested<\/em> them.<\/p>\n

So grade-wise I\u2019m thinking, what?<\/em> \u2014 a solid B, maybe?\u00a0B-minus<\/em>?* And definitely\u00a0some longish notes in the margins on what they\u2019ll need to improve on\u00a0if they want to do better than that on the final.<\/p>\n

The punchline here, as you may have already realized, is that this is not a hypothetical paragraph and it was not written by a freshman student. It is, rather, from another of those generally commendable public statements and mass-signatory open letters produced in the wake of the most recent white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. Specifically, it\u2019s from\u00a0\u201cAn Open Letter From Christian Scholars on Racism in America Today.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

I have great respect and personal fondness for many of the good people who signed onto this. (It\u2019s certainly not that I disrespect or dislike the others, it\u2019s just that I don\u2019t know many of these names.) The invitation to endorse it was somewhat binary and, given that, I think they were right to lend their weight to its side of the scale. I think the statement itself and its endorsement by these many scholars is, on balance, a Good Thing.<\/p>\n

But I also suspect \u2014 or, at least, hope<\/em> \u2014 that many of them would agree with me about the grade its description of the problem would merit if it were submitted as an essay in any of their classes. I suspect that many would agree that this statement fails to adequately grasp the breadth and depth and pervasive, enduring scope of the matter. Others perhaps would not agree.<\/p>\n

The apparent (white) freshman-level understanding reflected in the\u00a0paragraph I\u2019ve quoted may be partly\u00a0due to the unfortunate \u201cdumbing-down\u201d that scholars sometimes think they need to do to communicate to a broader, popular audience of non-specialists. It may be partly due, as we\u2019ve already said, to the extreme\u00a0difficulty of cramming all that needs to be expressed into a single paragraph on short notice.<\/p>\n

But I think it\u2019s also partly also an accurate measure\u00a0of where this group of students is\u00a0at here at the beginning of a new semester.<\/p>\n

This shows these kids have great promise and admirable\u00a0intentions. But it also shows that they have a lot to learn and to absorb in the months and years ahead.<\/p>\n

\u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013<\/p>\n

* Again, though, the paragraph is clearly written with well-constructed sentences. If you\u2019ve ever really been a TA slogging through an actual stack of student papers \u2014 many of which are, alas, not<\/em> so clearly or coherently written \u2014 then you\u2019re likely aware of the halo effect that provides, and how it means that this paper would likely get a higher grade than it might otherwise receive if it were read in isolation, just due to your sense of gratitude over not having to struggle to comprehend what it was attempting to say.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More troubling is the way the student doesn’t seem to have integrated the subject into their larger understanding of America. They seem to regard racism as a blot on the surface of the nation and its laws, history, culture, religion, politics, etc., rather than as an elemental, ontological aspect of the nation’s identity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[92,129,158],"class_list":["post-35127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evangelicals","tag-church","tag-history","tag-racism"],"yoast_head":"\nStudent's paper shows promise<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"More troubling is the way the student doesn't seem to have integrated the subject into their larger understanding of America. 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Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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