Old is the New New

Tags: TransAmerica, but not that TransAmerica; grading papers; the most useful six hours of grad school.

Completists take note: There’s a conversation going on at Cliopatria and elsewhere on globalization and transnational history. I wrote a little something on the subject—TransAmerica, which went up last Sunday—and there will be a symposium on transnational American history at Cliopatria next Monday. I’ll try to get something more written for that, but marks are due Monday and I have a pile of papers to read and grade. So don’t plan your week around it.

If you’re really a completist, you can also read my advice to graduate teaching assistants on responding to student writing. Tis the season after all, and if you’re in the thick of grading papers like I am, you may find some useful advice or at least moral support there. Most of what’s written therein comes from a terrific workshop I took on teaching student writing at Harvard’s Derek Bok Center—possibly the most useful six or seven hours I experienced in all of graduate school.

That handout I link to had to be watered down a little by revisions, though, before it could be given my department’s official stamp of approval. For instance, where I say “Grammar is not the only problem,” what I originally wrote, and actually meant, was “Grammar is not the problem.” Because I don’t think that it is. I’m a big believer in grading and interacting with student ideas as much as possible rather than trying to correct mechanical errors of spelling, grammar, and the like. And it’s been my experience that when students really know what they are doing in a paper, when they truly understand what they are arguing and why it matters, the great bulk of the fuzzleness and muddification in their writing drops away. (Now if only that worked for us professional academics.) Not everybody subscribes to this view of things, and that’s fine. Some people are skeptical about the top-down approach to teaching writing, or that it can work with students who aren’t, say, Harvard students. I think it does work, but I can certainly see why my department can’t just tell our TAs, “don’t bother marking for spelling or grammar.” (Which isn’t what I’m saying, of course, but I can see how it could come out like that.) So, opinions expressed here are not necessarily the opinions of my employer, etc. etc.