Fighting the End-of-Semester Blues

With some surprising takeaways from my students

Photo by Tanner Boriack on Unsplash

In keeping with “Unmaking the Grade” tradition, I haven’t written very much over the last few months about the Writing 101 class I’m currently teaching. I don’t like to share details of classes while they’re in progress. I have this sense that students might think I’m talking about them behind their backs, even if I tell them at the beginning of the semester that I write a blog about teaching.

So, I may have more to say about my current class later, after it’s over. But I’m breaking my rule a little bit today to share my experience over the last few weeks in the hopes that readers might find it useful as their own semesters come to a close.

To be honest, I’ve felt okay, but not great, about my teaching over the last few months. I’m facing all the same challenges I hear about from other people. Students (and many of them will tell you this themselves) seem to struggle with some of the things we used to take for granted, like basic vocabulary and reading comprehension or the ability to engage meaningfully with longer texts. More than once this semester, I’ve used words or references I assumed students would understand, only to find out later that they didn’t. More than once, I’ve been disappointed that we haven’t done more reading and writing together as a class.

I’ve been similarly disheartened by the number of students who have absolutely dragged themselves through the second half of the semester, turning in late work, which they frequently admit is shoddy, because they’re dealing with illness, crisis, or a highly demanding course schedule. Because my course is pretty flexible, it usually goes right to the bottom of students’ priority lists when things go wrong. I get it, and it’s fine. But it does mean that many students have not been able to reach their full potential as writers. And that’s disappointing.

After evaluating some student work in the last couple of weeks, I also had this deep sense of dread, wondering whether or not anybody had really learned anything all semester. Admittedly, this is a pretty common feeling for me this time of year and has very little to do with the students themselves. I think it’s due in part to the way I teach writing.

Inspired by

John Warner

and others, my pedagogy has shifted to focus on the process or practice of writing rather than the products of writing. The rationale for this is that many students who learn how to write a nice school essay that follows all the nice-school-essay rules still have no idea what to do when faced with a real writing task in a new context. Learning how to write a five-paragraph essay (or even a more advanced version of it) in a first-year writing class does not really prepare students to write literary analyses, or lab reports, or grants, or petitions, or opinion pieces for the school newspaper, or whatever else they might want to write.

If we want students to become strong writers, we have to help them understand what writing is on a deeper level, beyond a set of rules for essays. We have to help them identify the choices writers make when they approach a task and then practice making them. By shifting the focus away from a pretty product and toward a messy process, students can begin to develop more writerly habits of mind. Rather than putting their effort into learning a series of formulas and crafting a series of products that they’ll forget about as soon as they leave the course, they can concentrate on developing writing skills that might benefit them in a variety of future contexts.

This is all well and good, but it does require some faith. Because when you stop giving students formulas and instructions for pretty products and nice school essays…they don’t create pretty products and nice school essays. When the things they write demonstrate their ability to make choices as writers rather than their ability to follow a set of (what they view as) arbitrary rules, the things they write tend to be messy. And without polished products, it’s much harder to convince yourself that learning is happening. Maybe I’m getting messy work because I just haven’t done a good enough job of teaching what John calls “The Writer’s Practice.” But either way, receiving these kinds of submissions at the end of the semester can be demoralizing.

So, that’s where I was earlier this week. I wouldn’t call it despair, but I could feel my faith starting to flag a little.

That was before I surveyed my students about their experiences in the course. At the end of the semester, I usually create a simple form that asks about students’ impressions of the course grading system as well as whether and how they used AI. I also provide space for them to share anything else they want me to know about their experience in the class.

This time I added one additional question: “What’s one thing you learned in this class that surprised you?” (Someone recommended this to me earlier in the semester, and now I can’t remember who. If it was you, let me know!)

I often find the answers on these surveys heartening, but this question yielded especially gratifying responses. Here are a few surprising things students said they learned, shared with their permission:

• There is so much that goes into arguments and persuasion that I didn’t think about before

• That writing doesn’t have to be boring when you can write about something you are passionate about and that you don't have to write with the average 5 paragraph essay. It can be a lot easier and fun to write when you aren’t restricted.

• That I don’t need to be scared to talk out loud.

• How much I have learned other than just grammar and writing, such as how to structure my words and such.

• How to break down reading paragraphs

• I learned how to get feedback on a piece of work and redo it in order to improve.

• I did not ever pick up on the audience and conforming to all the audiences that may come in contact to your piece so that was very helpful

• The different writing styles that writers use or have that benefits their writing.

• To be confident in my work and whatever way I go about writing is okay.

• I learned it can actually be a bit difficult to tell something was written with the use of ai versus something completely original.

• How to find all the little details while reading like a writer

There’s a lot to unpack here, but I’m struck, as I usually am in these surveys, by how many responses contain takeaways I never would have thought to put into the course learning goals. Understanding that “writing doesn’t have to be boring,” and that it involves a lot more than just good grammar. Developing confidence in your own writing process or in your ability to contribute to class discussion. Evaluating the differences between human- and AI-generated text. These aren’t really the aims of this course—but they’re all just as important as the objectives that are on the syllabus.

Additionally, much of what students said they learned can’t be assessed in traditional ways. A student paper can’t really tell me that they changed their view about what writing is, that they have a deeper understanding of their own writing process, or that they feel more confident as a writer. I might get a sense of this from their work, but I don’t really know students learned these things unless they tell me.

To be honest, I’m still a little concerned about some of my students’ writing abilities. I’m worried I haven’t adequately prepared them for the big research paper they’ll encounter in Writing 102. I’m worried that I spent too much time fighting the five-paragraph essay and not enough time on topic sentences. But these responses made me feel a little better. They made me think that our time together hasn’t been wasted. And they convinced me that, for some students, this was the beginning rather than the end of their education in writing.

So, if you have any way to ask students what they learned from your course, and especially what surprised them about it, I recommend that you do it. It might provide the ray of sunshine we all need at the end of another tough semester.