This is the rhythm of academic work: 12 weeks of lectures, followed by reading period with a term paper of 15 to 25 pages, ending with the final examination. The purpose is to educate. Does the rhythm suit the purpose?

Except for the ritual of the exam, the student is asked to respond to course work primarily in the one long paper, scheduled after the end of the lecture part of the course. Until then, he just glides along, listening, taking notes, reading, taking more notes, passively ingesting knowledge, never asked for the evidence of his personal involvement in his education. Only after the lectures are over and the course is at an end is the student asked to report on what he thought, how he felt.

The result in the student's term-time work is a performance uninspired by a sense of active, personal engagement. At his best the student is simply dutiful, at his worst moribund. If he falls behind in his reading during the lecture part of the term, it is primarily because the mechanics of course work discourage ongoing, direct involvement in the material.

The traditional pattern of course work--postponing the student's contribution to his learning until the term is nearly ended--implicitly denies what all students know from their experience: education functions best as a dialogue, a running conversation between student and teacher in which both are actively engaged in the same material at the same time. Education fails and apathy sets in when this dialogue breaks down. Why copy down the lecturer's critical responses to "The Wasteland" before you have read the poem, before you have your own responses to measure his against? And of what satisfaction to the teacher is addressing passive spectators? Reuben Brower, professor of English, complains: "I can't stand lecturing about things people aren't engaged in."

Shorter Papers

In Brower's courses papers are shorter, and assigned at frequent intervals during the term-- thus fostering student involvement in the issues of the course, at the time that the material is being considered in lectures, rather than during reading period or exam period. When the student is given incentives to read and write about what his professor is discussing in lecture, there is a renewal of the dialogue.

Assigning several shorter papers during the term helps primarily to teach methods, approaches, modes of treatment and attention, rather than to convey a substantive mass of knowledge.

The single long term paper, on the other hand, usually seeks to test the student's ability to explore a specific problem in depth, bringing together a relatively large amount of material to bear on a single topic. (The long term paper will usually involve extensive research and run from 15 to 25 pages, whereas the short term-time paper is usually less than 10 pages long.)

Pre-eminently, the average student term paper reflects a lack of personal involvement of the writer in his subject. The personal response is blurred, buried, missing altogether. Unengaged in the work of the course during the term, the student has neither the time, nor the prior interest in the material (when he sits down to write) to cultivate his own responses to the reading and to write enthusiastically about them. What graders report missing in term papers is the sense of an immediate student relationship to the work at hand. This is a relationship that grows up through time, that must be nurtured and developed from the very beginning of a course. It rarely is.

"Insufferable Dullness"

What are the hallmarks of this failure of personal engagement in student term papers? David T. Little-john, a second-year graduate student in English, read about 80 long term papers during May for two upper-level English courses. He talked of their "insufferable dullness," lamenting "the absence of any imaginative involvement" on the part of the writer. The result: "commonplace topics and commonplace papers." In slightly different terms, Professor William Alfred described what is essentially the same problem, noting the students' habit of suppressing their own perceptions and immediate responses, holding back what they think and feel. Rather, in writing term papers, students often try to write what they think will please the reader, asking themselves: What does he want us to see? What does he want us to feel? The immediate personal response is never cultivated, never expressed. It gets lost in the desire to please, to be "safe."

Something more than the lack of personal involvement in course work is suggested in these comments. They testify, also, to other ill effects of leaving papers until the end of the term. First, writing only one paper for a course gives the student no chance to improve in his ability to argue a point, to develop his responses, to write lucidly. Also the student feels a great pressure to write a safe, conservative paper when it is the only one in the course. He tends to be thorough and cautious, not daring to take a chance on a dubious theory or a fresh approach. Too much of the grade depends on the term paper for the student to feel free.

If students learn through a continual dialogue, assigning the term paper due after the end of the course gives the student no chance to learn from graders' comments. In large lecture courses, these comments take the place of frequent personal communication as the only means for the teacher to maintain his end of the dialogue. The student can learn nothing of immediate usefulness from the grader's comments on his term paper, since he gets his paper back only after the course is over. If it is true that improvement requires continuing personal instruction and correction, how can such a system help the student? Often he receives his paper back as late as three months after the course is over.

And the grader, harried by having to read and grade as many as a hundred papers within a single week, must restrict his comment to a few marginal notes and a perfunctory summary at the end. The summary often goes something like this: "Able job. Well-organized and effectively argued. Especially strong in the middle section." Given such vague, abstract criticism, it is no wonder that students look forward only to learning their grades when they go to pick up their papers. What can anybody learn from such comments? Close critical comment is valuable, especially when made available to the student while the course is proceeding, so that he may learn from his mistakes.

Stress on Improvement