Periodic writing assignments, supplemented by intelligent and detailed criticism of each piece, serve to maintain student engagement in the material of the course while it is going on. Frequent short papers give the student an opportunity to hit his stride, and early grades are often discounted when his record shows improvement. The stress here is on improvement, on education, not on testing, as with the single term paper. Knowing that each paper will not count so heavily in terms of a grade, the student is encouraged to write more daringly and imaginatively. He has the chance, also, to purge his writing of that turgid idiom, Scholar-speak, a variant of English considerably less clear and lucid than Time-style.

Professor Samuel Beer considers that the six term-time paper assignments in Social Sciences 2 are "the most important pedagogical device in my course." His section men, Michael Tanzer and Norman Pollack agree, stressing the improvement over the course of the term of their students' ability to present a coherent argument, to marshal facts to support it, to organize effectively, and to express themselves clearly. Reuben Brower assigns four or five papers in his English 162, as does Robert P. Wolff in Social Sciences 140. Richard Poirier, in his courses on American and English literature, is another who gives frequent paper assignments, believing the act of writing to be the most important way of transforming feelings and intimations into real knowledge.

Frequent writing exercises sustain and periodically invigorate student enthusiasm. But they represent only half of the dialogue by which students learn. What of the teacher?

In the large lecture course, students ordinarily lack access to the Great Man, who is busy with his own scholarship. But for most undergraduates, talking with interested graders and section men would prove no less valuable. Thus one immediately practicable way to restore the educational dialogue in the large, upper-level lecture course is to have more graders; two graders for a lecture course of 200 is not sufficient for the kind of continuous interaction described here. The problem is more than one of more than one of more men and more money, however. Graders in courses money, however. Graders in courses without sections must be encouraged to conceive of their role in more generous terms than they have in the past. They must do more than record paper and exam grades; in short, must be willing to talk to students. Given a ratio of about one grader for every 25 or so students, more papers could as assigned. Before writing each paper, students would be urged to visit a grader to discuss their proposed topics.

Discuss Paper First

As graders like David Littlejohn have said, talking about a paper before writing it, especially in the case of longer papers, can help a student to find a subject that will genuinely appeal to him and engage his interest. The grader can often suggest new and fresh ways of treating material.

After the paper has been written, what then? Comments should show the student what he has done wrong, and suggest what to do the next time. The criticism on most term papers is insultingly brief, considering the amount of work put into the paper. "Able job," "fine work," "sloppy reasoning"--these comments do not educate. Ideally, as Robert P. Wolff noted, students should be writing papers every week, and going over them word by word with an instructor. Courses cannot fulfill this function--more properly reserved for tutorial work--but course graders might be able to talk with students about their papers, if there were more men among whom to divide the work. If the comment on a paper does not suggest in some way what to do next, it serves no purpose. Epithets do not educate.

Here again it is plain that the assigning of one long term paper to be handed in at the end of a course, militates against any kind of worth-while communication and instruction. Dividing the paper work through the course of the term would, incidentally, relieve the burden of the grader in reading hundreds of final examinations and term papers at the end.

More frequent paper assignments and more frequent contact with the heretofore anonymous men who read them would encourage a more active sense of student engagement in work as it goes along. Academic suicide, academic abandon, all of the varieties of student alienation from course work can be alleviated by greater concern with matters of teaching, by a dedication to the restoration of the student-teacher dialogue that is stilled in the lecture hall.