[MD] teaching Quality

[X Acto]

RMP's 1961 paper

an exerpt:
"The answer presented here is in the disguise of an old answer, so
that at first it doesn't appear very new. The problem being fought is
the old problem that is renewed each time a student brings in a
rewritten paper saying, "Is this what you want?"  The question seems
ordinary enough to the student but every time one tries to answer it
honestly it becomes a frustrating and subtly maddening question.  An
instructor often gets the feeling that he could spend the rest of his
life telling the student what he wanted and never get anywhere
precisely because the student is trying to produce what the instructor
wants rather than what is good.
     One also notices that on many of these occasions the particular
student is as frustrated and angered as the instructor.  The student
keeps trying to figure out how to please the instructor and to his way
of thinking, the instructor doesn't seem to know himself.  The student
turns in a rambling paper.  He is told he needs better organization
and should make an outline.  He goes to work, makes an outline and
writes a new story that follows the outline but is told the story is
too dull.  He goes to work, tries to brighten it with choice bits of
liveliness and brings it in.  He is then told the story sounds too
artificial.  He begins to look at the instructor with a deep feeling
of estrangement.  He decides in his own mind that from the evidence
available it is clear that he is talking to an incompetent instructor.
 He goes his separate way with little accomplished and the cause of
English composition has fallen another tiny step backward.
     I suspect that the particular problem involved in this situation
is a deep one, a fundamental problem that pervades all teaching of
English composition and perhaps all teaching.  Because instructors are
compelled to say what they want they do say what they want, and when
they do, they force the students to conform to artificial molds that
destroy ideas that students have on their own.  Students who go along
with their instructors are then condemned for their inability to be
creative and take a stand of their own or produce a piece or writing
that reflects a student's own personal standards of what is good.
     At this point an instructor's disciplinarian hackles can rise and
he can say that in the final analysis he is teaching conformity and
that the students had better learn to like it.  He can argue that
students should learn to be creative only after they have learned the
discipline, presumably when they are all through school.  When he says
this it is unlikely that he is thinking much about the fact that when
they get through school they will enter another form of
work-discipline which will carry them through until they are ready for
retirement and death.  The disciplinarian argument, carried through,
seems to lead logically to the conclusion that the purpose of a
college or university is to train willing and obedient servants, not
to encourage the growth of free individuals capable of thinking for
themselves.  But this conclusion is in such obvious violation of the
whole American way it is absurd.  We are, in fact, dedicated to the
ideal of free thought, and when we insist upon conformity to what we
say or feel is good in English composition we are not following that
ideal.  I am not interested at this point in whether this is necessary
or not, I am simply pointing out that it is wrong and will continue to
be wrong until solutions are found.  I suspect that this fundamental
wrongness is the basis for much hatred and apathy that English has
earned in the past and will continue to accrue justifiable hatred in
the future.
     The classroom dilemma of saying what you want without producing
conformity is a dilemma that, I believe, has a solution.  The solution
lies in a common word which on first analysis seems as simple as the
word, "time," and which, on further inspection, turns out to be fully
as complex as that word, "time."  The word is quality.  When a student
asks what is wanted in English composition he should be told that what
is wanted is quality.  This seems ridiculously simple at first but it
is an often overlooked primitive concept that is absolutely necessary
to put across before a student can learn to write."