As a diagnostic, I have my students write a one to two page paper about why they are taking college classes, and what they expect to get out of it. My goal is to find out which students cannot write at college level yet, and what areas they need to improve upon to write the two research papers they will do later in the semester.
Some were very good, a couple were tragedies. In general, my impression is that the average quality of these first papers was better than than the last two semesters. What is astonishing is how some of the students coming from the most horrible family backgrounds manage to write really quite well. Nietzsche's famous, "That which does not kill me makes me stronger" often seems to apply.
The corollary:
ReplyDeleteThat which does kill me does not make me stronger.
And then:
That which does not kill me had better be able to run damned fast.