Wow, so you’re looking for an examination of the writing culture at Kean. That might actually be very hard for me, since as a transfer student I haven’t had the opportunity to really get into the culture here at Kean. I figure that I’ll list a few experiences that I’ve had that might actually help me. Names have been removed to protect the innocent and the not-so-innocent.
My psychology professor tells me that I cannot use my laptop to take notes in her class because for all she knows I might be on that “myface” thing she’s heard about.
-Besides showing an utter lack of respect for social media, which I believe can truly help people as writers (don’t get me started on using a twitter feed as an exercise in brevity and word choice), I think this shows that the professor doesn’t trust digital media, and may not see it as a valid form of writing.
A professor gave me a paper back with just a grade with no feedback on how I could improve it for a better grade. When I asked him for feedback I was told that I shouldn’t need to ask.
-This shows what professors expect that their students should instinctively know about what academic writing should look like. That might come to be difficult for students like me, who have already acclimated to the writing culture of a different school (and believe me when I say that Brookdale was very different when it came to feedback). Also, I’m still not entirely sure if it was my writing or my ideas that this professor had a problem with, and if it was my ideas it reinforces what we talked about in class about how the ideas of the professors are valued much more than the ideas of the student. The professor “owns” writing, whereas the student is simply borrowing the practice as a way to get judged.
A political science professor told me that I should memorize the six page in-class essay before a test and just copy it straight from that memory.
-That shows that outside of the English department there is a severe lack of knowledge about how, exactly, writing works. Anyone who knows about writing or the way the human brain works to expect someone to memorize an entire essay and copy it back on a test.
One thing that I know for sure is that a lot of students that I’ve met here speak (and write) in a non-standard form of English, and that is not valued here at Kean, or really anywhere. Students end up with the impression that their writing is worthless because it doesn’t sound or look like what their professors expect out of an “academic” paper. When I stop to think about it, I start realizing that it makes me think of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” (the song, not the whole album) and the images from the film that go along with that song. They had a point about how much school pushes students to conform. This push for conformity in writing still exists at the college level, and it is an ingrained part of the culture here at Kean.
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