Teaching Writing at CDE

Padma Devkota
Teaching Writing at CDE
The Central Department of English (CDE) offers a compulsory Writing Course in its first year degree programme to help students conduct independent research and to write creatively and critically. Since students who write well usually score high in all other courses including Thesis, both students and teachers need to take writing seriously.    
CDE, however, has failed to deliver this course with any significant degree of success. Because instructors are not properly trained and monitored, they tend to discuss theories of writing more than actually make students write. Both the academic leadership and the size of the class are responsible for this. But it is simply unfortunate that most of the instructors have never been formally trained to write during their academic career. 
If no student is worth the MA English degree without at least some mastery over English language, anyone is free to examine the quality of MA theses that graduating students produce. With a few exceptions, one can easily demonstrate a general failure of the very basics of writing in many of these research works. I will not delve into cases of collusion, cut-n'-paste, and other malpractices that are growing and will soon swamp many departments.
Most of these problems can be effectively solved if teachers supervise theses properly, and seriously teach students to write. Instead, certain attitudes have intervened in the possibility of team spirit in the department. Besides the attitude of fawning students and each other, already discussed in "Celebration of Mediocrity," the other is one of fancied superiority of theoreticians over those condescendingly accepted as traditional colleagues. This I-know-more-than-thou attitude is unfortunately founded more on vanity than on actual meritorious scholarship. A neologism-spangled speech may dazzle the innocent public's eye, which, for lack of academic discrimination, can only behold an aura of versatile eminence of the speaker. But what of that! While the best literary scholars of the world strive hard to be simple, our students are brainwashed into thinking that the bigger the words they use, the wiser they are. They, therefore, argue that if you praise the fawning blurbs on their book, you are a postcolonialist, and, if you do not praise these blurbs, you are a colonialist. There is your sample postgraduate in English MA educated by theoreticians and groomed by "some higher consciousness" as SB Shrestha rightly perceives in "Strategic Minds" (TKP Dec 4, 2005).
While teachers have only to be honest to themselves and to their students to improve the situation, it is doubtful that some even read exam copies or chapters of a thesis submitted for correction. How can they if they supervise more than a dozen theses at a time? Why should they when the law of least sacrifice is human nature? Therefore, thesis writing has become a mere ritual where, to the utter neglect of desired research competence, some non-academic criteria help promote the student-loving teacher's image as a generous marker. And, in order to justify this, some claim that a good knowledge of postcoloniality and Marxism is enough to be a "nearly eighty-percent" scholar despite any fuzzy, non-academic writing ("Tantra and English," TKP October 16, 2005). Granted that knowledge is knowledge, the ability to express oneself must somewhere feature as a sign of education. However, for the present I will also concede to opposition to my line of argument because many of those who teach writing do not write well themselves.
    For instance, when faced with such criticism, a richly arrogant but poorly composed Letter to the Editor befuddled the public with such jargons as "expressionism" and "elitism" (Abhi Subedi, TKP October 4, 2005). In the name of unfortunate Stony Brook, doctors with neither sense nor sensibility spit personal venom in the form of ad hominems, which are arguments directed against the person rather than against ideas expressed by the person (TKP November 20, 2005). And, one might also ask, "Do columnists of The Kathmandu Post really intend to communicate a message to an audience?"
    What has the center for excellence in charge of English education all over Nepal done to improve the situation? In the past academic year, it offered a Writing Tutorial in the afternoon for its own students and compelled them to pay Rs. 2500 per head.
    The significance of this strategy is simple. The department faces a genuine problem: most students opt for Thesis in which they can indiscriminately score approximately distinction marks although they may have barely passed in the other nine papers. They will, therefore, savagely resist any attempt to restore the original pre-requisite for Thesis, which is the average score raiser. The department, with its insufficient teaching faculty, then adopts a survival strategy. It attempts to prove that students actually deserve high scores by giving them about fifteen percent grace marks, which is against the rules of the university, for the rest of the other nine papers. Otherwise, the all too glaring discrepancy of marks would remain a telltale blotch. It is quite a face-uplift.
    Then, the department decides upon another face-uplift by offering Writing Tutorial classes that turn out to be a grand financial success, but a blatant academic failure. First, the department already offers a compulsory writing course, which, if properly taught, will solve many problems. Second, students have already paid their university dues at the time of registration. Any coaching class that exacts a fee is additional financial burden upon them. Instead, teachers should have been available to them on campus, free of cost, to discuss their difficulties. Third, the head of the department literally intimidates students into registering for the Writing Tutorial by dictatorially turning it into a pre-requisite for the Thesis Paper. He, therefore, coerces them into filling certain coffers, which is shared among teachers who "love" their students.
Intelligent students who understood the importance of research writing at the degree level quietly tolerated this strategy for the benefit of their friends. They paid the dues; but, presaging the quality of the tutorial classes, they did not attend it. It probably was obvious to them that thirty students to a writing tutorial class meant additional lectures on the theories of writing. So, even as the head of the department counted bank notes at his desk and distributed these to selected teachers, students argued that the department should now indiscriminately accept their thesis proposals because they had joined these classes. Consequently, the more conscientious teachers, burning with shame, requested the head to return the money to students for the sake of a more academic line of action.
    Imagine what will happen if other departments, too, start running paid tutorial classes for their students. I hope mature students will realize how their zeal for marks sometimes unnecessarily empties their pockets.