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<p>Oh, get a life yourself … I think the topic is important, but introducing irrelevant sidelines like benefiting from your parents native conversational language skills is not important (even, unproductive). You are free to consider my views to be mere drama-stirring of course.</p>
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Then let me take another (and hopefully more productive) stab at that one…what about using said native speaker parent to help “proofread” your translation from the original text? Something nuanced or idiomatic, perhaps, that a non-native speaker might not/is unlikely to catch?</p>
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But that’s one area where I think word-processing is such a gift. I wouldn’t have wanted much critique back in the days when rewording a paragraph on page 12 would have meant typing out pages 12 through 20 all over again – but when I my daughter’s thesis advisor suggested that her work would be better if it was 10 pages shorter, I had no hesitation in pointing out that the introduction was a little wordy and perhaps redundant. I knew that my d. would be able to excise or edit down the paragraphs on page 3 without having to retype everything else. </p>
<p>And again – feedback doesn’t mean doing it for the kids. My d. wanted help in paring things down. (This was pretty typical for my kids – they are always writing too much and need help when it comes to the cutting part – a skill I have honed from copy editing for print media.). Here’s another example retrieved from a chat log of the feedback I gave:</p>
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<p>That’s not doing it for the kid – and I also don’t think that parents who do a lot of “hand holding” would talk to their kids that way.</p>
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<p>OK, I’ll have a go at that.</p>
<p>If the student can go to the Language Center and get a native-speaking peer language tutor to do the same level of correction to your written work, and the professor is OK with that, then fine if the parent does the same task.</p>
<p>For conversational skills, more likely the student has a scenario (dialog, lines of a play, discussion on a theme) to prepare for an oral class discussion which will be graded.</p>
<p>Can the parents drill the student on questions and responses, correct pronunciation, command of relevant vocabulary? Absolutely yes. </p>
<p>Can you hire a top-level voice coach in the target language for $200 an hour and practice with him? Sure, why not.</p>
<p>It would be odd if there was any limit to permitted preparation to enhance oral abilities.</p>
<p>So I told my DD about this thread and her response was something like oh yea, Mom, you would be a big help on my physics papers. Smarty pants.</p>
<p>Calmom–love your analysis. That’s the kind of conversation i might have with my kids, whether it was over their college papers, press releases, blog posts, etc etc, or my short stories, novel drafts, etc etc. I’m fortunate to have that kind of give and take, and expertise, among folks who also give a damn and more.</p>
<p>“their “peers” include their highly educated and accomplished parents”</p>
<p>Yep. Sometimes more than our classmates. We did “peer review” in my freshman English class, and I was talking to my peers about issues like sentence fragments and comma splices in their papers. I’m sorry, but I was past that stage in middle school, and on the rare occasions when they had something coherent to say about my paper, I didn’t trust them. (This was a big factor in my desire to transfer.) </p>
<p>My mom had published her first book and perhaps her twentieth academic article before I started college. She’s a merciless editor and she has never cut her kids any slack – one of my papers in that freshman English class was about the incisive critique she’d give my stories when I was six. Now that’s the person you want pushing you to do your best writing. When I started my first judicial clerkship, my judge remarked on how rapidly I adapted my writing to the task, and how little editing my draft opinions needed. Thanks, Mom! You were far tougher on me than that federal judge.</p>
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Because I will tell you – when a college student is a proficient writer — they aren’t going to get much critique on their writing from their profs – who again, are focused on the substance of the ideas presented. "</p>
<p>It matters who the professor is and what they teach. I’ve helped students who were good writers become nationally award-winning writers.</p>
<p>Younger S was a proficient writer, and has become an excellent writer due to the help he got at his LAC. This included a professor who insisted on all students’ revising their work and visiting the writing center.</p>
<p>Is it cheating? Well I think it’s perfectly okay if students tell the professor who did the editing and to what extent (just be honest about it). Then you know if it is in line with the requirements for the class and the playing field is fair. If they aren’t comfortable doing so, something is amiss. </p>
<p>My kids are only in highschool but at this level, I would not dream of editing their homework or assignments. They are being graded on their writing ability, and their teacher needs to know and offer feedback on their current and actual writing ability (not their writing ability as it appears to be after their parents have quietly cleaned it up for them).</p>
<p>I still say that even at the professional level, there are people who proof and edit documents, and it’s a good habit to get into to have others check you. Yeah, ok, checking yourself is nice. But as I’ve said, we are all human, and we all make mistakes, and it’s not possible for us to catch every mistake. We have such limited brain capacity that we aren’t even able to catch everything in our immediate surroundings, especially the most obvious of things. If you don’t believe me, there are plenty of psychological studies out there which note so.</p>
<p>“their teacher needs to know and offer feedback on their current and actual writing ability (not their writing ability as it appears to be after their parents have quietly cleaned it up for them).”</p>
<p>I guess I view actual improvement in a skill as far more important than measurement of the skill (grades). If the parent’s writing lessons are making the kid a better writer, as was true for me, I say to hell with grades. Up, down, who cares – the kid is learning better and faster, and that’s the point of a college class. I’ve never been in a paper-writing course that was curved, so it doesn’t detract from anyone else’s experience.</p>
<p>I teach transtitional writing (read remedial) and I tell my students to not have anyone else look at the first paper because if I cannot see the mistakes they make, there is no way for me to help them correct them.</p>
<p>"just don’t get why parents would think it is is perfectly o.k. to be telling college age kids how to do their laundry "</p>
<p>Is there a laundry skills center on campus where they can learn it? ;)</p>
<p>Our DD learned do to laundry at CTY. Kinda expensive way to learn to do laundry, but they tossed in some academic stuff as a bonus :)</p>
<p>During this summer when DD was mainly “chillin” every time she grumbled when asked to do a chore, I said “Life skills training!” which usually gave everyone a smile. And mostly improved her record in performing chores.</p>
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Absolutely true, and we have tech editors at work who help us deliver good products to our clients. But I am not getting graded individually on that work like a student is. If anything the firm or team gets graded by the client.</p>
<p>"I still say that even at the professional level, there are people who proof and edit documents, and it’s a good habit to get into to have others check you. Yeah, ok, checking yourself is nice. But as I’ve said, we are all human, and we all make mistakes, and it’s not possible for us to catch every mistake. "</p>
<p>I have not seen anyone disagree about the importance of people having others check their professional work. </p>
<p>The disagreements here are about whether it’s appropriate, truly helpful or even ethical for parents to be checking their college students’ work. Yes, parents may catch mistakes that students overlook, but if the professors expect that students work will be completely theirs with no feedback from anyone else, having parents help is unethical.</p>
<p>Some of us believe that if professors do allow such outside feedback, for the student to develop independence and confidence about their skills, it would be better for the student to use the professor, peers or the campus writing center instead of using their parents’ help.</p>
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<p>Valid point but only in some cases. Some learn from editing, others just mindlessly use it. I have seen some students grow from extensive feedback, and others that just incorporate the changes but make no reflective effort to identify the patterns and avoid the same mistakes again. </p>
<p>Grades do matter. Apparently many students compete on grades for college, grad school, scholarships. If some are getting extra help and other are not, the teacher doesn’t know it but grades students relative to one another on their writing ability-- it’s cheating (whether one cares about the grades or not).</p>
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<p>And there’s the rub. It’s that sorting function that Shawbridge mentioned oh, so many pages ago. I think there are parents (maybe some posting here, maybe not) who become very invested in issues like GPA and ranking all through high school and get very steamed at those kids who are succeeding with what seems like lots of help.<br>
To me, the sanctity of the grade is very secondary to the overall learning.</p>
<p>All I can tell you is that I have never turned in a paper that doesn’t reflect my real writing ability, as improved via working through the exercise with a tough critic. I sleep soundly on this. The fact that there are some students who are lazy and want to get credit for other people’s work doesn’t enter into my judgment of what I do.</p>
<p>I think the students like Hanna & my own kids are doing more work and putting much more of their own effort into the process. They seek feedback and support because they are concerned with much more than their grade – they could easily dash off something that would satisfy whoever is teaching the class and grading the papers – but they are worried about tone and phrasing and vocabulary. They are thinking about stylistic issues that most other students don’t even bother to think about. </p>
<p>The most common issue that I have had to confront with my kids is over-long papers needed to be trimmed down-- whether it was cutting 1500 words down to fit the required 500 word college essay, or cutting 90 pages of thesis down to the 75 the prof wanted. And its hard to cut because there’s a lot of substance to what they write – so sometimes it takes feedback from multiple people to figure out what can and should be removed.</p>
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<p>Respectfully, “more than” whom? And how would you have the omniscience to know that? How do you know how much work/effort other college students put in, whose efforts you cannot see, but who may want to take a different path toward arriving ultimately at the same place?</p>
<p>Why does anyone on this thread assume that students who follow the Honor Code at their colleges (or interpret it in an “orthodox” or “literal” fashion – for want of better terms), and separately those who want to ‘tough it out’ by not seeking outside help to learn how to write for a particular class – not for all classes, not for a lifetime – are students who are merely grade-grubbing?</p>
<p>Again, we’re talking about undergraduate academic settings, where grades are earned for specific writing assignments. I have no problem with professors deciding that their students may and even should seek outside help of any kind, including that of relatives, but I can understand why, absent such explicit permission, students might choose not to assume such permission. There is no logical conclusion that can be drawn that the latter are poor writers, lazy writers, grade-grubbers, people-pleasers, unable to collaborate, uninterested in celebrating the writing process, or any such nonsense.</p>
<p>It’s fine, and it’s great, to be proud of how one runs one’s family, but there’s no need to state or imply superiority when there is limited knowledge about other people’s families. At least it seems to me. I don’t mean to offend anybody.</p>
<p>I know lots of students who don’t seek parental help but are enjoying the writing process and benefitting enormously by doing it alone. I also know of situations (have read these papers) where parents thought they were improving on their children’s papers, but clearly they were not.</p>