That Thing We Do [fixed]

There's this thing many composition teachers do. I do it too.

We share our students' particularly egregious writing errors or silly writing constructions with friends, spouses, peers, and really, anyone who will listen. We do so looking for a laugh.

We need to do this. We read a lot of mistakes, and finding humor in some of those mistakes makes the difficult work easier.

I have no problem with this practice, although I'm not crazy about seeing student errors shared in big public spaces. I see a lot of it on Facebook, and sometimes feel like those post are exploiting our students. Regardless of what I think, however, this stuff does get out into the social media landscape and onto click-bait websites.

The problem isn't the sharing; it's the responses I often see when people read these errors. 

It's always some version of this: 

How did that student get into college? 

or

How did that student get out of middle school?

The follow up goes one of two ways. People either suggest A) kids today are dumber than they should be or else B) our teachers aren't doing their jobs.

There are so many things wrong with these reactions, but I only want to get into two of the problems here.

First, composition instructors don't share examples of average writing. The stuff that works in a composition class is not amusing to outside readers. The only thing we're going to share are the hilarious mistakes (maybe the occasional moments of graceful writing), and it seems a bit unfair to judge an entire generation (or their teachers) based on such a biased sample.

Second, let's not decide if a student deserves a university education based on a poorly-worded attempt at a writing task. I mean, if the instructor is any good, the task should be challenging, making mistakes all the more likely. 

Keep in mind, the entire discipline of composition and rhetoric has been defined and redefined by the continued expansion of access to a college. We owe much of our livelihood to people who believe the opportunity to attend college should be extended to a larger portion of the population. 

Here's some of that history:

Yes. We should admit veterans to college.

Yes. We should admit economically disadvantaged students to college.

Yes. We should admit minorities to college.

Yes. We should admit people who grew up with families that don't speak English to college.

Yes. We should admit students from other countries to college.

And the list will continue to grow, because knowledge is valuable. 

It doesn't make the job easier. So, we'll probably continue to share the funny mistakes our students make. Just don't allow those mistakes to be taken out of context. 

EDIT: When I first posted, I was in a rush and used images and links to some fictional student errors. I was trying to illustrate how this stuff gets out there - beyond the first Facebook share. But that wasn't really important, and the lazy link undermined the larger point - as my friend Aaron pointed out with some glee on Facebook. I've pulled those links and images, but here's the Snopes article on it.