Faulkner Revision

Faulkner talks about the Four Philosophies of Composition teachers use to grade writing, in his piece the Four Philosophies of Composition. There are Formalists teachers who judge writing based on structure. There are expressionist teachers who have a wide range beliefs, they can be teachers who refuse to grade work or teachers who create specific lesson plans to help their students discover who they are as writers.  Mimetic teachers emphasize logic, reasoning and research-- they believe the more you know the better you write. Teachers who believe in rhetoric agree that writers must write with the audience in mind.
 
"There is nothing wrong with and expressive philosophy, but there is something seriously wrong with classroom methodology which implies one variety of value judgement when another will actually be employed. That is modal confusion, mindlessness."

Faulkner believes teachers can't stick with one of these philosophies and end up switching back and forth mindlessly confusing the students and grading them unfairly. He uses the example of a teacher evaluating a students work with expressionist values, according to the teacher the student jimmy did not sound like himself in the piece he wrote. The teacher was relating to expressionist values but the students were not told to make their writing authentic in the way the teacher apparently wanted it. Faulkner has made me think about writing classes in a new way. Most of my life teachers have been giving me prompts like, write how you feel about x, without any clear guidance and commenting that I need to expand or be clearer when they in fact are the ones who should have been clearer with their instructions. Different teachers value different things but I'm not sure they know that they are being mimetic or formalists. I think that it is unfair and unfortunate that most teachers, I'm assuming, aren't knowledgeable about the four philosophies of composition and ask for one thing when they grade seeking another.

A concept that I found interesting in this article was the teacher being the one at fault. Usually when I would get my work back asking for something to be clarified or expanded I would blame myself but after reading this piece when I think about the prompts for such assignments, they were pretty unspecific. I was recently asked to write about my opinion on two conflicting arguments, and the teacher  graded me on my form. I guess some teachers feel that there is no need to include that piece of instruction, but it couldn't hurt.