Who Ends Up Teaching Composition at Our Colleges?

It is a truism that, as Harold Coyle once quipped, "necessary and important but unpleasant duties" are, within large organizations, customarily "given to the most junior" member, with this "passed off as being part of [their] development," when "in fact it is nothing more than passing off a dirty chore to someone else."*

Certainly this has applied to college teaching, with the "necessary and important but unpleasant" duty so passed commonly including the teaching of first-year, general-education courses (because few want to deal with inexperienced students often resentfully satisfying general-education requirements they see as merely an obstacle to getting the credits they really need to get so that they can get the job they are after), especially insofar as they are particularly tedious or laborious (for instance, because the subject matter is dry and the burden of grading heavy).

English composition famously fits that profile--with the result that in universities with graduate programs the job is handed off to graduate "teaching assistants" (unlikely to get to do any assisting, or apprenticing, before they are put in charge of a classroom), while everywhere it falls disproportionately to adjuncts.

What this means, of course, is that instruction in composition, already afflicted with problems ranging from the gap between quite logical college requirements and the actual preparation K-12 instruction provides; and some badly flawed thinking about just how instructors could go about providing what corrective one or two 15-week courses plausibly can (like the Karate Kid nonsense I have discussed in the past); one sees those people teaching the course drawn from either the least-prepared and experienced of the potential instructors, and more generally those who are most overworked and distracted. This, too, takes its toll on the quality of the result.

* The remark is to be found in his novel Sword Point.