<p>I just wish one of the Moms would do a DD “blackhawk” tactical drop in front of DS. </p>
<p>Its hard for a father to select a girl and then ask them to do a high altitude, high risk, drop nearby DS. Maybe if I can recruit a platoon of young ladies, my odds of success will increase?</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I guess that there’s demand for personal cloaking devices.</p>
<p>Well, my comment about Jackie O was meant to be flip and representative of the segment of the population. I don’t care what others do.</p>
<p>I got my walking papers from my kids, which I think is very appropriate. I am glad they told me to shove it.</p>
<p>Others families will work differently.</p>
<p>I find Hanna’s posts helpful in that she is cautioning parents not to actually hurt their children’s chances by “helicoptering.”</p>
<p>And yes, different situations, including different types of institutions, kids, parents, finances and circumstances all impact the rhythm of the parent/child separation dance.</p>
<p>If the situation in the family works for that family, carry on.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I call this cheating. I assume that neither of your kids attends a college at which they are required to sign a statement that the paper was entirely their own work. Even without such a requirement, I think this is dishonest.</p>
<p>If you don’t, then I suggest that you tell both of your kids that they MUST inform their teachers/ profs that the paper was edited by their parent and ask whether they object to that.</p>
<p>jonri, schools have writing offices that help kids edit their papers. Is using the writing office cheating? Why would it be different for a parent to give equivalent advice on grammar, clarity etc.?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I haven’t been called on to read, much less edit, one of Son’s college papers, but you raise an interesting point. When colleges ask students to sign such a statement, is no editing by a third party allowed? Lots of schools have writing centers. Is it okay for the person helping out to make oral comments (“don’t start this sentence with the word ‘but’”) but crossing out the word “but” for the student would make it dishonest?</p>
<p>Good writers have editors.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>My son tutors an EE course with killer labs and homeworks and sometimes he gets students that come in that basically ask him to do their homeworks or their labs for them. Tutors are given some guidelines on tutoring and that they should keep in mind that the objective of the tutoring center is to help students learn - not do their work for them as they will wind up failing on tests, even if they do get their homeworks and labs accomplished. So the type of help and degree of help is up to the tutor. Good students should know all of this stuff by the time they get to college and the tutoring center has stringent academic requirements on the tutors that work there.</p>
<p>There is a writing center which provides tutoring services. Sometimes courses require that you use the writing center to review drafts - you have to provide proof that someone from the writing center reviewed your draft. Some professors will review drafts too and you can improve your grade on a paper with a revise and rewrite cycle. Even Microsoft Word will check your grammar for you and make suggestions if it finds problems.</p>
<p>(I’m not arguing for or against; just bringing up a few other thoughts)</p>
<p>When the writing center reviews a draft a professor can be reasonably confident that the ideas are those of the students; that the fact-finding and research was conducted by the student; that the conclusions and synthesis represent the intellectual product of the student. The writing center helped the student organize the paragraphs, put the conclusion in the appropriate place, lay out the footnotes according to the style manual and accepted usage, etc.</p>
<p>When Mom or Dad edits a kids paper the professor knows none of these things- and in fact, would be justified in being suspicious that the kid used Mom and Dad precisely so that the thinking, conclusions, research, etc would benefit from some assistance.</p>
<p>Why is this a hard concept to master? Parents editing a kids college work seem guilty of enabling some very immature behavior (for sure) and crossing the line ethically (perhaps). The acid test seems to be to have the kid tell the professor, “oh my dad edited my thesis” and see what the professor says.</p>
<p>And yet kids don’t do this- wonder why???</p>
<p>When a college has a writing center, those employed by it are trained by the university in what they can/cannot do to help students. From my limited knowledge of this, I know that those rules are NOT standard among colleges. Nobody has told you what Amherst --which seems to be the college your son attends–does/does not permit, and you may well have crossed the line. (At the college my own kid attended, individual profs had the right to impose more stringent limitations on the help that they permitted students enrolled in their courses to receive. )</p>
<p>Individual professors at the colleges I am familiar with can and sometimes do require that the writing center tutors inform the prof when a student has used the center in connection with a course assignment. Note that this obligation is NOT imposed on the student at these colleges; it is imposed on the tutor. (I have no idea what the procedures are at Amherst, if that is the college your son attends.) </p>
<p>When a student has trouble with writing, he is required to use the writing center and the writing center is supposed to tutor him or her. By doing the editing yourself, you are robbing your son of the benefit of having someone assist him in improving his writing. </p>
<p>The few schools I am familiar with do NOT just have students submit their work for editing by a writing tutor, pick it up, and submit it as their own work–which seems to be what you are doing. The tutor reviews the work, makes suggestions, and has the student submit a revised draft. Then they have another go round with the student revising and rewriting again. </p>
<p>Kids do win prizes for the best paper submitted in certain classes. I know at least one college does not permit any prize money to go to a paper for which the author has received any assistance from the writing center. </p>
<p>The issue here is NOT whether YOU think what you are doing is right. The question is whether the professor teaching the course would. If you think it’s perfectly okay for your son to do what he is doing, he should disclose that fact to his prof. The prof may well agree with you and think that’s fine. But
(s)he may not.</p>
<p>There’s also a basic concept of fairness here. Every kid can get help from the writing center and the SAME kind of help is available to EVERY student. When a parent has knowledge of the underlying subject–writing tutors usually don’t–they WILL notice when an argument isn’t accurate or an analysis is weak and say things like you need to add more examples here or this doesn’t follow from that–writing tutors don’t give that sort of help.</p>
<p>Again, if you don’t think what you are doing is wrong, then your son should disclose the fact that you are editing his work and see if that’s acceptable to the prof.</p>
<p>If I understand you, maybe we are having a semantic issue. I would do what a writing center does. Review a draft, point out things (e.g., subject is plural but verb is singular), let kids rewrite. No dropping off a paper for an external rewrite.</p>
<p>It is NOT a semantic difference. Again, if you do NOT think you are doing anything wrong, then there’s NO REASON not to DISCLOSE what you are doing. </p>
<p>You are NOT Parker Brothers. YOU do NOT get to decide how much help is ethical for you to give your son. YOU do not make the rules.</p>
<p>Why not have your son tell one of the deans that dad has been editing his papers and some crazy woman suggested that may not be ethical --and just to end the debate, he wants the dean’s concurrence that it’s perfectly okay to have his dad edit his work.</p>
<p>I teach writing at the college level, and I am very frustrated when I receive a pre-edited paper. I feel I can’t do my job, which is assessing exactly where the student needs to work, communicating that, and facilitating an environment that empowers the student.</p>
<p>My goals as a writing teacher include communicating the idea that our ideas and the way we say them are inextricable. Finding the right language refines our ideas. </p>
<p>That said, I wouldn’t accuse anyone of cheating, exactly, but to me, it does somewhat defeat the purpose of the assignments.</p>
<p>As for writing centers, writing tutors, writing fellows, etc. Different schools do handle these differently. From my admittedly jaundiced perception I find they ruin the papers as much as improve them. These folks, even the staff of a professional writing center, do not usually understand the context in class the paper grew out of. They staff is not usually published writers, either, which I am, and most college profs are.</p>
<p>So, I would rather see “the unvarnished truth.”</p>
<p>In an age when most programs have grammar checks to help with blatant spelling and grammar mistakes, I don’t think this routine editing is necessary anyway, and edits must be going beyond this, to structural and phrasing issues that I would like to be able to teach.</p>
<p>Again, I wouldn’t label parental help “cheating.” I just think parental anxiety sometimes keeps young writers from coming into their own.</p>
<p>(And yes, as a mommy this was very, very hard for me, too. So I am NOT JUDGING anyone.)</p>
<p>I know that my son and daughter have gone to their respective writing centers but I don’t know what the writing centers have done to the ultimate papers.</p>
<p>geomom sdaid: “Administrators that complain about parents are like businesses that complain about customers.”</p>
<p>Two things:</p>
<p>These administrators are not complaining about “parents” . They are complaining about parents that are attempting to do the work that the student should be doing. </p>
<p>and . . . BINGO - you hit the nail on the head!!!</p>
<p>Because the parents are NOT the customers; the students are!!!</p>
<p>Parents pay but they are not the consumers of the service provided. Parents have been paying for college for generations but only lately have gotten the crazy idea that they are the consumers of their kid’s education.</p>
<p>Kei</p>
<p>P.S. As mythmom said, she finds Hanna’s posts helpful in that "she is cautioning parents not to actually hurt their children’s chances by “helicoptering.” Add to that “developing into a competent adult”: helicoptering ■■■■■■■ a child’s healthy development.</p>
<p>“Administrators that complain about parents are like businesses that complain about customers.”</p>
<p>Applicants are not customers yet. They are competitors, and it’s a seller’s market. It’s smart to think about the message you are sending to the school (or employer).</p>
<p>My understanding is that only the worst writers are told to go to a writing center for help.
Some students are given the opportunity by their instructors to re-submit a paper, but not all are. As well, profs are not always very helpful in their comments. Writing “awk” or “syntax” in the margin is not very illuminating.
I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of students do not get the help they need to become better writers.</p>
<p>Kei-o-lei, you seem a little confused about “customer” vs “consumer”. Yes the student is the consumer, but the parents are the customer, because we pay the “custom”, or the rent. And this customer was very leery of any colleges that had administrators that were very vocal about “helicopter parents”. In fact, they turned all of us off. So much so, that DS didn’t apply to any with this attitude. There are plenty of schools that concentrate on the lectures we are paying for for the student, and don’t feel a need to lecture the rest of the family.</p>
<p>Well, it is a very difficult, labor intensive job. And it does take a lot of insight to actually see a student’s problems and find the language so s/he can see them as well.</p>
<p>But a casual editing of grammatical errors that can be accomplished by a computer program is not going to bring the writer closer to literacy. Not really.</p>
<p>This leads me to suspect that parent editors are doing more than correcting cursory mistakes.</p>
<p>But again, my kids gave me my walking papers in this area, too. All for the good.</p>
<p>Marite, I don’t disagree. DD had to submit her papers to writing fellows who had to sign off on them. Problems arose because they were other students who had taken a brief workshop to qualify for the positions, and their ideas were not always helpful or even correct.</p>
<p>Writing is a big topic. I don’t want to derail the thread, so I will be good now.</p>
<p>At my kid’s college, only bad writers were TOLD to go to the writing center and FORCED to submit drafts X day before assignments were due, etc. But EVERY student COULD go to the writing tutors for help if (s)he chose to do so. Some profs recommended that every frosh do this for first paper–and made it clear that they would not forgive mistakes in footnotes and citations based on “I didn’t know the rules.” Did all frosh do this? No–mine didn’t. </p>
<p>BTW, every student had to write a draft BEFORE meeting with the tutor, and the tutor had to photocopy that draft. It was kept in the file, so that if there was a question as to how much help someone had gotten or whether the idea was the student’s there’d be something to check. </p>
<p>There are two different concepts involved here. One is that a student isn’t going to improve his/her writing and a prof isn’t going to know what help the student needs if the work is pre-edited. But the second is the question of how much editing it is ethical to get. If a parent reads a paper and says I don’t think your conclusion follows from your premise; you need to develop that argument. Is that cheating? I think people could disagree. </p>
<p>So, you ask the prof BEFORE you do it to see what the prof’s opinion is. His/her classroom; his/her rules. Again, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, then there’s no reason your kid shouldn’t tell the prof what’s going on and get guidance as to what’s allowed.</p>
<p>Writing is a process. Kids don’t get that. They want “one and done.”
So ask yourself, I guess, if your help is shortcircuiting the process.
They should have to do MORE work after they talk to you, not less.<br>
Once that happens, maybe they won’t ask very much anymore :).</p>