<p>This is NOT just about writing. There’s NO suggestion that the only papers Shawbridge is editing for his son are papers for writing courses. It’s not that hard to ask a prof "Are we permitted to have someone edit our papers for grammar, spelling, etc. ? Can we ask someone to read our papers and critique them as to substance before turning them in? "</p>
<p>I am a writer, and I did teach writing at the college level. I have been given the ironic gift of a dysgrapic daughter. (I did not always find the humor in this that I do now)…</p>
<p>She’s a very high IQ dysgraphic/dyslexic. She was able to overcome her dyslexia with YEARS of hard work…on both our parts. To be honest, if we’d left it up to the school system she would not be a reader. They told me she would never read. I said, “HA!” Her critical reading scores were perfect. So much for school systems…the are, so to speak, systems. And there are simply times parents have to step in to look out for the best interests of thier kids. Schools are normative environments and if you are in an exceptional position, you may have to do exceptional things to overcome obstacles others just don’t face. End of story.</p>
<p>As for writing, she can’t work with me. She has always had tutors and she does, now, in college…college sanctioned tutors, but still, tutors. She spends twice to three times as much time as any other A student to get the work done. I pay for the tutors. I made sure she looked into whether she could have tutors in each academic environment. In a few more months, she’ll never have to take another writing class again! Thank God. It’s not as if anyone would ever hire her to write or edit anything anyway. None of her professors have considered this cheating and they all know. But the writing teachers will never teach her one thing about writing, because she uses voice recognition technology to write and will never learn to write. And, yet, there she is in the classroom. It’s hillarious, really. Meanwhile, her science profs are battling to get her to do THIER research. </p>
<p>Is paying for her to have a tutor helicoptering? I don’t know. Would we all be better off if the parents of ADD students just let them fall through the cracks before the frontal lobe of their brain had completely grown in? Would we be better off if we didn’t allow blind people to use tape recorders in class or books on tape? Would it be better if we made people in wheel chairs take the swimming requirement to graduate high school? </p>
<p>We are talking about too many different things here.</p>
<p>We are conflating “helicoptering” with assisting kids with legitimate disabilities. It is simply not the same thing. Sorry.</p>
<p>I would love to be the fly on the wall when the son of helicopter parent decides to be transparent about all the “help” he’s getting from dear old dad with the professor. What a fun conversation.</p>
<p>If your involvement would be awkward or difficult or embarrasing for your kid to reveal to a dean or professor- well that seems to be where the line is. Kid probably has no problem disclosing that roommate or parent or RA read over the paper for typo’s and grammatical errors. Kid probably has more difficulty describing line editing done by the same group. Kid would probably rather withdraw from the class than disclose how much hands-on rewrites and restructuring and adding of citations and incremental research and synthesis actually happens at the kitchen table.</p>
<p>poetgrl, if your kid’s professors KNOW that she is getting help and they PERMIT that help, that’s NOT cheating. But the parent does NOT get to decide what help is/is not allowed and give the student that help without the prof’s/ college’s knowledge. Nor does the parent get to decide how much help is justified when a student has a learning disability without getting the college’s consent. </p>
<p>If shawbridge’s son has some sort of disability that makes it perfectly appropriate for him to be allowed to have someone edit his papers for him, I’m sure Amherst will permit this–but I doubt very much dear old dad will be allowed to do it. And I note that shawbridge has two kids and he edits papers for both of them. Do they both have disabilities? Does he tell his daughter’s teachers that he is editing her work?</p>
<p>No. Which is why I made sure my D made sure that the kind of help she needed in an area which is irrelevent to her future but a stepping stone in college would be permitted and condoned. She is also allowed to take in-class essay tests separately with a computer. Actually, no professor or TF would want to read anything she wrote by hand. I’ve tried. But, the point I’m making is that we are talking about a lot of different things here and I’m not 100% sure Shawbridge’s son’s profs would care one way or the other. Writing isn’t why he is in school. Of this I am certain.</p>
<p>So what? All I’m asking is that that shawbridge’s son tell his profs the kind of help he is getting from dad. If the profs don’t care, then there’s NOT a problem. But shawbridge does NOT get to decide that he will help his son and how much help he will give him without DISCLOSING it.</p>
<p>Fair enough.</p>
<p>Probably the best course of action is to get tutors who work with the student specifically…It seemed to be fairly straightforward, actually. And, in D’s case, it’s really freed her up from ME! Which is always her main goal, anyway. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Because I started typing my last post before you posted your #107–or at least before it was there for me to read. When I saw yours, I hit the delete button. Then you posted #108 while I was deleting. So I did delete before you complained and before I knew you had responded with either 107 or 108.</p>
<p>I hope that’s clear.</p>
<p>got it…</p>
<p>So I work the front desk at my dorm, and especially around the first few weeks of classes, we’ll have parents coming by, saying that their child hasn’t called them and can we please go track him/her down. We only have one person working at a time, so we obviously can’t leave, but this isn’t a good enough answer for some parents, who insist that they can watch the front desk while I go find little Jimmy or Susan.</p>
<p>For these parents, we have a pair of scissors. They are labelled ‘To Cut The Cord’.</p>
<p>Hopefully you will all find this more amusing than most of these parents do :)</p>
<p>Well, I just wanted to check that he’d gotten the hash brownies I’d sent :)</p>
<p>Y’didn’t have to make fun of me for that!</p>
<p>I am a bit surprised at the attitude displayed here about parents’ help with writing.
My S is in a math/science field and it has been drilled into him that study groups are a good thing. In fact, in one of his classes (he’s now in grad school), the prof actually created study groups. The three students in each group solve the problems together then one of them writes down the solution (they take turn doing so). In other classes, the study groups are informal and fluid but nobody is holed up in his room doing assignments on his own.
How about essays? In k-12, my kids were introduced to the concept of peer-editing. In college, often students are encouraged to let others comment on their essays. As academics, profs have research assistants. They submit what they write to be peer-reviewed and revise their manuscripts accordingly. Then copy-editors go to work editing for style, but sometimes asking questions that lead to further research and revision.
Parents may be in a different category from peers or professional editors, but the idea that an essay has to be the pristine work of a single student flies in the face of what profs themselves do.</p>
<p>I am probably more sensitive to this issue than most on this thread because I see cases of actual helicoptering of students that has to be addressed. </p>
<p>I’ve seen graduate students- I’m talking PhD students here- whose parents edit their essays!</p>
<p>I’ve had a long email last year from a mother who wanted to meet with me to discuss her daughter. The daughter had never talked to me. The mother felt her daughter’s team was unfairly criticizing her contribution to a year end project (an outcome, which if true, would at best affect her grade by 2%)…and wanted to send me ‘proof’ from her daughter’s text messages…and her daughter was a senior! </p>
<p>I know of junior students who are not allowed to choose their own electives…mom and dad decide them (and of course their major too).</p>
<p>I could go on with examples, but these are the kinds of things that one just shakes their head at and where the term ‘helicoptering’ really belongs. They cross a line that is difficult for me to articulate but it is something I and my colleagues have only seen in the past few years. And the rest of us probably fall somewhere away from this and it’s more debatable. </p>
<p>You should have interest in and support your kids, teach them how to self-advocate, direct them to find resources and supportive people and experts to seek out, coach them in how to talk to the right people, or bat around the pros and cons of different options and choices. All this along with basic life skills like laundry, setting your own alarm clock, and filling out forms. But all this should be going on for years throughout highschool, and maybe a bit into college. But by college, it should be the student, not the parent, who should be doing the actions, having the feelings, and making the final decisions about their life (they are the one living it, not the parent).</p>
<p>I agree that there are parents who overstepped the line; I have heard and read enough from college administrators about them.<br>
At the same time, I have read and heard about the “nurturing” LACs where profs call and wake you up if you overslept. At one college, according to an alumna, new faculty were told to buy study furniture because they were expected to invite their students regularly. At the other end of the spectrum are colleges like Harvard that are supposed to provide little hand-holding or large state universities where students can easily get lost in the crowds.
It would be interesting to find out if there is any correlation between the incidence of helicoptering parents and the degree of nurturing present in different schools.</p>
<p>Jonri, both my kids have learning disabilities, but I the helicoptering I do is very different for the different kids. My son is largely on his own by now but he calls and asks for advice. My daughter is in HS and I am trying to teach her how to write well, which I did for my son when he was in HS. This requires much greater intervention.</p>
<p>In my son’s case, he now writes well. However, spelling and grammar checking do not work for a severely dyslexic kid – mathmom, his spelling is far too creative for MS Word – and he has always had accommodations for this. Unless he is putting in lots of effort on things like spelling, capitalization, punctuation and grammar, he doesn’t capitalize all the words that should be capitalized or put in all the punctuation. Speech recognition software produces odd stuff – what it puts out is different than what he said, so that is not a curative measure by itself. He will need someone to go through his writing for the rest of his life, although he can do so with effort for short periods of time when he has to. He got a high writing score on the SATs, for example, but attending to spelling, punctuation and grammar is fatiguing for him and gets in the way of working out the ideas. Some aspects of grammar are still challenging for him, although this has gotten a lot better. When he was in HS, he needed tons of help learning how to write that the HS did not supply. Now, he writes well and largely needs defatiguing. His work is his own. I’m actually proud of what I have taught him, but part of that is learning to ask for and get the help that he needs to demonstrate his thinking. I think he gets that kind of help from the writing center, from me and likely from others. But, I take your point that what is done should be done in keeping with the professor’s definition of what is appropriate and he will check. </p>
<p>My younger child also has LDs. With my younger one, I am trying to ensure that, like my son, she has the writing skills she needs when she gets to college. In her case, she also needs to learn how to structure arguments better and to make sure every sentence is doing something. I used to work on that with my son when he was in HS but he no longer has the need. She also needs help learning how to synthesize and work out coherent arguments. That always came to him naturally. The challenge in helping her learn to write involves teaching her how to think things through without doing it for her and at the same time help her learn to articulate her argument. She has used writing tutors, but so far, they have not helped her with thinking things out better – and neither have her teachers. So, I’m taking that on. The balance there is critical, but my concern is that she learn the skills she needs before she goes off to college and again, one key skill will be to ask for the right kind of help.</p>
<p>The challenge in both cases is to ensure that they a) learn what they need to learn; and b) get the opportunity to display their thinking in a manner that reflects the thinking and not the disability.</p>
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<p>For many of us, when we applied the business metaphor to higher education, we ruined it.</p>
<p>Essay Prompt #1: Explain the benefits and drawbacks of understanding ‘students’ as ‘customers’. In what ways is education like a commodity that can be bought, sold, traded, etc.? In what ways is it not like a commodity?</p>
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<p>Excellent post, Starbright.</p>
<p>My son may be the exception to the rule but when it comes to his school work, he is extremely independent. He was adamant that he didn’t need me to review the essay he submitted to his top choice for college on Sunday. He has been writing and editing his own papers since late middle school. Almost never fails to get a A on them. Often, when I read them after the fact, I think, “good paper, but I could have made some suggestions that would have made it better.” Then I remember he got a A all on his own, without my help.</p>
<p>My point being that teachers and certainly, admission counselors, can spot the essays that are written by a 18 year old vs. those ‘polished’ by their parents. After reading thousands or even hundreds, the differences become glaringly obvious (several counselors made this point during college information sessions we attended)…much more obvious than the average parent realizes.</p>
<p>I did feel a certain level of anxiety that I didn’t have the opportunity to help my son make his essay better. After all, the stakes are slightly higher during the college admission process than a classroom grade. On the other hand, I am very proud of him for having enough confidence in himself and his skills that he didn’t feel he needed me to help him.</p>
<p>I did get to read my son’s essay after he submitted it. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t 100% polished but it was 100% him and 100% original in theme. I suspect the college admission counselor who reads it will appreciate it, flaws and all.</p>
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<p>I have read this so many times on CC, and I do not doubt it is true. But all 18 year olds are different, too. I would love to know what the tell-tale “markers” are. Surely there are 18 year olds that write better than their parents? Do they get penalized because no one believes they did the work? Are there specific rhetorical devices they look for, a general tone, or a certain level of abstract thought – or what??
I’m really curious about that.</p>
<p>Also re: the debate stirred up by shawbridge’s comments:
There really are some kids who call home and discuss their classes. Say a kid has a paper on, oh I don’t know, the Cinderella motif in modern movies or something. He/she may call home and start a discussion with mom or dad. Said discussion might spark things the kid hadn’t thought of, help him/her hone some points, think of new examples. Is that wrong?<br>
Isn’t that what intellectual exchange is all about?</p>
<p>Words such as: ergo, or henceforth are a dead give-away. Avoid them at all costs! Actually, since the whole point of the essay is to get an idea of who the kid is as personality, it would be such a waste not to let the kid, who clearly has a fantastic-ness, get a chance to write it themselves.</p>