I question the ability to prove success in the ways the CBS program believes it will do. If anything, a program like that should be sensitive to how it is not addressing a variety of other factors that play into learning, particularly when one is speaking about so called “at risk” students. Alas, it’s not. To get all ANT here for a moment, that may partly have to do with the pedagogical background its leadership has. And that point, too, asks for a more complex breakdown.

I may have the opportunity to work with these students beyond 1010 and pick them up (or many of them up) as 1020 in Winter 08. . .I’m hoping that maybe I can use 1010 to lay some foundations for a 1020 course that (like my current one) can address non-linearity, appropriation etc.

And as a final note–I hope you don’t think my tone above sounds defensive. I think I understand the point you’re making about the danger of a defective practice, but I think CBS’ goal is a noble one and–to a certain extent–wonder whether a course like my current 1020 wouldn’t make their task more difficult.

Of course, this is the issue, no? At what point does even this realization - diagnostics and placement exams are too artificial to use - allow us to shift pedagogical emphasis? While your observations are helpful to the work you are doing, another position is to wonder if time could be put to more useful practices. Given that neither a diagnostic (as you note) nor a placement exam actually trace how someone writes, why the commitment to them? The answer typically given is that they allow us room to understand what to teach (ah! x amount of students did y; I need to teach y). But if we just recognized that these things don’t measure accurately, how are they helping us teach?

One might then realize that a program like the one you are teaching in or any other that is committed to the diagnostic or placement exam is actually re-enforcing problematic practices. Students who are repeatedly exposed to a problematic practice believe that it is the practice. This is how ideology works. Replace diagnostic with a racist, sexist, consumerist, nationalist and so on practice and you have the same thing. Repetitive exposure convinces us of a way to do something.

The observation, then, that a textbook like Textbook was confusing to “basic” writers makes sense. If I am exposed to schooling practices that tell me non-linearity writing, appropriative strategies, fragments, mystorys, etc are wrong, why would the book make any sense? I’ve been interpellated already by diagnostics (which must be simple in form in order to work in 45 minutes) and other similar devices.