FWS Will Not Be Taught By Undergrads

Yesterday the Sun ran an article about the prospect of undergraduates teaching Freshman Writing Seminars in light of university budget cuts and constraints. I quickly ridiculed my friends who said they would be perfect candidates to teach writing seminars. Were they out of their minds? Did they even consider the amount of time it would take to design a brand new course, the knowledge needed to provide useful instruction in critical writing for a given discipline, or the absurdity of undergraduates handing out official grades to students who might not be more than a year younger than them?

My suspicions were confirmed this morning. From the Cornell Daily Sun website, Professor Katherine Gottschalk (FWS director) said:

Undergraduates never have been, are not being and will not be considered by the Knight Institute to teach First-Year Writing Seminars. The Knight Institute greatly respects the work of the graduate student instructors and of the faculty who teach First-Year Writing Seminars,” Gottschalk said in a statement. “It would never consider having undergraduates take over the teaching of these very pedagogically and intellectually demanding courses. Faculty and graduate student instructors put intensive work into the preparation and teaching of seminars and do outstanding work, the work of graduate student instructors often being so excellent that it serves as models for faculty, as well as the other way around. That undergraduates could teach First-Year Writing Seminars is out of the realm of reasonable possibility.

It certainly appears that someone took a whole lot of editorial/interpretive leeway in the original article. IvyGate was quick to make fun of this lackluster journalism.