Rhetorical_Analysis_of_Being_a_Utc_Student

Jordan Lockler Mr. Parker English 1010 October 19, 2010 Rhetorical Analysis As I graduated high school I was very enthusiastic about entering into college. As I visited the many colleges I thought I would enroll into, there are many different characteristics about each school that I would have liked and disliked. Some have large, medium, and small campuses, but as I got deeper within each college there were many different, cliques, fraternities, and sororities that I would have needed to get affiliated with to “fit in.” No matter which college I chose, as the semester progressed I realized all the professors were the same. The effort that I was to give in class was the grade that I was to receive for the effort. As much as this seems to be a theory it is not so much true. As budgets, year after year, keep getting lower and lower, teachers become fewer and fewer. As a result, as discussed in Brent Staples article Why Colleges Shower Their Student with A’s, teachers are doing whatever is possible to keep their jobs. This is not brought upon greed, but it is brought upon as the need of survival. Which brings me to the point of how ethos, pathos, and logos are represented in the article “Why Colleges Shower Their Students with A’s“, by Brent Staples. As I grow older and wiser, I begin to realize I want to pay more for quality that I receive. As I come to reality, I notice that the high quality and simple value are essentially the exact same. Some may be confused by this statement, but this is more than true. As more and more students begin to fail college level classes, the more seem to drop out of school. As college professors begin to see this underlying trend they add more and more incentive to make their resume look more prestige. Therefore, if a teacher has a low average of a class the university will review the class in its entirety. All of this applies to ethics in many different ways but the most uniform ideas all fall back on the teachers. The teachers are responsible for teaching the students the right material the correct way due to the fact that students may have to use it in the future. Though not all teachers are logically sound, this falls into the category of an indefinite failure for the students. A teacher’s ethics plays the biggest roll out of all three of Aristotle's appeals. Teachers have an obligation to take in the personal and class wide views of the students, but they are undoubtedly entitled to make the final decisions on certain ordeals. The professor technically has two choices to decide upon, either the teacher goes alone with what the students as a majority want, which could be the wrong ethical morals, or to possibly disappoint the students with the right ethical morals that the teacher feels is correct. The wrong ethics, that as this article is representing, is that the teachers are giving the students A’s, when the students are not working to their full potential, to basically keep their jobs. Thought the right ethics would be to give the students what they deserve according to their work and study habits. When teachers make the wrong ethical choice they are degrading their credibility drastically. A teacher can still make the right ethical choices, though I may hurt the students, but the teacher can do more for them to help get their grades up. Such as holding tutoring sessions, study groups, or allowing students to make personal appointments to get one-on-one help in specific areas. The emotional or motivational appeals, pathos, is the most mentally tough decision to swallow, because when you know you made a wrong decision the thought of it eats away at you till you breakdown. Though, when you make a right decision it makes you feel good inside and also makes you feel as though you accomplished something. This leads me to explain how a teacher cannot, in some cases, emotionally deal with the stress of making wrong decisions. Not saying that this happens on a usual basis, but a student or group of students can push the teacher to make the wrong decision which could possibly get the teacher reprimanded or fired, but teachers also have to have the will to survive in such a competitive network of teaching professions. Now, if something like that were to happen, the teacher could become emotionally unstable enough to quit trying and just give up on everything. If this domino effect on teachers were to take place, then the quote in Staples article “universities would be free to sell diplomas outright” would be a valid truth. If students cannot take initiative to do their work and studies then why would they take it out on their teachers to give them a better grade when they did not try. It is ok if a student tries and does not succeed, but it is a completely different story when a student does not try and then expects the teacher to him/her what they want. Plus teacher are under enough stress due to all the grading, teaching or lecturing, and giving some sort of assistance to the students that ask for help in specific areas. In conclusion, as a student of the University of Chattanooga, according to this article, my graduating class of 2014 may accumulate the same GPA as others in different schools, but because of different majors the equivalency of my success cannot be established just by a simple calculation of numbers to show if I am smart or not. Some students could have a horrible GPA and still be really smart. Just because a friend wants to further an education in law and another wants to further his in medicine, how can a certain level of equivalency be measured based upon a silly number' Though students make bad grades, according to the ideology of a teacher’s point of view, the pupil or student can have his or her own opinion.