Letters to the Blog: UW20

I agree. The UW20 program is a surprisingly effective tool for teaching writing, and it is certainly unique (or somewhat unique) to GW. I am frankly surprised that GW instituted such a relatively progressive program, and I am sadly unsurprised to see them now taking it away. Oh well.

-Apathetic

my uw 20 class was one of the best classes i had at this school but they were being taught by temps who were being payed pennies to teach classes on an irregular basis. most of the uw 20 profs were just holding those jobs on the way to something bigger and better. my uw 20 prof is not on tenure track on BU it made me mad to know that gw lost a wonderful professor becuase they chose to exploit her instead of recognize her obvious talents as an eduacator. i loved my uw 20 class but i’m not sad to the see the end of a program that was demeaning and unworthy of the proffesors it employed.

My UW20 experience was disconcerting at best but the reasoning behind that was that I a) didn’t realize we could pick the topics we wanted and b) despised my teacher like food on a Saturday morning. Every one of my friends who picked their topic were thrilled that they didn’t have just another class concerning Strunk + White and their elements of style. Hopefully they’ll keep this system but just revamp how they inform freshmen on the setup.

I think that the UW20 program is very hit or miss. I didn’t mind my class but almost everyone I know who had to take it hated the class. I’m a senior so only 2/3 of my class were forced to take UW20 because we were the second class in the program and the university was phasing it in. I learned more about writing in freshman year of high school than I did in my UW class and now in my senior seminar I can see how badly UW failed as a writing class.
Also, the WID courses that follow UW20 are completely pointless. I have had history courses that require 45 pages of writing that are not WID courses and WID courses that only require 15 pages of writing. I don’t think the program should be cancelled until the university puts a concerted effort into reforming and solving the many problems with the relatively young program.

I don’t think that the program should be phased out completely - it is the least GW can do to let us choose our own topics if we are going to be forced to take a specific class. The problems arise in the teaching of the classes themselves. I know plenty of people who had wonderful experiences and liked their topics and professors, but I wasn’t one of them. My section was supposed to be about politics from the Washington perspective, but the professor had absolutely no knowledge of the subject. The extent of our discussion consitsted of short 10 or 15 minute current event disscussions before beginning our actual lecture. I also don’t feel as if I learned anything about writing that I hadn’t already been taught in AP English.

There is obviously room for improvement, but that applies to pretty much everything GW does. I by getting rid of the program, rather than making better, GW is taking the easy way out.