Edwin Hopkins and the Costly Labor of Composition Teaching (Randall Popken)

Popken, Randall. "Edwin Hopkins and the Costly Labor of Composition Teaching." CCC

Vol. 55, No. 4 (Jun., 2004), pp. 618-641.

Still, our histories of the profession come up short in identifying the real engagement of writing faculty with their material work. That is, we need more "inside" profiles of early composition professionals---teachers such as William Lyon Phelps, who "read and marked over seven hunddred themes a week" one year at Harvard (288); Fred Newton Scott who read 3,000 student essays in 1895 (121); and Barrett Wendell, who typically read more than 24,000 papers per year (Connors, "Overwork" 111). Such profiles can tell us how labor conditions of 100 years ago framed the teaching, curricular thinking, and even the personal lives of composition faculty. (619)