IMPUESTO SOBRE LAS GANANCIAS

In the essay “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics,” Heidegger turns to the ancient Greeks to discuss the way Being reveals itself and critiques the way mathematics has been used in modern life to project meaning onto things instead of letting things speak for themselves. Mathematics is used as a tool in a positivist sense in science to quantify evidence so that truth is reduced to binaries of correct or incorrect. When viewed in this light, it is easy to understand why positivists also view language as a tool to project meaning, thus the strict adherence to rules of mechanical correctness. In “On the Way to Language,” Heidegger then contrasts the notion of language as an instrument, a tool to be used to accomplish a task, with language as a dwelling of Being, a medium by which Being reveals itself to us. It is, however, the former, the instrumentalist approach, that takes precedence in the sciences, as noted by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer. Husserl, while not addressing language in particular in the “Vienna Lecture,” decries the positivist turn of Enlightenment thinking, with its laser-like

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focus on method over pure reason and calls for self-reflection in the disciplines. Such self-reflection did occur in the Department of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, due to the grassroots efforts of myself and a small number of faculty interested in taking the initiative to improving student technical writing. In 2008, this department decided it needed to act on its own to put more emphasis on writing in its senior design courses in an effort to improve what some faculty advisors saw as “atrocious” and “sloppy” writing practices in students graduating with BSME degrees. WAC/WID principles have slowly made their way into the ME-EM curriculum with some measure of success in building the confidence of at least a few faculty members in writing-to-learn concepts. One considerable difference, however, is that it is an initiative that arose from within the department itself and that has been only tangentially related to the Department of Humanities, home to the composition and technical communication courses and one-time home to the university’s now-defunct WAC program.

Michigan Tech’s ME-EM undergraduate major is one of the largest in the United States, with nearly 1,4006 _{students, so class size is always an issue with any pedagogical}

initiative. Its Senior Design Committee, composed of four faculty and three staff members, decided to make writing instruction a priority despite the large class size (about 100 for the fall cohort and about 45-50 in the spring cohort). The first step was to make writing fifty percent of each team’s grade, forcing the students to “take writing seriously,” since these students tend to be highly grade-conscious, likely a consequence

6 _{Fall 2015 enrollment was 1,385}

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of high GPA requirements by potential employers7_{. Next, a staff member with extensive}

writing experience was assigned to coach and mentor the teams as they worked through the five reports they prepared over the course of two semesters. This effort involved writing conferences and in-class lectures as well as the eventual development of detailed templates to help teach the teams the rhetorical conventions of engineering design. But this was just beginning.

Those who are experts in teaching writing know that, just as engineering students do not learn all of the math they will ever need in just one course, students need more than a single composition course to learn to effectively express their ideas and that good grammar, punctuation, and spelling are not sufficient for good writing. As David Russell states, what faculty consider poor writing is often the work of a student struggling to develop skills in that particular rhetorical community. That student is attempting to learn and use the terminology and persuasive modes correctly, with little or no formal rhetorical instruction from the faculty (2002, p. 17). This issue of rhetorical expertise, while not explicitly discussed by the Senior Design Committee members, was nonetheless their main concern. While they complained about poor grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure, they were most concerned that too many students graduating with a BSME did not “write like engineers” as Dorothy Winsor describes in her study of the rhetorical practices of engineers in her book Writing Like an Engineer (1996, p. 11).

7 _{Many large employers require a minimum GPA of 3.0 on a 4.0 scale for consideration for internships, co-}

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Within a year of beginning its writing program in Senior Capstone Design, the committee agreed that more emphasis on communication was needed earlier in the curriculum so I began recruiting receptive faculty to integrate more writing into their courses. Additionally, a third-year design course was added in 2009 with a heavy emphasis on written and oral communication via rhetorical approach as opposed to a focus on mechanical correctness. Since then, feedback from the department’s external advisory board and faculty who teach senior technical electives has been overwhelmingly positive, with two such faculty saying the clarity of their students’ writing has improved “tremendously.” Still, I believed that the department had the resources to further improve not only student writing, but also more effectively engage our GTAs.

Up until fall 2014, when a new curriculum was implemented, students working towards a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering (BSME) were required to take a sequence of three laboratory courses in which they wrote at least two dozen lab reports total, both as individuals and in teams of two to three students. The courses, and the year and order in which they were taken, were MEEM 2500 Integrated Manufacturing and Design (second year), MEEM 3220 Energy Lab (third year), and MEEM 3000 Mechanical Engineering Lab (third or fourth year). Since there were limited opportunities for undergraduate students to develop their technical writing prowess outside of this course sequence, these lab courses were a natural target for my attention as the department’s technical communication advisor. All three courses included technical communication as a learning outcome and as having a moderate or high importance

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relationship to ABET program outcome “g” (ability to communicate ideas effectively8₎

(see Appendix A for ABET course descriptions). However, little effort had heretofore been spent on actually teaching technical communication principles in these courses, either during lab lectures or through detailed feedback on the students’ lab reports. Based on my years of experience in working with Senior Capstone Design students and faculty, it was clear that the students needed more feedback on their writing earlier in the curriculum. The question was, how might we ensure they receive effective instruction when resources, especially time, were limited? The answer was to better utilize an existing resource–the GTAs who assessed student work.