Celebrating Mediocrity?

Recently discussions in another course have given me pause as I consider my teaching philosophy and methods. Talk of emphasizing the students' self worth to improve their writing, of not criticizing their work so as to protect their fragile self esteem, of not recognizing (or at least not admitting) any variation in writing ability among students, of not having standards, of calling "inexperience" "need of practice" and "failing" "not passing" seems to me to lend to a celebration of mediocrity.

Obviously, we must always keep students in consideration when grading their papers and adjust our comments accordingly. We must be kind to them and respectful of them, addressing them in a way that we would like to be addressed and treating them as fellow writers, scholars, human beings. I feel that by addressing students' failures, oversights, mistakes, illogical thinking, or gasp, incorrect grammar we show them respect. It seems patronizing to me to assume that the student is too fragile for constructive criticism or too inept to learn to address both higher and lower order concerns simultaneously. It seems that students often know when they have written poorly, and when they don't realize there are problems in their writing, it is our job to help them identify their deficiencies and to help them fill in their gaps.

In my estimation, self-esteem and self-worth cannot be endowed upon students; students have to develop this for themselves. Perhaps this development of self-worth comes not from undeserving praise on a paper, ignoring problems, or refusing to call problems and deficiencies problems and deficiencies (though we should be able to find some element which we can comment positively about in every paper), but rather from constructive criticism and encouragement that lead to improvement and a sense of accomplishment. Comments which point out problems in the writing do not have to tear students down; there are ways to show them that you value them as human beings, students, writers without giving them a false vision of where they are in their development as writers.

I know that I am working under the assumptions that there are standards, that there are good and bad writers (though I don't use these terms in such a way so as to suggest that a person cannot move from being a bad writer to being a better, good, or even excellent writer), and that recognizing lack, problems, even failures is not necessarily wholey harmful. I cannot accept that there are no standards (although I can accept that these standards may be deeply internalized and difficult to "nail down"). If there are no standards, then what are our classes about? Why does Introduction to College Writing exist? Why are we in graduate school studying composition? Why are we teaching it? How can we grade writing?