It was an odd whim of college compositional history that staged two rival enthusiasms during the same years (1970-1985): computing systems and individualized instruction. To compositionists today the machinery of automation and the pedagogy of “individual differences” seem contradictory in some obvious ways, but back then the two appeared to go individual hand in computerized glove.
 
The yearning for the match is readily seen in a book from that era, small enough to fit easily in one’s hand. Teaching Writing with the Computer as Helper was written by J. Terence Kelly and Kamala Anandam and published as a 3.75" x 6.25" pamphlet in 1982 by the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges. The book promotes a ten-year-old computer system at Miami-Dade Community College that had been used, in part, for writing instruction. It was a system that the authors insist "has the potential to individualize instruction” (p. 16).Yet today we can detect contradictions in the book's celebration of the marriage between computerization and individualization. Our first clue is the cover to the book. If the computer is really an instructional “helper,” why are there no humans in sight? All we see is a Telex Model 5403 printer (it automatically typed input from the mainframe). Photographs inside the book send the same message. We see either computing equipment tended by computer specialists (here is author Kelly with a bank of open-reel tape recorders) or students tended by teachers in old-fashioned, pencil-in-hand, pre-computer ways. Students and computers are separated.
 
Graphically, the closest students and computers approach one another is in a photograph of a student holding some sheets of computer paper that have been folded to fit inside a legal-size mailing envelop. The student is reading the computer’s print-out of a response to her last essay. The envelope was delivered to her by her teacher. The teacher had created the response by reading the student’s paper and then marking a bubblesheet of writing criteria, which the computer had turned into the letter, with boilerplate amenities (“Thank you for turning in Assignment 1”), boilerplate diagnosis (“Verb Usage: Shift in Tense’), and boilerplate illustration of error (“Verbs change in form to show the time of their action: Read the following paragraph”). This computerized teacher's aide is cleverly named RSVP: Response System with Variable Prescriptions. It also kept records. Kelly and Anandam contrast photos of a messy handwritten gradebook with the tidy RSVP bubblesheet, and hand-written teacher commentary on a student essay with the printed computer letter.
 
Teachers could write individual messages on a student's paper if they wished, but the computer system did not permit anything other than boilerplate text in the letter to the student. Understand that RSVP used mainframe technology of the 1970’s, before PCs and LANs were feasible for university instruction—and, I can’t resist adding, apparently before the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges acquired computerized text-editing capability (although most publishers had it by that time), at least inferring from the misspelling of their own name on the cover to this book.
 
So how does RSVP promote individualized instruction? Kelly and Anandam are quite open about this question, but their argument is a little mysterious. The impersonality of the computer will “equalize” teacher and student relations, and its speed will give teachers more time to work one-on-one with students (p. 13). It seems the computer doesn’t individualize instruction, teachers do. But its efficient delivery system reduces “the drudgery and repetitiveness, which English teachers have had to deal with in scoring students’ essays” (p. 6). It is an argument that predates computers, of course. Ever since the late 19th century the word “drudgery,” for instance, has been a writing-teacher code term, used to sell a grab bag of labor-saving devices, from criteria sheets, error symbols, lay readers, peer critique, overhead transparencies, to actual rubber stamps. Now it is computer house-elves willing to work for very long hours at very low wages.
 
Today “individualized instruction” does not have the éclat it did in the 1960s and 1970s, and the defense of computers in writing instruction has moved on to new machinery, new premises, and new rationales (such as group identity). Another stage, another story.
 
RH, April 2006
 
Bibliographic note. Kelly and Anandam's pamphlet is available on microfiche in the ERIC Document Reproduction Service, ED 214 583. An earlier version of their argument is "RSVP—an Invitation to Individualize Instruction," Community and Junior College Journal, March issue, 1978, pp. 24-26. For the compositional history of the word “drudgery,” see Brian Huot, “Computers and Assessment: Understanding Two Technologies,” Computers and Composition 13.2 (1996), pp. 231-244; and my own “Automatons and Automated Scoring: Drudges, Black Boxes, and Dei Ex Machina,” in Patricia Ericsson and Rich Haswell (Eds.), Machine Scoring of Students Essays: Truth and Consequences, Utah State University Press (2006), pp. 57-78.