Just Some General Observations Concerning Teaching College Freshmen:

• When it comes to choosing paper topics, it is my older students who are more likely to pick something light and fun; it's the younger students who pick dull, heavy topics like abortion, immigration, gay-marriage, etc.  There appears to be something about growing older that causes one to lighten up, take one's self less-seriously.
• The super-majority of the time, students who pick the "heavy" topics (e.g. abortion, etc) do so not because they are passionate about the topic, but because they are lazy and unimaginative.  This assumption is proved by their writing.
• Drug-users (both current and ex-) are usually among my strongest writers.  Conclude from that what you will.
• Students from truly turbulent countries--e.g. Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Bosnia, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, former Soviet Republics, etc, rarely tell personal stories from their home countries.  I suppose there are just some stories that war-survivors won't even share with their closest loved ones, let alone their freshman composition instructor.  Understandably.
• A roommate suggested that maybe these international students don't share their war-stories because they perhaps consider their tales too common, too normal, to be worth attention?  Americans, by contrast, perhaps consider any personal tragedy to be a strange and great thing, for we don't ever expect tragedy to occur to us; hence, Americans will write long and dramatically about a car-crash where everyone survived, while a civil war survivor who saw his family butchered won't even think to bring it up.
• Or, perhaps these refugee-students simply don't have the words for their experiences--not in English, maybe not in any language.  I don't know which of all these explanations is more tragic.
• A native English speaker can absolutely jack-up one's own language--misspell, mis-punctuate, mis-capitalize, write both run-ons and fragments, etc--but they will still always use the indefinite article (a, an, the) correctly.  It's uncanny.
• Conversely, a non-native English speaker can master every other element of English grammar, but still mess-up the indefinite articles--Romance Language speakers over use them, Asiatic Language speakers leave them out.  A misplaced "the" gives them away immediately.  Articles appear to be first English grammar principle mastered by natives, yet the last mastered by new-comers.  It's uncanny.
• It is the A- students who are most likely to take me up on my offer to let them revise their papers for a higher grade; the B, C, and D students only take me up on the offer sporadically.
• Of the lower-graded students who do take me up on it, most only make the most superficial corrections to their papers, often ignoring the notes I've made detailing what they can do to improve their paper.  I no longer give these students higher grades for just turning in a token "revision."  At such times, I consider withdrawing my offer to let students revise their papers.
• But on the same token, I get just enough outliers who take my offer seriously and turn in superbly improved revisions, that I don't dare withdraw my offer.
• One of the saddest sights you'll see are the occasional students who clearly coasted through high school as class clowns, but who now find their antics no longer amuse their classmates nor get a rise from the teacher. The emperors have no clothes.  I almost pity them.
• But again, some of my most engaged and interesting students are high school flame-outs who are now determined to salvage their life.  I wish them good luck and godspeed.
• In a similar vein, it is also perversely gratifying to encounter the occasional former-honor-student who previously coasted by on sheer ability and teacher indulgence, who now suddenly realize that in college, one actually has to try.
• Whether because the blood is draining from students' brains to their bellies post-lunch or what, early-afternoon classes are usually my least-engaged, poorest attended, and hardest to teach.
• Night classes tend to be the funnest, presumably because they are populated by adults with day-time adult responsibilities, and, as earlier noted, it is grown adults who tend to lighten-up.
• Genuine tragedy seems to render people more charming, thoughtful, and interesting.  Bitterness, by contrast, is naive.  Again, draw your own conclusions as to why.