Originality And Assignments

Jejak PandaJumpa Lagi Kita Diblog Kesayangan Anda
ceme 99 onlineI had an unusually long time between my last class of the semester and the tamat exam. My students had over a week to prepare. I do not give a traditional sit-down tamat exam, especially since I teach a writing intensive course. Students spend the entire semester working hard on a full, fifteen-page term paper, so I don’t see the need for them to also come in and take a timed test with short answers to uniform questions. I’m not convinced that would be an accurate or useful assessment of anything in particular, and certainly no more rigorous than what I have already required them to do.

The last two regular class meetings were dedicated to response groups, supplemented by lots of one-on-one conferences with me. But since we had this long week and a day between the last class and the exam, I had many students in my office over the last few days, too, finishing up their drafts and working on bedeviling details like useful quotes, proper citation, or how to effectively conclude this paper they have been plugging away at for the past fourteen weeks.

During one conference that took place earlier today, a student remarked that professors must get tired of reading students’ essays, especially if they are all on the same topic and even more especially if they are poorly written. I agreed, but I also observed that many professors have none but themselves to blame for this situation when they give a uniform assignment to all the students. Of course they are all going to write similar papers if the topic is the same for all, and of course many of those are going to be poorly written, because there is only a small likelihood that many of the students will find such a canned topic of any direct interest to themselves.

My students might have to struggle with being given more independence and autonomy than they are used to or comfortable with, but most of them end up with interesting topics that, ultimately, they enjoy researching and writing about. And as for me, I get to read an incredibly varied set of essays.

This semester, I had twenty students. We read Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Twain, Dickinson, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau. Pretty straight-forward, canonical stuff. (It is a survey course, after all). But the students’ papers were anything but straight-forward or canonical. No discussion of the symbolism of Hester’s A. No discussion of the whiteness of the whale. No discussion of the personification of the House of Usher. No discussion of Thoreau, Whitman, or Dickinson’s embodiment of an Emersonian ideal.

Alana wrote about Joshua Komisarjevsky and the death penalty through the lens of Edgar Allan Poe. Andrew wrote about the entrapments of celebrity, focusing on Tiger Woods and Anthony Weiner, and in addition to Hester and Dimmesdale, discussed Don Draper from Mad Men. Liz wrote about female sexual repression in Poe and Hawthorne, but read additional texts by Henry James, Sigmund Freud, and William James. Brittany defended Harry Potter from attack by Harold Bloom using Emerson, Twain, and Joseph Campbell. Matt wrote about the importance of place in Whitman, Hawthorne, and various contemporary musical artists, such as Bruce Springsteen. Andrea wrote about educational leadership and read texts by Emerson, Twain, Paolo Freire, and other less well-known contemporary educational researchers. Alyssa wrote about abortion and gay rights, and cited texts as varied as the US Constitution, "Resistance to Civil Government," The Scarlet Letter, the New International Bible (used by Assemblies of God), and various abortion and gay rights rulings, including Roe v. Wade.

Bobby wrote about bullying. Spencer wrote about the sea. Kristina wrote about Casey Anthony. Mary wrote about theocracy and Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman. She’s a science major and had 21 sources, mostly news articles but also Puritan texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Peter wrote about American History X. Alex is a psychology major who wrote about isolation using several relevant psychological studies on monkeys and humans. Mark designed a course on minority literature. Steve wrote about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Alyssa wrote about the Byronic Hero, and brought her discussion into the contemporary kurun using Dexter. Laura wrote about the American Federation of Teachers New York City chapter, and read educational theory going back to Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Horace Mann, and Elizabeth Peabody. Jessica wrote about Landscape Architecture, and Gina wrote about Charles Manson.

Now I can’t guarantee that all of these will be well written, but I certainly won’t be bored reading twenty dull, uninspired versions of essentially the same assignment.

Being In The Classroom Is The Best Part Of My Day

Jejak PandaJumpa Lagi Kita Diblog Kesayangan Anda
ceme 99 onlineOne of the most frequent complaints I hear from teachers these last few years is that more and ever more is being demanded of them.  (I would say ‘us,’ but, at least for now, I don’t think it’s quite as bad in higher education).  We’ve seen gradual mission creep for years.  We’ve been expected to teach not just the content of our subjects but skills in reading, writing, thinking, computing, research, et cetera, et cetera.  I doubt I have to spell it out for most readers.  You know the drill.

But to this we have now added untold layers of assessment, data collection, data analysis, and data-driven instruction.

As one former colleague used to say, “We’re still supposed to have the kids read books and write papers, right?”  Another used to say, “Once you close your door and it’s just you and your kids, that’s the best.”  He’d utter this like a chant to remind himself what he loved about teaching and why he taught in the first place.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this since I got a sad message from a former undergraduate a couple weeks ago, a brilliant and talented high school English teacher, just entering her fourth year.

She wrote, “I'm so burnt out.  I get these frantic urges to just run like hell to anything else.  It's such a deep feeling of dread going into school.  It's not the kids or the people I work with at all.  Being in the classroom is the best part of my day.  But I've grown so tired of the bureaucracy and red tape and paperwork and phone calls and meetings and evaluation forms that tear me away from the actual teaching and learning part.  I feel like I'm suffocating in paperwork.  Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but man, is it supposed to feel this way?  Maybe I need to move on.  My needs and my ambitions are bursting at the seams and I feel my impact is so menial.”

At about the same time, I received a different message from a former high school student who has become an elementary school teacher.

This young woman wrote, “I just wanted to share with you a story from school today.  I had asked my students to bring in their most prized possession to get to know one another, and one of my fifth-graders brought in a letter from the Connecticut Writing Project, congratulating her on one of her pieces being honored [in Connecticut Student Writers magazine].  She was so proud of it she was absolutely beaming, and when she asked me to read it afterwards, I saw it was signed by you!  I just wanted to let you know how far your impact is spreading and that you most certainly made a ten-year old girl very confident in her abilities as a writer.  So from one teacher to another, THANK YOU!”

This note, of course, delighted me.  I’m happy that we made this little girl feel such confidence in her ability, and I’m proud of my former student.  (I’m always so proud when my former students go into teaching).  But in the context of the other note, I felt a little sad, too.

Principally, I'm very cognizant that this ten-year old and her teacher were deeply moved by something from outside any curriculum.  Something creative.  Something unassessed.  Something that is not collected, disaggregated, analyzed, charted, and used to inform teaching.  Which is in most ways a good thing, except that I fear the creativity, authenticity, joy, and pride so central to this student’s experience are becoming increasingly separate from the core focus of most classrooms, and certainly separate from most of the initiatives born of this current reform movement that has held us in thrall for the past decade.

The experiences of these two young teachers underscore two things for me:  the obvious limits of reform, especially corporate reform, and the positive influence teachers can have upon their students, even if it has to be exercised surreptitiously once we close our classroom doors and are left with just our kids.