Originality And Assignments

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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.

Embracing The Shitty First Draft

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Lately I have been trying to get my students to buy into the Shitty First Draft.  I teach writing intensive courses each semester, and one of the core requirements of the W courses is that there must be explicit writing instruction.  When I sit down at the beginning of each semester and think about what I want to do differently or better in my courses, I always come to the conclusion that I can do a better job of teaching writing.  This is not necessarily true in the Advanced Composition course the Education students have to take, but I’d have to admit that there’s some truth to my own self-criticism in regards to the American Lit courses I teach each fall.

The students have to write a 15 page paper, for which I require a succession of drafts.  I build in workshop days approximately every fourth class for the students to work in groups on their latest drafts of the assignment, and during these I sit in on the groups and add my two cents.  I also require conferences at midterm and make myself available for conferences by appointment throughout the semester.  But this isn’t always enough. 

This semester, I have found that my students are having tremendous difficulty just generating ideas for their papers, and they are coming to workshop sessions with very paltry drafts.  Not just shitty drafts in the classic sense of the term, but drafts that are really nothing more than a paragraph or a list.

After having talked to about half of the twenty students in the course, I began to see clear patterns.  1.  Students were not taking the time to read the samples of student essays I had provided, and even when they did they really did not know what was important to observe.  2.  The students were not especially well read, either in terms of classic literature, Bible stories, or mythology, or in terms of current events.  In terms of popular texts like movies and television, they were unsure how to begin reading these as texts.  3.  They were so terrified of not having enough to say about a topic for fifteen pages that they strove for exceedingly broad topics in the resigned belief that even if they didn’t write a good paper they’d at least be more likely to fulfill the page requirement.  4.  They were unwilling to embrace the messiness of the drafting process.  They were horrified by the thought of cutting and pasting, moving things around, exploring tangents, and having multiple, interrelated tasks going on simultaneously.

So then I asked myself what I could do differently.  I started by taking a day to discuss some of the student papers I have posted on a course wiki, talking aloud about what I thought was successful, effective, or interesting, and why.  I asked the students to make observations and note patterns of what students did to make the papers effective.  In conferences, I spent time going online and showing the students good websites for current events, starting with places like the New York Times.  Many students were surprised at how comprehensive such a site was.  I also gave a lot of pep talks and struck deals.  I’d say, "Get to seven pages and then let’s revisit this idea about the 15 page paper."  I also had to assure the students that the learning process was more important than the grading process.

Lastly, and this was in many ways the hardest and most important psychological hump to get over, I had to encourage and cajole the students into embracing the shitty first (and sometimes second, third, and fourth) draft.  We read Annie Lamott’s chapter by the same name.  I showed them how I use two—and sometimes, with the help of a laptop, three—screens to be able to see multiple drafts and pages, so I can cut and paste from one draft into a new one, while simultaneously doing research on a third screen.  I told them stories I’d heard from Wally Lamb about using notecards on bulletin boards, and even showed photos of William Faulkner’s home where he wrote his outline of ideas and events for A Fable on the walls of his bedroom. 

I don’t know yet how much this has or will help, but students thus far have expressed thankfulness for these various efforts.  Their next draft is due on the 18^th.  I guess I’ll find out then how much of this was taken to heart and mind.