The first assignment I ask my ENG 101 students to write is a two-page brochure on the topic of "So You've Decided to Teach Me English." It's a fun assignment for the students to perform, I think. I have them write a column on their personal biography, their interests, and their writing experiences.
One thing that almost always comes up is that students will invariably say, "I am good at writing about things that I'm interested in, but too often I get frustrated when teachers assign me work that I don't care about." As an instructor, this is challenging, because there's no way that I can tailor a classroom experience to 26 different students and their varying interests.
Not that I haven't tried in the past. When I first started teaching, I let the students write about whatever they desired, as long as the essays were of the type that I'd defined by the syllabus. Paradoxically, the students tended to be paralyzed by indecision. Without having some limit on their field of vision, they ultimately procrastinated on choosing a topic until they selected whatever seemed to be in front of them at the time. Once, I had a compare & contrast essay submitted to me on the difference between shell-toe sneakers and some other kind.
More recently, I've decided that I'd narrow their options some. It's hard. My dad is driven crazy by what I ask my students to do because I'm not asking anyone to write about Shakespeare or something. He doesn't understand that ENG 101 is not, really, an English class. It's definitely not a literature class. Among my one hundred students, maybe five are interested in pursuing English as a major. These students have also been discouraged for the last five-plus years by thinking that the essay is a chore that you write in response to a text that they didn't care about and likely didn't even read. They can put together a five-paragraph essay that you describe to them, but that's not the kind of person that I want to create when they leave my classroom.
So I've given them larger topics for discussion for each essay. The last two years, students have written on sports (with examples from Chuck Klosterman and David Foster Wallace), education, gender issues, and something political that I'm generally deciding at the last possible moment (this year it was evaluating Obama's first 100 days). There are still students who resist, but there's not much I can do about that. My general hope is that I can limit their options, and then allow my own promiscuous interests ("Promiscuous Boy" was nearly the name for this very blog) and my enthusiasm to carry them along the road.
I'm also teaching a summer session of ENG 101, beginning June 1. In the past, I've focused on movies during the summer (for reasons that readers of this blog should find obvious). After doing that for two years, I've come to the conclusion that it's a little much to ask students to focus on movies for five straight weeks and 20-30 pages of writing.
This summer, I'm going to try letting their first two essays be about movies. The first one is about an experience of going to the cinema. The second is one of my favorites: comparing Jaws to a summer blockbuster of their choice. Then I'm going to try something new. I think I'm going to ask them to evaluate their experience as a tourist. I'm not sure what I'll have them read as an example, but I'm thinking I'll give them one of David Foster Wallace's essays, either "Ticket to the Fair" or "Consider the Lobster." Finally, I'm going to ask them to critique an album released in the last two years, adding research as they go.
I'm pretty excited. It's always fun to vary the syllabus. A five-week summer session is pretty grueling for students who have been educated for (likely) the past 14 years. The students really don't have a chance to process what they're learning like they are more able to do in a traditional semester.
I think all teachers design (or should design) their courses to appeal to the students that they were (or they remember themselves being). I think this leads me to challenge my students more than they really expect. But I think the 18 year old me would like the amount of independent work that I ask students to do, even if he would have loathed the peer review process that the college environment requires.
No comments:
Post a Comment