Just finished grading my last set of papers & now I’m on sabbatical until next September. The papers brought me up short, I must admit. They were from a freshman class and we had finished the semester reading Margret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake, a very smart & entertaining book, I think. My students seemed to like it too, but their papers were, with only a few exceptions, dismal. I have to take some of the blame for this, though, because I should have gone over the basics of evolution with them before turning them loose on a novel about the hazards of genetic engineering for fun & pleasure. Many of them went wrong by assuming that evolution is teleological, i.e., that it leads inevitably to us. Others fouled up by assuming the meaning of “natural” to be self-evident. But the most breathtaking move — which showed up several times — was importing an entire metaphysics unexamined into an argument with a single sentence: We were put on earth for a reason. By whom & for what was never mentioned. What my students were really saying, I think, is something like “the world makes sense” — a rejection of nihilism. That rejection might have been a good start, but I didn’t get the chance to move them along since this was the final essay in the semester.
Actually, I’m dissatisfied with the way I have structured the course. I like the content I’ve worked up since we rennovated the curriculum three years ago — the authentic individual in a social context, the problems of establishing justice — but the wriing element isn’t really working. I’ve always just assigned four 3-5 page essays with opportunity for infinite revisions, but most of the essays turned in are essentially rough drafts. So when I go back to this class next year I’m going to make some changes.
- I’ll reduce the nmber of major texts and supplement them with critical essays. I’ve been using Graff’s little handbook They Say / I Say & when I can get them to adopt its methods, my students are better writers. (I’m also looking at a similar book, Rewriting, by Joseph Harris, but it seems aimed more at advanced writers of academic prose.) But I have to do more in class with this “entering the conversation” trope. In fact, I have to have workshop sessions using student writing. So:
- I’m going to assign six two-page essays starting in week one, with one final essay of 5-6 pages that develops some idea from earlier writing. We will use these two-pagers in class to discuss the various kinds of moves you can make in writing. Basically, I’ll do what I do in my creative writing workshops.
- Possible book list: The Book of Job (Mitchell translation), Utopia (More), Parable of the Sower (Butler), Oryx & Crake (Atwood), along with a simple text on evolution and a pocket style guide. [Great video here of Atwood discussing her novel.]
3 Responses to “End of Term Blues”
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I ran into similar trouble this semester, against the assumption that evolution = progress, whether moral, economic, biological, or cultural.
Regarding Harris’ _Rewriting_, I used it with first year classes this fall. I don’t know how many students actually read it carefully, but they found Harris’ descriptions of rhetorical moves and techniques to be helpful, and it got results in their essays. A similar book I’ve gotten good results from is Frank Cioffi’s _The Imaginative Argument_.
I’ve used creative-writing-workshop methods in talking about academic-essay writing to great effect; I recommend it highly.
Thanks Joe, and thanks to Steve for the suggestions on books on writing. My experience was similar. I do wonder if my expectations are too high. I seek measureable improvement in student writing over the course of a single semester. If there is solace to be found in Joe’s entry it is that final papers are almost always a disappointment. Student attention is dispersed at semester’s end, and the essays reflect staleness and poor time management. I’m acutely aware of my limits as a teacher of writing.