Enjoying what you do...

Well, I'm at a point in the semester where the papers are really starting to stream in. I got a whole stack of them this week from one class and I have two more stacks coming in from my other two classes on Thursday. Students stress about writing papers. Professors, they may not realize, stress about reading them. Or, I do. One thing I have learned over the years is how important it is to create assignments that engage students, but also that engage me. I have only had a few experiences where I sat down to read a pile of essays and dreaded it. Usually, when I get over feeling overwhelmed by how many papers I have to read, I get excited to read what the students have actually written. There have been a few times in my life when this has not happened. I have, occasionally, struggled through reading student papers. Usually, this is when I have given an assignment, or someone else has insisted I give an assignment, where all the students must write on one topic. This is, I think, a sure way to commit professional suicide as a professor. Give one prompt, make it real specific, and ask all the students to write on the same prompt. This is my idea of suffering.

I'm more interested in creating assignments where students have leeway to create something that will surprise themselves and me. In an ideal assignment, I'll get 20 or 25 different papers. I don't want to read the same thing over and over again. This is part of the reason why I look forward to reading the blogs--no one writes about the same things. I am surprised and learn something EVERY time I sit down to read students' blogs. Usually, I think, or I'd like to think, this is because they have been surprised and have learned something through the act of writing. If there is one thing I have learned over the years, it's that if a writer isn't learning something and/or discovering something intersting through writing, the reader will probably not discover or learn anything either. Donald Murray and Robert Frost used to say: No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

Another observation I've come to over the years, and I'm not quite sure how to word this one...there is a particular kind of writing assignment that produces essays that I find boring, tedious, unsurprising, and monotonous. It's when you give students a prompt or a series of prompts (you give them a series of prompts and this creates the illusion of choice) about, say, something they have read (but perhaps not fully understood), like a poem, or a novel or a short story and you ask them to comment on some aspect of what they've read. This kind of assignment is specific, I think, to English classes and English teachers. So, it might be something like,

What connections can you make between Beah’s A Long Way Gone and any of the five pieces we read in Christopher Biffle’s text, A Guided Tour of Five Works by Plato (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, or Phaedo and/or the “Allegory of the Cave”)?

or

On the Course Description, I explained that in this course, we will attempt to meditate on three central questions:

• Who am I?
• What can I know?
• Based upon what I know, what should I do?

Use one of the readings in Christopher Biffle’s text, A Guided Tour of Five Works by Plato (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, or Phaedo and/or the “Allegory of the Cave”), to reflect upon these three questions. How, or in what ways, does Socrates help you answer these questions (if he does so at all)?

I don't know why, but questions like this always prompt "canned" responses and a pile of papers that I just want to "get through." I guess I feel like very little is learned from such prompts. I guess its because what the students are supposed to do (or what they feel they must do) is, not think through something or learn something or discover something, but, instead, show the teacher that they have read the material. They are performing for a grade, writing as if to say "LOOK! I did read the material! Or, I read enough of it to throw in these few key terms that we talked about in class because, really, I didn't actually read much of it, now that I think about it, so, I better BS may way through this and show him that at least I got the parts he talked about in class." Does this make sense? It's not learning, discovering, etc. It's regurgitating.

Having said all this, I must say that I am enjoying reading A) students blogs (when I finally find the time to sit down and do so) and B) student essays. I'm thinking that this is something that students might not think about, though, when they think about their assignments: that professors actually do (or should, if they are smart) think about what kind of student work they want to read. If you create assignments that interest you, as a professor, sitting down to read them will seem less like work and more like an engaging activity because you're actually looking forward to seeing what the students did with what you created.