Assignment Design and Making Your Grading Sessions Less Mind-numbing

Tenured Radical has a fantastic post up today about designing assignments in a way that encourages students to write scintillating analysis instead of boring dreck:

Whose fault was this?  My fault, that’s who.  I had given a highly conventional assignment that signaled to the students (correctly) that they were being tested (without being honest about saying so), and so the vast majority of them stayed in the right-hand lane and drove slightly under the speed limit (metaphorically speaking.)  Furthermore, I had failed for years to attend to this whole business of what students were talking about when they referred to a “prompt”:  hence I had given one assignment, and they had essentially received a different one than I intended.  So the next time around, lest I should be tempted to drive a pencil into my ear while grading, I gave them complete and utter freedom.  I asked them to choose their own document and to choose it based on something they were passionate about now.  I asked them to compare their own enthusiasm for this topic to the enthusiasm expressed in the document, and to use the document to understand better how their own passion was rooted in a history of other people who cared about this thing too.  When students asked me if it was OK to write about something they didn’t really care about, I said no.  Then I took the time to talk with them about what they did care about, and urged them to write about it.

I’m probably stating the obvious, but the way an assignment is designed and presented will, for better or for worse, greatly impact the quality of student’s output.  As TR argues, a rote, conventional assignment that suggests that a student is being tested on course content will inevitably generate rote, conventional regurgitations of that content.  If the major objective of that class is to get students to memorize and apply content, then that may be perfectly fine.  But if the major objective of your class is to get students to practice the analytical skills relevant to your discipline–as it is with many introductory humanities courses–then it pays to allow a bit more room for creativity, and it can be a good thing to get students to practice those skills on objects that appeal to them.

I’ve been using a literary studies version of this assignment for the past two years, and I have been thrilled with the results.  Since the Writing Flag program at my university requires me to assign a variety of assignments with varied lengths (which is something I would probably do anyway), I determined that reading one hundred odd essays on course texts would probably bore me and my students to death, so I have them produce a conventional literary analysis on a course text at the end of the semester, but before that, they write three short (1000 word) analyses of artifacts they find outside of class employing one of the critical methods we discuss.  They can pick a painting, a song, a poem, a novel, a film, a television show, a video game–pretty much anything is up for grabs.  And the results are not only twenty entirely unique essays for each assignment but essays that are actually fun to read.  For one thing, while many students feel intimidated by Literature with a big L and mistrust their abilities to even understand them, much less say something new and interesting, many of them are capable of producing erudite readings of texts and artifacts with which they are more immediately familiar.  And no, I do not receive sixty essays on television shows each semester.  In fact, current pop culture makes up a surprisingly slim percentage of the topics chosen, and even when it is the selected topic, we’re usually talking about sophisticated and original assessments of the movie Pulp Fiction from an RTF major who bothered to do secondary research.  Last year, I also had a student who wrote three essays on paintings from the escuela cuzquena school, a student who wrote about a Czech shrine, and a student who compared an Obama speech to John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity.

My class is actually a topics course in Literature and Religion, and other teachers frequently express surprise that I’m willing to talk about religion in my class, since the potential for controversy is so high (made a bit worse due to the fact that our state legislature now reviews our syllabi).  However, I have yet to encounter a problem, and I suspect that this assignment is part of the reason.  While I insist that their analyses avoid confessionalism or polemic, there appears to be something both cathartic and educational about getting them to talk about cultural productions that are important to them and allowing them small space for sorting out their own beliefs relative to a much bigger world of ideas without ever having to debate Biblical literalism in class or argue about whose god can beat up all of the other gods.  In other words, while the essays are academic essays, they allow some small space for self-expression and creativity as well as critical thinking.  And that’s pretty much what any assignment in a course like this should be designed to do.

Finally, while there’s no way to scientifically prove it, I do think that making this the dominant writing activity for the lion’s share of the semester makes the end-of-term essays on a course text more original and more interesting.  The short essays do seem to make students more sensitive to the context in which texts are produced and build confidence in their own abilities to tease out an author’s agenda.  At the very least, the short assignments seem to demystify the whole notion of authorship and of Literature as a monolithic, impenetrable body of signs by encouraging them to use the same tools of analysis that they use to unpack more familiar, more accessible cultural products.

On Being Grateful

Tenured Radical has a phenomenal series on the economics of professorial salaries going right now, and the conversation has lapped over onto Historiann.  If you are currently seeking a distraction from grading and/or writing, you could do worse than their comments threads.  The first post begins by noting that TR’s salary has more or less stagnated at $107K a year and shows no signs of going up despite an increasing workload.  I confess that when I first read it, my lizard brain said “uh oh,” because I was anticipating the demands from less well-paid individuals that TR simply be grateful for what they may justifiably feel is a largesse.  And, admittedly, as someone who alone nets about $17K a year from what are essentially three part time jobs at my university, I experienced a twinge of “suck it up” myself.

But I’ve written about “being grateful” here before.  There is nothing wrong with counting your blessings and reflecting on the fact that you are better off than many others, but there is also nothing wrong with demanding a remunerative wage for the work you perform, especially if that wage is commensurate with the wages earned by individuals with similar levels of experience in the same job (which is all TR is really asking for).  Similarly, “being grateful” doesn’t benefit the people who are less fortunate than you.  It benefits the people who stand to benefit by not paying you OR the people who make less than you.  It tells your employers that they can reasonably expect all of you to work for free if they simply appeal to your sense of personal and professional ethics.

As I’ve said before, despite what looks on paper to be poverty level wages, I too experience the pressure to simply “be grateful.”  I have spousal support, after all, though it comes from a spouse making a public school teacher’s salary.  Also, we have no debt and substantial equity in our home, the product of being on the good side of the last decade’s real estate bubble.  And I attend graduate school largely tuition free (except for that one semester) and get decent health benefits, which is more than can be said for most grad students in the humanities.  In other words, even as a grad student, I have a pretty decent middle class life.  And I do, much of the time, feel grateful for that modicum of economic security and reflect on the myriad other forms of satisfaction I derive from my job.

But occasionally that life and those forms of satisfaction are inexplicably used as a rationale to get me to work for the university for little or no extra money.  That, folks, is ridiculous.  At what point, exactly, is one allowed to respectfully decline to do extra work for free?  When you can no longer afford your mortgage?  When you finally qualify for food stamps?  No, at some point, I think it is reasonable to do as TR is doing and weigh the costs and benefits of agreeing to do more work for free and, you know, finding some other line of work. Because, for better or for worse, that’s the free market, baby, and as long as there’s a healthy supply of suckers out there willing to just “be grateful” for living a life of the mind and getting to work with young people and blah blah blah, universities will feel free to capitalize on that.

Coming soon:  The cultural capital of “not caring about money.”

TR on Post-Grad School Job Prospects

The JIL gets published, like, next week.  Does this have anyone else feeling kinda shitty about the job market?  Tenured Radical is making that point I was trying to make a few weeks ago but with actual scholarly street cred and a gracious sense of humor.  Read it and be encouraged:

A great many graduate students are instructed that doing such work takes them off the fast-track, making them look unserious, unfocused and lacking in commitment to their scholarship. To this I say: Balls. Since when did the allegedly virtuous path of eking out a living on adjunct pay, moving around the country, and becoming increasingly bitter about what you have sacrificed prove to be a guarantee of tenure-track labor? Furthermore, while some narrow-minded person at Prestigious Ivy U. might look at your vita, overlook all your academic accomplishments and say, “Hmmm. Assistant to the Dean of the College? Yeccch!” someone at Zenith, or State U – Calabash might say happily, “Now here’s a person who won’t have to be taught how to walk, talk and find the chalk!” It is also true that you can send vitae to different schools that emphasize different things.