Time to revisit that eternal conundrum: Is there anything actually to be gained from assigning traditional essays, particularly the old literary analysis essay assignment that asks students to produce a close reading of a work of literature?
I’ve been grading this weekend and, in addition to confirming my sense that my students this semester are actually getting dumber as the weeks pass, I’ve been wrestling with my fear that it is my assignments that are making them (seem?) dumber. Maybe it’s not them. Maybe it’s the essay itself that’s the problem.
So, seriously, what do we assign essays for? They resemble no other form of writing except academic writing; there is some sort of Linnaean link between the 5 paragraph essay and the books/articles we write now. So, if all of our students are going to be academics, it’s great. Otherwise, what’s the purpose?
Of course, the conventional answer is that our students are practicing the work of developing ideas and constructing arguments — skills that will serve them no matter what career they enter. The ol’ literary analysis essay gives them the opportunity to work on their analytical skills, their writing skills, and their following-directions skills — again, all things that are objectively valuable in the Real World.
But, I’m just not convinced that my students are getting any of these skills out of my assignments. Most of my students aren’t putting any effort into developing a skill set other than plagiarism. I don’t think they read anything anymore, other than the summary of the assigned reading that they find on SparksNotes or Wikipedia. I don’t think they write anything that they haven’t read somewhere online. Sometimes they take the time to rewrite it so I can’t prove it’s plagiarism and sometime it’s as easy as a Google search to locate their source of information. At any rate (trying not to turn this into yet another plagiarism rant), I just don’t think the ol’ essay assignment is having the beneficial effects it is legendary for.
I know many academics who have abandoned the essay in favor of collaborative, performative, service learning or complicated technology assignments. These assignments embrace a different set of values: instead of privileging analytical skills, students learn team-building, communication, creativity, citizenship, or computing. All infinitely valuable accomplishments — and arguably more practical or necessary than being able to construct a good thesis statement.
However, since I have been clinging to the whole “individual analysis of a literary text” thing, I haven’t been able to completely embrace these more radical measures. (Not to mention, holy shit, it is so much work to develop such innovative pedagogies! I bow down to all of you have undertaken such ambitious projects.)
But, I am completely dissatisfied with the results: My students write crummy papers. I don’t feel I have either the class time or the ability to teach them how to write better papers. So, I continue to simply hand out essay assignments, they generally turn in bad papers, and the cycle continues.
Something’s got to change and, since it ain’t gonna be my students, I think it’s gotta be me. I think I need to overhaul my entire pedagogical model, dispense with certain kinds of assignments and get really creative in developing different ones.
Either that, or I may just sink into a mist of despair, muddle my way through all of my classes, and inevitably take my place as the grey, fussy, old lady member of my department. You know, the one who complains but never makes any effort to fix things.
I’m taking advice, folks: what have you done to either resurrect or put to bed entirely the ol’ literary analysis essay assignment?
10 comments
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November 10, 2008 at 4:17 am
servetus
I’ve started to wonder if the assignments that test analysis shouldn’t be oral and conducted in person by the instructor–but one still has the problem of how they are supposed to learn to write sentences that are not plagued with major grammatical errors.
November 10, 2008 at 6:31 am
Notorious Ph.D.
I’m with you on admiring the innovative pedagogy crowd (except for a few gratuitously wacky things), but I’m sticking with the essay. Sure, not every student will get it. But that’s something you can say about any work format.
One thing I’ve done is to intersperse my traditional text-based assignments with at least one assignment having them find (on their own, but with some pointers for places to look) and interpret a piece of visual culture. I give them a set of questions they need to answer, then have them do a bit of free-form analysis.
As far as privileging new values, that’s all fine and dandy. But critical analysis and organization of ideas and evidence is still number one in my book.
That said, I do appreciate your frustration. And I think it would be nice to have something new once in a while, just so *we* don’t get bored and lazy. I’ll be reading other commenters’ replies with interest.
November 10, 2008 at 7:56 am
daiskmeliadorn
Hello, I’m a lurker from Sydney, Australia, just finished my History hons.
You say you don’t have the time or the ability to teach your students how to write better papers, but that seems to be the main problem you’re having (vs the problem of whether you have time to embrace alternative values and technologies etc). That also fits with my experience of rarely being taught *how* to write a good essay and finding that really frustrating. One year I did have some fantastic sociology lecturers who really integrated teaching-how-to-write into their course (creatively too), and I tell you they changed my life.
I’m sure you’re trying to teach how to do the kind of criticism you are talking about in some ways already, aren’t you? Somehow that just isn’t translating into an ability to do that criticism in the form of a written, structured argument. I agree that doing criticism in that way is a useful skill and worth valuing, and I reckon you should stick to that and go for it – there must be people out there in the land of educational theory who’ve written stuff that would help you?
November 10, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Linda Aragoni
It’s not you.
Nor is it the assignments.
Our multi-tasking world has changed kids’ brains. They do not read much, do hardly any sustained reading, may not be capable of doing sustained reading.
My hobby is reading vintage bestselling fiction of 50-100 years ago. The intellectual demands of popular reading of the 1940s would be beyond most graduate students today.
My gut feeling is that we are not going to make much headway having students write about literature, which is foreign to most of them. I think we have to start out having students write on other aspects of the English curriculum than literature. Students see more relevance to topics like language and writing conventions than they do to literature.
Even if I’m right, I don’t expect to make much progress. Sigh.
November 10, 2008 at 8:43 pm
JaneB
That’s a scary thought, but seems worryingly sensible. I love Dorothy Sayers novels – but can only think of one or two students from the past eleven years who MIGHT have a chance of getting most of the detail, the casual references to literature and cultural symbols, the occasional dropping into French or Latin without translation…
I’m a scientist but in a discipline where essays or other pieces of written work rather than calculations/problem sheets are the main form of assessed work. The whole concept of reading seems remote to my students, even those majoring in social sciences and taking the odd science course: they use the web. And what really bothers me is that they use it badly, carelessly – if the information they need isn’t in the first page of results they give up, if they have to click through to a different online repository to download the reading they complain that it isn’t accessible (and I get slammed for that in my evaluations), when I ask them to do really really simple e-data tasks, like use the tool on a site to generate a map and then download it (Choose from a drop-down menu what you want to map. Choose the scale of the map by clicking on a button. Click another button to create the map. Right click and copy or save the image), half of them turn up at office hours complaining that it’s hard or won’t work.
I know they’re meant to be leaving school with different skillsets these days (I’m all of 40 but feel ancient a lot of the time) but many of them can’t give talks, rush to the lecturer as soon as there’s a disagreement between group members when doing project work, can’t organise themselves, lack the confidence in themselves to actually link one reading to another never mind ask original questions… so what are these skill sets? They are EXCELLENT at ungrammatical writing, using their mobile phones and asking for help. It’s not all of them – but it’s enough that I wonder how I’ll stand another 25 years sometimes.
November 11, 2008 at 2:54 am
undine
I think more writing in class might help with the close analysis, but I am not practicing enough of what I’m preaching in this regard.
November 11, 2008 at 8:26 pm
anonymous
It’s not the object of analysis; it’s the fact that they don’t read (and therefore can’t write).
I teach Television Criticism and read the same type of vomitous textual analysis of The Office, Twin Peaks and Family Guy that you’re reading of Gravity’s Rainbow or The Divine Comedy or whatever.
Given the fact that most students can’t even figure out how to use the header feature in Word, it should come as no great surprise that they can’t wrap their minds around more complex things like metaphor or satire.
November 12, 2008 at 3:40 am
kfluff
Okay, I fear that this is going to sound either too zen, or too smarmy, so forgive me. But when I complained, years ago, to a colleague about how bored I was by reading student papers where they gave me answers I already knew, he told me: “easy. stop asking that question.”
And the last time I moaned “why can’t students just write a decent 5 page paper?”, my colleague in composition asked me: “why can’t you ‘just write’ an article?”
You don’t need innovative pedagogies or wacky assignments to get at the skills that you value. Give them a question to answer that you’re genuinely curious about, and then show them how to go about answering it (bonus: the more specific the question to your class and the themes and texts that you use, the harder plagiarism is). I routinely spend an entire class period per semester working as a large group on the process of close reading, where I project a passage up on the board, ask them to identify important terms, associate various meanings with those terms, contextualize them vis-a-vis the text, the time period, etc., and then produce a number of sample thesis statements that the passage could support. And I continue to return to that method informally in class discussion.
I find a larger number of students attempting to do what I want them to, and some delightful surprises in terms of their theses and conclusions—all of which keeps me from giving it all up and herding goats in New Mexico.
November 12, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Dr. Crazy
If they’re plagiarizing to the extent that you indicate, I’d say that means they are insecure and that they are clueless about what “close reading” or “literary analysis” means. I found papers in my intro-level courses improved *dramatically* when I started having them practice those skills in class (similarly to what Kfluff describes above)- breaking down the steps of that enterprise and having them do it in groups, individually for a quiz grade, etc. Do you have time to “teach the essay” in a lit class? Probably not for more than a portion of one class period. You *do* have time to teach them how to analyze texts, to explain why making your own original claim about something you’ve read matters, and to explain the connection between reading and one’s initial reaction to deeper thinking and a fully developed response to whatever one has read. And, call me old-school, but I don’t think the “innovative” kinds of assignments you describe teach those things, and I think that those things are really the centerpiece of what it means to study literature. Collaboration, communication, teamwork, creativity, computing – yes, all valuable skills. But in a literature class you’re supposed to learn how to read and analyze literature. Sometimes I think that all of the bells and whistles of “innovative teaching” actually take us away from what we’re supposed to be doing.
November 12, 2008 at 2:54 pm
bsgirl
Thanks to all of you for your thoughtful comments. I was going to write another blog post about these issues but I find that I am still turning them over in my head; I’m not quite ready to articulate my thoughts.
I appreciate discovering that I am not alone in this — and that it’s not just that I am a terrible teacher. (I’ve been feeling like a terrible teacher a lot lately but, if I think about it, I generally feel this way around this time of the semester.)
I also appreciate those of you who chided me gently by reminding me that: you have to teach your students to do what you want them to do. I know that but I don’t always put it into practice. Too often I get so enchanted by the subject matter in my classes that I overlook technique/methodology/skills. But, simply by the measure of my own frustration and boredom as I read my students’ papers, it is clear that I need to spend more time on these things.
I particularly like kfluff’s zen philosophy: don’t ask boring questions. Now, why didn’t I think of that before?