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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.