Every semester I say that I am not going to assign final papers so I don't have to spend two weeks doing nothing but reading and commenting and grading and agonizing, especially now that I have a baby for goodness sake.
And yet I did assign big papers to both classes and here I am, reading and commenting and grading and not resting like I should.
But beyond the sheer drudgery of it all, I wonder if organizing a class this way really maximizes what people learn.
So I am thinking about changing the way I structure assignments in the fall. The university doesn't mandate anything about how we design our courses so I have a lot of freedom. Just because I always had to write final seminar papers doesn't mean my students have to; I didn't learn a great deal from writing mine, and when I read their words I sometimes feel like there's nothing behind them. Like they banged these things out the night before just to get done.
Not to learn. And I entered this profession to make people think.
I have a few months to think about all of this before the next round of syllabi need to be finished. If you taught master's and doctoral students, what kind of assignments would you give them?
Monday, May 19, 2008
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1 comment:
When a person approaches work without the right consciousness, it shows. Writing reflects the writer, but if they were absent, the result is empty and the reader perceives it as uninspired. I feel sorry that you have to wade through so much empty writing.
Questioning the status quo is smart and asking a question is very powerful.
The best learning is active but the traditional teaching model seems to place students in more of a passive mode. When I was reading books about enlightenment, one concept was that the teacher, though necessary, was kind of a contrivance. The student always possesses everything they need to become enlightened. The teacher was there partly to guide, but also to satisfy the belief that a teacher was necessary.
To answer your question, one idea is to have them create powerpoint presentations. It would be less to write and less to read, but the main point would be to get to the essence of the subject and convey it meaningfully. In a way I think that would be more of a challenge. In my work, it would have been easy to write long papers in excruciating detail, but I was often required to present complex information to impatient executives in a short meeting. The limits you choose to impose on the presentation will force studens to make tradeoffs about what is most important which would one criteria for assessing their work.
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