Creative Pedgagogy, Part I

As faithful readers are probably aware, I just spent the last ten weeks teaching "Fundamentals of Composition" during summer session. On the whole I found the experience enjoyable as many of the students were entering freshmen and were excited to get a remedial class out of the way before they began their college careers. And while there were the usual problems that come with teaching college freshmen (cheating, frequent absences, etc.), it was a very positive experience. Certainly, it was much better than teaching SAT prep classes like I have for the past two summers. The students knew why they were there and I felt like I was teaching worth wild.

This was not the first time I had taught the course. I've taught this class specifically two times before and I've taught a very similar class twice as well. However, there is one assignment that students have to do that I've never been satisfied with. It's not that the assignment is bad; indeed, I find it quite a useful exercise. The problem with the assignment is how its been taught over the past years. While the assignment asks students to understand one text using another, the materials that have accreted around the assignment have essentially lead students to believe that the assignment asks them to state that it would be useful to analyze one text with another. This approach leads students to produce thesis statements that essentially say "Using ideas (X)(Y)(Z) from text (A) allow us to understand (M)(N)(O) from text (B)." Of course, this really doesn't tell us what we understand, just that we will understand something. The papers follow suit from this thesis statement and essentially don't go anywhere. What the thesis statement should look like is something more like this, "Idea (X) expressed in text (A) allows us to see (Y) in text (B)," thus naming what it is we now understand. This is an argument and if done successfully will teach students how to use effective hermeneutic and exegetical reasoning.

I have struggled with this paper since I began teaching here at UCI. It always struck me as a little off and I wondered why we were teaching students to produce papers that none of us would ever write. However, it was only the last time that I taught this class that I came to realize what exactly was wrong about the paper. Not only were we leading them to produce thesis statements that were not argumentative, but we were also handing them a rigid four step method which kept them from really articulating an argument; what it did instead was to merely produce an outline in paragraph form. It took away the flexibility they needed to form their own ideas and it leaded them not so much to make an argument so much as to produce a display of quotations.

While I did not want to simply tell them how to write the paper, or at least tell them that there was only one way to write this type of paper, I did not want to send them out blind either. It was very clear to me that they were not used to making arguments which could be defended. If this is an overstatement, it was at least evident that they were not used to making arguments based on close reading. Thus, I knew I had to give them some sort of sample paper. Unfortunately, because this was the first time that the true nature of the assignment had been stressed for some time, I did not have a paper to show them.

So, I was forced to write one myself. I had long thought that this would be a useful pedagogical activity, but I never could really find the time or produce enough interest in myself to take the plunge. However, faced with an empty lesson plan and the desire to teach the assignment correctly, I made myself write a version of the paper. While I still believe that doing the assignments is a useful activity because it better defines for the teacher what he or she wants from the student, I'm a little apprehensive about showing them a sample of a teacher's writing. In this case, it solved my immediate problem of showing them a good example. On the other hand, because I did reveal to them that it was my writing, it produced a top-down style of teaching which is exactly what I didn't want them to have when doing this assignment. After reading some of the final papers, it's clear that some of the students were trying to ape my style. While this is of course some of the reason why you show sample papers at all, I was a little wary of them just copying from me as I wanted them to develop their own ideas. Still, while I don't think it was totally successful this time, in part because I introduced it too late into their writing processes, I would show them my sample paper again. My hope is that it produces a student paper which is good enough to be a student sample paper.