Sunday, July 29, 2012

That's Why God Made Blogs

In various threads of the discussion boards at the class (and yes, the discussion board remains basically a mess, as noted in a previous post), some people have been expressing how frustrated they are with the essay framework of 270-320 words (or whatever it is; I forget the exact numbers). Of the many things that I would do differently in this class, I am actually pretty sympathetic to this word limit on the essays. I probably wouldn't call them essays with such a low word limit; someone at one of the discussions suggested thinking of it as an "idea" which sounds pretty good. A lot of the trouble I think is that as soon as you say the word "essay," people have some pretty specific expectations, and writing 300 words is not one of them.

In my classes, the essay option (which hardly any student chooses - my experience with that suggests most students basically do not like writing essays about literature; more on that below) has a word count range from 300-1000. That seems to work pretty well, in the sense that people who do like to go on at length have 1000 words available. Every once in a while someone sends me an email to tell me 1000 words is not enough and I assure them without hesitation that 1000 words is plenty. Unfortunately, though, a limit as high as 1000 words does not really force them to focus or to learn how to be concise. I really respect the 300-word limit for this class because it forces people to be concise... like or not. As someone who is not very concise, I know I will learn new skills by writing within that limit.

At the same time, sure, I might have LOTS of things to say that don't fit into the "essay" for the class. In my opinion, that's why God made blogs, as I said in the title of this post. We have a whole Internet and endless social networks to share our thoughts with others; a class assignment is just that: a class assignment. It almost always just goes into the virtual trashcan when the class is over. Because I don't like the idea of my work, even just a class assignment, going into the virtual trashcan, I posted my essay here at the blog. Could I have said more on the topic? Sure! Did I want to? No! Instead, I wanted to tell a story, so I spent my extra time writing out my version of The Robber Bridegroom (one of the two stories I wrote about in my essay), and posted that story here at the blog - not for a class assignment. Just for me. The very first thing I did when I signed up for this class was to create this blog. In my opinion, that is the first thing any student should do for any class they are taking - don't let your learning disappear into the virtual trash can at the end of class! Create a blog to record your questions, your thoughts, your ideas, the work you do for the class. It's YOUR learning, YOUR class... and you can record that entire process in YOUR blog.

Meanwhile, I also want to say something about the reluctance so many students have in writing essays, even tiny ones just 300 words long (that happens to be the minimum for my class). I used to have two writing assignments in my online Myth-Folklore class every week: an essay, and a story retelling. Easily half the class would write exactly the minimum for the essay (when you see an essay exactly 301 words long when the word limits are 300 min - 1000 max, you know they were straining even to reach 300 words), but people would almost always write longer stories, sometimes 500 words or 700 or whatever - but always longer than the essays. As for the content of the essays, it was usually just not very interesting to read; I suspect that is because the student was bored while writing the essay. The stories, however, were always fun to read, because they always had some kind of surprise in them, some undeniably creative spark that made the story something you never would have thought of yourself - some vivid visual detail, some twist in the plot, some surprise in the characters.

Well, last year I decided the time had come to do something about this; I was bored reading the essays, the students were bored reading each other's essays, and (I suspected) they were bored writing the essays. So, I changed the essay assignment and gave the students a CHOICE: they could write an essay based on the reading as in the past, an "enrich the reading" sort of thing like what we are doing at Coursera, but with some more specific prompts (here's the assignment) OR they could write an essay based on the writing process itself, language usage, their experience as writers/readers, etc. (here's the assignment). I figured I would get maybe half and half - half the students writing traditional essays (the English majors, professional writing majors, people who felt confident writing would choose that option I thought), while the other half of the class would choose the new alternative (the business majors, engineering majors, pre-med students, etc. - in a Gen. Ed. class, there are students from all the colleges at my school, which is a great thing about the class). Imagine my surprise when.... NOBODY wrote essays. Seriously - out of over 700 weekly assignments during the semester, there were fewer than 20 essays about the reading. Basically everybody chose the other option. Why? I'm not 100% sure why, but I suspect it is because that even if they DO like essay-writing, they do that all the time in their other classes anyway, and wanted to try something different. For the most part, though, I think people don't really like writing essays about literature. Plus, these new essays about writing and language were really fun to read, vivid, creative - and they also garnered better comments from the other students who were curious to read them, too. The essays about the cartoons were the best, since the insightful intelligence of the cartoons prompted insightful and intelligent commentary from all the students (they noticed all kinds of things in the cartoons I had never even noticed myself, that's for sure). I've made various changes to my classes over the years, but this move away from the traditional essay was the single best change I've ever made. I could kick myself for being so slow to make the change! I knew for years the essays about the readings were a problem... but I wasn't brave enough to do something about it. This is a college writing class; we have to write essays about the reading, don't we? Well, sort of - but they don't have to be your typical essay, as I discovered happily last year. And, of course, the storytellings are the best thing of all; that's why the class projects are based on storytelling, not essay writing.

Now, there is a HUGE difference between my classes, which are Gen. Ed. courses required for graduation, and this Coursera class, which is totally voluntary. People are in the Coursera class presumably because they are passionate about the subject matter. So, it makes sense that people would want to do more than the assignment expects... but, as I said in the title of this blog post, that's why God made blogs. I have really enjoyed reading the blogs of people who are in the class, and I hope that more of the really serious students will make blogs of their own. It took me about 15 minutes to write the essay for the first week's assignment... I'm spending my real time writing here at the blog. For me at least, that is where the time is well spent.

Out of curiosity, I checked: I've written 1250 words here. It would certainly improve in quality if I edited it down to be 1000 words long... but it's Sunday, my last Sunday of summer vacation, so many truly fun things to do. And, it's my blog and I can do what I want to, ha ha. So 1250 words it is. :-)

18 comments:

  1. How funny that your newest post popped up in my home page, because I JUST managed to whittle down my assignment to 320. It was quite the struggle!

    Nevertheless, blogging about the process has definitely helped me get the assignment down pat. I am ready to hand it in, and also post it on my blog.

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  2. Ha ha, fantastic! I know I am going to want to read more than just the four random essays, so if people share them via their blogs, I will be really happy about that. Even if we want to read more than four essays at the class website, I don't think it will let us do that. I haven't looked at my Google Reader yet this morning, but I think I have subscribed to all the blogs people have shared, and hopefully there will be essays popping up there this weekend. Happy Sunday!!! :-)

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  3. I totally agree that essay is a strange label for the assignment. I started mine thinking of it as an essay and I had an intro that was 170 words . . . and it wasn't even the type of intro I would expect from my College Writing I and II students. Finally, I realized I should be considering it more as a reflection than an essay and that helped me restructure, so I could cut it down to a shorter assignment. I got it down to exactly 320 words and there is not a single word that I could cut out now. As someone whose last academic writing assignment was my 90+ page Masters thesis, though, I found the length for this assignment a huge challenge.

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  4. Hi Beth! As one teacher to another (I teach college writing also), I am so curious if Prof. Rabkin uses this type of assignment in the face-to-face classes he teaches also, and what process led him to use this type of writing assignment. I know I have definitely changed my ideas and expectations about writing and writing assignments over the past 10 years, and I've also changed my own feelings about writing (I enjoy writing so much more now than I used to...). Anyway, I am curious to see what the random essays will be like! Congrats on doing your Masters! :-)

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    1. I agree that it would be interesting to see how he came to the decision to use this type of assignment; I assumed that it's more of a time/convenience thing since we have to read/comment on each other's. Maybe he thought more in-depth assignments would be too daunting for peer review? But I think that shorter assignments are nice for other reasons, too. Like you said, they definitely force writers to be concise (whereas I'm always pulling teeth to get my students to develop their ideas more). I hope there was a deeper reason for wanting to keep assignments short than just time constraints. I always enjoy learning how other professors develop their assignments, so I'd love to have more info on the thought process behind these short assignments.

      I'm curious to see the essays, too! Just from skimming the discussion boards a little, everyone has such different interests in the tales, so I'm excited to see what sort of ideas come out in an assignment where people have had more time to really develop and refine ideas.

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    2. Agreed, Beth! Some people have said they wish we had had the big lecture (I guess that is coming on Tuesday? although I'm kind of confused about that, truth be told) before writing our essays, but personally I am glad that people felt inclined/compelled to follow their OWN interests, instead of letting the professor chart out the path. Even if he were to lecture for five hours straight, I don't think he would cover all the topics that people have raised in their own thinking-out-loud about these stories. :-)

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  5. I found it difficult to get my essay down to 320 words, of course, but I just cut out extra words and examples and didn't torture myself much about it. I write book reviews all the time, and I try to keep them as short as possible while still saying something. Because I never read a book review that's long. I just skim it for interesting sentences if I look at it at all. :) So I completely understand the need for short essays here. They're long enough that you can make a point, but short enough that the graders aren't as likely to skim.

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  6. EXACTLY, Rachel - in fact, I often see when students are leaving comments for each other in my classes, that when someone has written something closer to 1000 words, rather than something that is 500 or 600 words or so, the person commenting clearly has not read the whole thing... so I think as readers, we may end up appreciating the purpose of the 300-word-limit in a new way. :-)

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  7. *blush* I admit that I skimmed this blog. ;)

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  8. And skimming has its purposes... I do it all the time when reading stuff online. But Alice in Wonderland I am listening to as an audiobook right now, enjoying EACH and EVERY word! :-)

    I should add that I love short form things - fables, proverbs, epigrams. I wrote a book this summer - Brevissima: 1001 Tiny Latin Poems. (I used to be a Latin teacher and I still love Latin.) The poems in the book are TWO-LINES LONG. Short is good! I'm excited because I should be releasing the book at Lulu and in a PDF at my blog next week!!!

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  9. If you are a Professional Essay Writer you should know how to provide a concise information with an appropriate clarity.

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  10. Hmmm, I'm not a professional essay writer. Are you?

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  11. I'm commenting on this thread because, apparently, my computer will not allow me to comment on your new post. Just wanted to say, that's really cool the way you're cycling through pictures like that! You certainly know a lot about how to use blogger! :)

    I've started my Alice analysis, now. So far I'm thinking about it in terms of an allegory for puberty. But I'll see if that changes as I move further into the story.

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    1. Whoops, I did my reply to you as a separate comment (Blogger introduced these threaded comments a couple months ago and I still haven't gotten used to it). :-)

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  12. Hi Rachel, I bet that is because of the javascript in it; it sometimes makes things act a little weird. The tool I use to build those rotating image things is something a student actually created for my class years and years ago - RotateContent.com. It's not hard to use at all - I hired him to build it and the basic idea was that it had to be simple enough for ME to use, ha ha. I'm not a programmer by a long shot.

    The puberty idea fits in exactly with the identity theme I am looking at - and of course puberty is one a radical change-of-identity experience. That's definitely how I see the Alice books, as meditations on identity and reality. The root of the word "identity" is the Latin word idem, meaning "the same" (like in the word "identical") - and "identity" is the idea somehow you are always the same as yourself, that's what makes you you. But poor Alice is not the same as she was when she woke up that morning... total identity crisis, as nothing is staying the same about her, it's all changing! (And of course that happens to us grown-ups too - am I the same person I was a year ago? five years ago? ten years ago? or not...?) :-)

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  13. I found the 300 word limit somewhat difficult for adding quotes and the like in, but in the end decided not to worry about it too much. I think my essay is a little superficial but decided to give myself space to improve :) Also, this was a nice one to get 'the kitchen sink approach' out of the way as opposed to the later ones which are mainly single stories.

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    1. Very true about how Grimm forced people to make choices that won't be so complicated with the novels, where the choice to focus on a theme or character or scene won't make you feel you are just discarding the whole rest of the book, since it's all connected in a novel! :-)

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  14. Hi! I thought I'd let you know that I used your snakeskin metaphor in my most recent blog. Thanks! I'm going to post my blog on the forum thread, too, but I didn't know if you're still watching that thread...

    http://rachelreadingnthinking.blogspot.com/2012/07/alice-caterpillar-and-serpent.html

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