Who needs to think?

An Ambiguous Cupid

My colleagues and I regularly discuss the paper topics which we assign our students. We are acutely aware that nationwide a high percentage of both high school and college students plagiarize (see the Sept. 7, 2012 article in the NYT) So we worry about how we can design assignments to reduce the student temptation to scavenge the internet.

The chief weapons are student excitement and engagement. If students like what they are reading, care about the characters, are intrigued by the plot, they are less likely to see what some anonymous person thinks about the book. In addition, if students find class exciting and the discussions in class relevant and meaningful, they want the chance to expound their own ideas. I think all teachers want students to have this high level of enthusiasm. Not every student gets there all the time. Maybe a student has too much work in other classes to read carefully; maybe a student has too many co-curricular commitments; maybe a student is just downright bored by the book; maybe a student has some other things going on that make concentration on reading impossible.

As you might know from reading this blog, we teach Jane Eyre. A teacher who had retired from the school left her a treasure trove of Jane Eyre paper topics from her more than 30 years of teaching. We loved all her topics but hesitated to use them because we knew students could easily find entire papers on the subject of Jane’s independence, Rochester’s mutilation, Bertha’s madness, St. John’s oppression of Jane, etc. We are going to try a compromise. We decided to have them write the rough draft in class during one 75 minute block period and then upload the draft to Turn It In. Then the next step was to have the students revise the paper over the next day and re-upload the paper to Turn It In. Our hope is that if they just get a draft done, they will overcome the challenge of beginning and be more likely to depend upon their own analysis than seek internet assistance.

In another class, the students had to write a character analysis and then prediction paper after reading the first two parts of Cather’s O Pioneers! Here our thought was that since the student are writing part of the paper from the I-perspective, they would look to find passages and develop analysis that supported their individual predictions.

We also worry about internet temptations when we teach poetry. I love the Romantics as much as the next person (actually not really) but know only too well that a student can find an explication of Keats’ sonnet “When I Have Fears” or Wordworth’s “The World is ‘Too Much With Us.” For this reason, when I teach poetry, I tend to go for the modern stuff that appears in the New Yorker magazine — these are brand new poems and no explanatory notes or erudite commentary exists on most of them.

Or this year, I am going to try something a bit more diabolical. The third floor of our house is lined with book shelves which contain books from my graduate school days. I found an old edition of Elizabethan lyric poetry. It contains literally hundreds of poems. We are going to pull 70 poems from this anthology and each student in the eleventh grade class will get one of these lyrics and will have to write an explication of it. I already imagine the groans and frowns when this assignment gets distributed but these poems are accessible and playful and challenging but not impenetrable. Some of the poems in this anthology are famous ones such as Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” — we will not choose any of these —

but most of them are unknown and unappreciated. I doubt even Elizabethan scholars write about some of them.

I am eager to see what these students will do with their individual poems. They surprise me with the freshness of their observations which are untainted by the gobbledy gook of academic snootiness.