Steal This Idea

Last class, we offered some ideas for classroom activities connected in some way to the idea of performance in the classroom. Many of them are connected to A Comedy of Errors, but they could easily be adapted to other plays, and even to other modes like poetry or fiction.  You asked for them to be available electronically, so voila.

As you think about these activities, consider what aspects of literary analysis sneak in (to use David’s phrase) to the different approaches. We discussed how many of them are designed to get students working on close reading, but it’s probably more apt to think of these as exercises in rereading that offer students a way to get past that first reading that Blau calls necessary but not necessarily valuable. Emily’s exercise focuses on character, Kassidy’s work with genre, Tricia’s introduces students to performance history, Molly’s explores a literary theory concept. Clarissa and Justin have students think closely and carefully about language, whether through “telegramming” or memorizing.

These performance-oriented exercises offer students an authentic opportunity to collaborate—and collaborations that enhance the learning of the whole class. Amanda’s divide and conquer exercise allows the class to close read a section of the play and then, as the groups perform, see a condensed overview of the play as a whole.

Finally, many of these exercises all ask students to become physically active in the classroom, another (often neglected) form of learning that is likely to engage students who are not the usual suspects raising their hands from their seats in the classroom.  In his classic work on multiple intelligences, Howard Gardner identified seven distinct types of intelligences we all possess in one form or another, and urged teachers to draw on as many of these as possible in the classroom in order to engage as many students as possible. One of these is bodily-kinesthetic; people with a high level of this intelligence:

Bodily-kinesthetic - use the body effectively, like a dancer or a surgeon. Keen sense of body awareness. They like movement, making things, touching. They communicate well through body language and be taught through physical activity, hands-on learning, acting out, role playing. Tools include equipment and real objects. (http://www.tecweb.org/styles/gardner.html)

I can see no good reason to leave students who love to move and act and role play out of the learning of the literature classroom; drama gives us a perfect opportunity to work this intelligence into our classrooms.   Many of you did this, whether explicitly through role play or improv, or subtly by having students get up and move.  So now, without further ado, I present your lessons.

Emily Moeck

Group Therapy

A performance exercise to be used for Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors—or any dramatic work—to help students understand underlying character motivations and desires through close readings of specific scenes.

Genre: Drama

Course Level: introductory to intermediate

Student Difficulty: moderate

Teacher Preparation: moderate

Class Size: medium to large

Semester Time: after full text has been read

Writing Component: in class

Close Reading: medium

Estimated Time: 50 to 60 minutes

Exercise

Comedy of Errors is a play that takes place over the course of a single day filled with emotional reveals and scathing affairs. When looking past the play’s comedy, emotional trauma runs deep.

We have EGEON who is about to be killed for traveling to the wrong city in search of his family. EMILIA who chose a life of celibacy after having her husband and sons torn away from her. The ANTIPHOLUS’ who both somewhat yearn for their lost family and also undergo strange identity crises throughout the course of the play. The DROMIOS who have also been torn away from their family and are physically abused by their masters. ADRIANA who has long felt her husband’s distance and has potentially committed adultery for the first time. And LUCIANA who lives with her sister and her husband in a life of solitude and potential jealousy.      

This exercise is meant to get students to think more about these underlying character traumas and how they surface in the characters speech/actions of the play (intrinsically or extrinsically).

Divide the class up into five groups and assign them each a scene from a different act of the play to re-read before class (take time picking scenes where the potential for characters’ emotional depth is visible), keeping in mind the characters’ development within that scene in relation to the rest of the play. Tell each group they must assign themselves each to characters within the scene. If your groups are larger than the amount of characters in each scene, they may also assign themselves to characters within the play that are connected later with characters in the scene. For example, if a group is working on Act 2, Scene 1 (where we meet Adriana and Luciana) it would make sense for additional group members to assign themselves to Antipholus or Dromio of Ephesus.

For more introductory classes, you may want to assign the roles for the students.   

Pass out a prepared handout with 4-5 questions that probe into the emotional arcs of the characters. For example: What matters most to this character in this moment? What emotions are driving the character the most here? What is this character hiding/not saying about themselves/others? What would make this character most happy? Over the next 15 minutes, have each group work together close reading their scenes and briefly answering the questions for their own characters.

After students have filled out their worksheets, have them spend the next 10 minutes roll playing as their characters as they talk amongst themselves. Their goal is to uncover the other character’s inner motivations through dialogue. They might start with asking other members of the group: It hurt me when you… I know you said, but it felt like you meant… Why are you always?... How come you never?...I’m scared you’ll find out about… While they perform in their groups, feel comfortable walking around and interjecting/prodding into their dialogue from a “therapist” perspective.

Next, have the groups rearrange themselves by characters instead of scenes. For example, all the ADRIANAs in one group, EMILIAs in another, etc. Hopefully, what should emerge are groups with their character from different emotional moments within the play. For the next 15/20 minutes, have them share with each other their answers from the handout. Have them discuss how the character’s emotional arc/answers to the questions developed over the course of the play.  

Finally, if time/engagement permits (additional 15/20 minutes), have each group of like-characters map out their character’s emotional arc on the board to share with the rest of the class. Where did they start the day and where did they end? What emotional baggage did they start the play with? What emotional baggage remains at the end? What new baggage might they have to deal with after the curtains close?

Reflection

The goal of this exercise is to get students to actively engage with interpreting text and characterization, getting them to think about how the “part” plays into the “whole” within a dramatic arc. At the end of class, they should feel more comfortable with the complexities of the text, while also understanding how round characters develop within plot.

“15-minute Shakespeare”

Amanda Rose

Genre: Shakespeare

Course Level: Any

Student Difficulty: Easy

Teacher Preparation: Minimal

Class Size: Minimum 15 students

Semester Time: Any

Writing Component: Optional

Close Reading: High

Estimated Time: Roughly 60 minutes

Exercise:

Students will be divided into five groups (at least 3 students per group) and each group will be assigned one act of the play. The groups must create a three-minute version of their act, using only Shakespeare’s words within the play. When each group has prepared, a 15-minute version of The Comedy of Errors will have been created. Students can then perform their scenes one by one.

Afterwards, the class can discuss their process in creating the scene. There are many questions that could be discussed, and this could be a class-wide discussion or a reflective assignment for homework.

Questions for discussion:

What did you most struggle with as a group?

Why did you choose the lines you did and why do you consider them to represent the entire scene?

How did you adjust based on the environment and amount of characters in the scene?

Did the acting process go as well as you might have hoped?

Is there anything in the scene you wish you had included?

Did we include all the essential components to the story?

What would have been most helpful to add?

Kassidy Kelley

Genre Work & Acting Style

Assignment: Partner with your seat neighbor, and each pair will be assigned an Act 1-5. Skim over your act together and find a scene that could be interpreted in a different genre, perhaps tragedy or history—but creative straying from those categories is allowed.

Example-- Perhaps S. Antipholus declaration of love to Luciana is a tragic deathbed confession-- complete with crying, falling, and a dramatic final word. Or a haunting horror scene, with ghosts/witches a la Macbeth.

Take 10 minutes to adapt your scene’s genre and be ready to perform it. Pay attention to tone, gesture, dramatic acting, and stress of language. Each pair will perform their scene—if you need an additional actor: get creative (or ask me to step in)!

Questions to Consider:

·      Are there specific words or phrases that support comedic interpretation? Can they change meaning?

·      How important is established genre? Does it modify or influence how you interpret the play as you read?

·      What scenes from your act were easily adapted to a new genre? What scenes were most difficult? Why?

·      Did you change words or phrases of the original text? If you didn’t, what did you use to convey a new meaning?

Justin Saret

            For this lesson, you’ll need a short segment of snappy (if not necessarily funny) back-and-forth dialogue. Ask students to try memorizing it the night before. In the first part of the class, get students comfortable with performing the text from memory. Pair them up and have them rehearse – but emphasize that they are not preparing for a performance, but rather a game. The second part: have each pair come to the front of the class to perform the dialogue. However, they will, at your signal, remove one line of dialogue and instead improvise a line – then continue the dialogue as usual. Invite them to say something that honestly comes to mind, not to try to craft something “clever” – to follow whatever impulse of sound or sense is at the tip of their tongue. (It might not make sense!) It would be worth experimenting, also, with improvising two lines – consecutive or not – or building the number of lines improvised, working backwards from the end, until only the first line initiates a whole new scene. This exercise also might be worth trying with a piece of prose, with the students performing alternating sentences – just pick something with a distinctive sound and a tight series of points.

My expectation is that students would, at least, get something like the experience of paraphrasing – attention to both what the words mean in general, and what particularly about them makes them fit. They’ll also encounter some semi-lucid snippets of criticism, made with whatever associative, affective, rhythmic impulses their peers have rattling around in their heads. And then, of course, they’ll get to have the experience of participating in the collaborative act of improvisation – even if it’s only one line, the build-up and response to that line will shift in the moment.

Clarissa Eaton

Telegramming

An exercise that uses rephrasing and movement to examine the importance of language in a play.

Genre: Drama

Course level: Intermediate or advanced

Teacher preparation: low

Class size: small

Writing component: minimal

Close reading: high

Time required 30 – 50 minutes

Lesson suggestion adapted from Miriam Gilbert “Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance.” 

This exercise has two parts.  For the first part, choose a long section of speech – one which appears to be lengthy and wandering or could be interpreted in differing ways. Each student should have a copy of the section that can be marked up. Ask students to work together to reduce this speech to the shortest amount of words possible that still convey the message they believe the speaker is attempting to give. This should be a short examination allowing them to acquire first impressions of the section’s purpose.

Each group will then choose one speaker to present their shortened speech, using as much emotion and movement as possible to convey what they see as the primary message.

In a short debrief discussion first examine differences in message that might arise.  For example, why did group A emphasize a feeling of desperation while group B portrayed anger?

For the second part return to the original lines. Given time, it is ideal to break the original lines into sections that would include hand gestures, body movement, changes of expression, and changes in tone and delivery. Again, the students should use as much emotion and movement as the scene allows. Ask for a volunteer to deliver the speech incorporating these notes.

The exercise then accomplishes two goals. First, the students will understand the central point of the speech. Second, by reintroducing the original speech, with greater consideration and detail, the student will notice how the language advances the message and adds nuance.  Gilbert says: “By first reducing a speech to its central point… the telegram allows students to see first what is central … and then how the language which seems unnecessary is actually useful to the speaker”. Students could identify different fine distinctions in the language in which interpretation would depend upon choice of delivery style. This work will allow students to collaborate and closely interpret how to convey they meaning they see in the lines.  Close reading is necessary in the second part to add physicality to the scene. An additional benefit in first depriving the group of complex language then restoring it, is that it dispels the fear many students feel when approaching Shakespeare’s works. Simply encouraging a minimal message, which may contain a bit of humor all its own, will make Shakespearean language more approachable.

Molly Booth

Model Lesson: Emplotment

Age: middle school+

Teaching: Paul Ricoeur’s narrative concept Emplotment

For: I’ve used this for plays, but I think it’s transferable and could be adapted for other kinds of narratives.

You’ll need: a way to write so the students can see. A chalkboard, easel, etc. I think easiest is a white board and a dry erase marker.

Objective: This is a simple activity, but all students I’ve done it with have responded really well. It’s a quick way to understand how writers construct a narrative out of a story. It also helps students recall/understand the plot of the play.

Activity:

1.     Draw a horizontal line on the white board. Somewhere toward the beginning and end of the line, draw two vertical lines and label “play begins” and “play ends.”

2.     Ask students to list the basic plot of the play, and draw vertical lines through the horizontal line to signify each event. Label the lines with funny shorthand. I.E. “Antipholus S. <3’s Luciana.”

3.     After that, ask students to list everything we kow that happens before the actual play begins. For example, in Comedy of Errors, they could list the twins being born and separated, Antihpilous E. marrying Adriana, etc. Write all of these in a big cloud before your “play begins” line.

4.     Then ask them to list everything that happens during the play that we don’t see on stage. For example: “Adriana and Antipholus S. dine.” Write these underneath the horizontal line.

5.     Discuss with the group why the playwright chose to show those specific scenes from the story. Ask why they might’ve left out the ones they did. Ask how the play would be different if they’d chosen different scenes.

6.     Tell students that choosing the scenes from the story to show the audience is constructing a narrative. French narrative philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls the act of choosing moments from the story emplotment.

7.     As a fun bonus activity, ask students to hypothesize what might’ve happened once the play ended. Write these in a big cloud after the “play ends” line.

Patricia Case

Commedia Del Arte Exercise

This activity is great if used before reading any play that has been heavily influenced by Commedia Del Arte, in a high school or college classroom. It is an introduction to the form of improvised comedic theater which originated in Italy in the early 16th century and had a sizeable influence on comedies following that time. I’ll be using Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, in which the character types and stock gags (Lazzi) are especially distinct. This exercise could be used either before or after reading the play, but it may be more useful if read before. It gives the slapstick and pun-heavy comedy of the play some context as a received form, and students will be able to make connections between the Commedia Del Arte character types and gags to those in the play.

You will need a handout including a list of stock gags (Lazzi), and descriptions of the four different types of characters (servants, old men, lovers, and captains), and scraps of paper with potential scenes written on them (these can be either prepared by the instructor before class, or written down by students at the beginning of class.)

Students will either take the handouts home to read and familiarize themselves with as homework or read them in class. Once the introductory handouts have been looked over and discussed for a short time, the instructor should ask students to write down potential scenes if she has not already brought them with her. These scenes should be simple and could be anything - someone is trying to order food at a restaurant, someone has lost her keys in a parking lot, someone is getting her hair cut. Once you have these scenes, break the students up into groups of two or three. Hand out the scenes or have students pick them out of a hat. Each student should pick a character type and a stock gag to use, and they should design a short scene (3-4 minutes) in which they stick to the characteristics of their type, and each person must use one lazzi. Remind students that even in these short scenes, we should be able to tell which character type they have chosen, and how their characters feel about each other. Their short scenes should also have a beginning, middle, and end. Students should have 10-15 minutes to design their scenes. This seems like a short amount of time, but you can remind students that Commedia Del Arte also usually involved an element of improvisation, so as long as they know basically what their story and gags and characters are, they can plan to improvise a bit. Once their time is up, have students perform their scenes for each other. After each scene, students should ask the performers any questions they might have about the scene before the next group performs.

This may be a good exercise to use alongside an exercise about more modern slapstick, in order to show where the form came from before The Comedy of Errors as well as where it has gone since. Showing a clip from Charlie Chaplin and/or Home Alone if there is extra time at the end of the class period could bring this lesson full circle, and might help students to put the play in context more successfully, as well as give students a great deal of connections to make with the characters and gags as they read.

This plan adapted from the one on Paul Hricik’s blog: https://shakespeareanstudent.wordpress.com/activities-for-teachers

Creative Assignments: What They Teach Students and What They Teach Us

Thinking about creative responses to literary texts, Tricia wrote:

I'm not sure this kind of open-ended assignment would be possible to assign very often in a literature course, since I assume it would be difficult to consistently grade such vastly different assignments, and I imagine some teachers and heads of departments might not think creative options like these allow for enough literary analysis.

While I think she’s right that some people might see so-called “creative” responses to literary texts as lacking rigor, I’ve found that they can serve as highly effective means for students to enter into a literary text in deep and meaningful ways that in fact can lead to greater depth of analytical understanding than might be unlocked by more traditional teaching methods.

For inspiration I think those of us teaching at the college level and beyond should look to our colleagues in middle and high school.  Faced with groups of students whose exposure to and interest in the texts at hand—not to mention their reading skills—may be widely varied, great middle and high school teachers routinely incorporate creative activities and assignments into their classes, even in the face of strict requirements for teaching to standardized tests that tend to crush creativity rather than inspire it.

A useful entry for those of us who feel wedded to teaching standard literary analysis and argument, especially in our writing assignments, might be through activities and writing tasks that focus on rewriting the text at hand in various ways. These could include rewriting a piece of the text in a different genre or mode, for instance changing a play to a short story or rewriting a sentimental scene from a novel as a scene of Gothic horror; asking students to recast a passage through another point of view; having students write alternative endings; or inviting them to reimagine the setting of a text as something entirely new. This kind of rewriting is an activity many of our students engage in on their own, as the plethora of online fan fiction sites demonstrates.  But just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s new; engaging with writing by attending to mode was a cornerstone of the composition curriculum in the past. Applying this technique to literary texts is not just fun; it’s illuminating for students and directly transferable to more traditional analytic work.

All of these activities are based in close reading, and once we have students’ creative minds engaged with the text it’s a short step to framing the analytical work required for successful creative projects in more traditional terms. What is key here, I think, is the teacher’s ability to help students identify and understand the analytical work they are already doing and explain how this work can get re-presented  (or perhaps re-re-presented) in the genre of academic writing. Isolating the formal qualities of academic writing is key to this process. Students who have been thinking in terms of genre already through their creative work are likely to have more to say about the formal essay—and find it more interesting as a form—than they might if the essay were just one more standard writing assignment for English class.  

Knowing Your Audience, or, Teaching to the Whole Class

Apart from graduate seminars (and sometimes even in graduate seminars), we’ll all encounter classes of students whose experiences in, abilities for and inclinations toward working closely with literature vary widely—sometimes wildly. In a diverse public university setting, where students can’t always march along taking classes in order from one level to the next, the range can be especially pronounced. 

Here’s an example. I often teach an undergraduate literature class on the 200 (nominally, second-year) level that both serves as one of three required prerequisite classes for English majors and fulfills a university distribution requirement.  This combination means that the class attracts a range of majors (and potential majors) from across the university, all of whom have an interest in fulfilling a requirement, and perhaps some of whom register for the class because they are interested in American literature. Perhaps.

But because of the nature of our campus, and especially because we have a large number of transfer students, the English department decided that students could take advanced classes in the major after having taken two of the three required prerequisites.  So every roster will  contain at least one or two advanced English majors for whom this is the last class they must take in order to graduate.

How do we teach such a range of students to read, discuss, and write about literary texts? How do we maintain interest among the dedicated and skilled English majors without alienating the students for whom the material is unfamiliar?  The best approach to this that I’ve found is to see the range as an opportunity rather than as a problem.

First, some general principles. Set a bar high enough so that everyone will be engaged in working hard right away, even the most experienced students. Begin with (or stick with) frequent low-stakes writing assignments so that the bright but inexperienced students can learn the ways of the discipline without being penalized at the beginning. Give students the opportunity to revise graded work, so that they have more control over the outcome of the semester. Frequently change the way class meetings work—rearrange seating, incorporate movement, ask students to read aloud, vary group sizes and members—in order to engage as many learning styles as possible. 

Finally, while it might be convenient in a short essay to divide the students into groups, in reality each student is an individual with unique experience and interest in the material.  For me, this underscores the necessity of taking the time to get to know them individually over the course of the semester.  When I taught composition, I would routinely cancel class in favor of individual conferences for each major paper assignment; why would these individual meetings matter less in a literature class? 

Individual conferences make a difference to all students—the struggling student who reveals a personal or family difficulty that is making it difficult to study; the middling student who labored with an undiagnosed learning disability and still lacks confidence; the advanced student who wants to think about graduate school but hasn’t found a way to put a meeting with a faculty member on her calendar.  But they also make a difference to our own engagement with our students as people. If I had not required student conferences, I never would have known that one of my students drove the Zamboni in the hockey rink for his work-study job—or that his dad, a Zamboni driver by trade, harbored a passion for Willa Cather. I never would have known that one of my brightest students had been a semi-successful touring rock musician but now was finding himself drawn to, of all things, reading and writing.  And I never would have heard one of my very best students of all time tell me about how, as an African American girl growing up in the deep South, she had been labeled “ineducable” and trained as a domestic servant.

Knowing my students, even a little bit, makes me a better teacher of literature, not just because I can cater to their interests, but because I can understand what literature means for them—that it really IS meaningful. That can be hard to see from the front of the classroom. But in a climate where it feels like few people care about our subject, it’s worth letting our students remind us how much it matters to them.

Unburdening Yourself About Feedback

Though study after study has found that students can only absorb a limited amount of teacher feedback on their writing, many of us have trouble changing a habit of commenting in detail and at length on our students’ papers. I’m finding in my own practice that curbing my urge to comment excessively on my students’ writing has led to better and more thoughtful reading practices on my end, and better writing—and even, better learning about writing—on the part of my students.

What we know from research on writing is that, when it comes to feedback, less can mean more student learning. Reading student work carefully and then—before marking up the paper— identifying an issue or two for them to work on as they revise or as they think toward the next assignment.  When we step back even briefly from the page to think about the assignment as a whole, and especially about the assignment in the context of the course, certain patterns often emerge as the most important work for the student to attend to in a revision or in a subsequent assignment. Identifying and explaining just one of these technical issues resonates better with the student than too much feedback can.  If they can work on the issue and fix it, they’re going to remember it, possibly forever.  I can still remember being taken to task for using too many commas in my writing and think about this every time I write. I truly know the difference between when to use “which” and “that.”  I believe in the power of the topic sentence to power an argument.  Silly examples, maybe—but attending to issues like these has helped me become a far better reader of my own writing even as the experience has convinced me that focused comments are the way to go with my own students.

The best thing about this practice for me as a teacher is that it frees up my mind to ask better questions of the authors and to respond more positively to their ideas as they develop. I talk openly to students about my commenting style and why I do it; I want them to understand that careful attention to them as writers doesn’t mean spilling a lot of red ink (electronic or otherwise) on every page. Instead it means focusing on their particular patterns of error, and beyond that, thinking about the ideas they are presenting. I hope that targeting my comments will help students understand that what I really care about in their writing isn’t comma splices or misplaced modifiers (though I do care about those things) but the quality of their thinking and the strength of their expression.  

The success of this practice hinges on students having the opportunity to revisit and revise their work.  By the time they reach the last assignment of the term, it’s usually too late for the student to do anything about their work unless they plan to revise it for some reason, perhaps for a conference presentation, a writing sample, or a longer research project.  If the final paper has a future, and comments can think toward whatever specific future lies ahead, great.  And they can still be brief and targeted.  Otherwise the comments that matter so much to us are likely never to be read.

Can you believe the professor let him say that?

or

What if student comments are way off base?

An interesting question keeps arising in our conversations about running class discussion in an open and generative, as opposed to a task-oriented way: what do you do with a student comment that’s way off base—or even wrong?

(Disclaimer: This entry is not going to deal with responses that are bigoted or offensive in nature. That’s for another day.)

First, let me confess that, while I don’t believe that there are no wrong answers, I think that if the discussion question is truly open—as in, “I never really know what to do with this passage in The Scarlet Letter, and I’d love to talk about it together to see if we get farther together than I did on my own,”—then there are so many possibly right (or at least potentially interesting) answers that it would be hard for a student to be absolutely wrong.

Given the anxiety many students feel about speaking in class at all, it seems far more likely that the student hasn’t fully formulated his or her thought, or that the wrong-seeming response betrays a deeper misunderstanding of the text, than that the student is being wrong on purpose. Far better in the first case for the instructor to try to draw the student out more completely so that the response becomes comprehensible—and perhaps in the process more interesting, useful, or even illuminating.  Asking a student to rephrase or “say more about that,” turning the question to the class to see if others share the view, or perhaps asking the class to think about where in the text might there be evidence to support the surprising contention you’ve all just heard are all ways to allow an unexpected answer to become the most exciting part of a class.

As the old saw goes: the more you learn, the less you know—so it may in fact be easier for more experienced instructors to let go enough of their own ideas about a text to go to a new, if odd and surprising, place with it. But this requires us to believe a few important things: first, that the text can yield itself in vastly different ways to different readers, and that the excitement of reading with others is expanding what we already know, think, or feel about a text.  It requires us to be clear in our minds, as Curzan and Damour remind us, about the difference between a real discussion and a task-based conversation, in which there really are right or wrong answers, and where the point of the class conversation is to have the students actively coming to these answers themselves rather than quietly taking notes while the instructor lectures.

Becoming open to unexpected responses also requires us to believe that interpreting literary texts is a skill—or even an art—that gets better with practice. We wouldn’t expect a beginning biology student to be expert at lab skills before taking a class; we wouldn’t expect dancers to know all of the steps before taking the floor.  Sure, some people have naturally steadier hands with the pipette, and other fortunate people have an innate sense of rhythm. But they still need to practice, and so do our students.  And learners need to have a place where they can make mistakes and not be made to feel like the skill in question—in this case, finding pleasure in coming to a deeper understanding of a literary text and sharing that insight with other interested people—is off-limits to them. I think the literature classroom should be just such a place.

Asking for Something Ridiculous

Last night, our model lesson was ridiculous.  I’m not being judgmental here; we were asked to bring two disparate literary works—a fairly straightforward poem by Philip Levine and a freewheeling postmodern dialogue by Donald Barthelme—together to illuminate one another. We were also given a set of rules to govern our work. One of the rules was that our response had to be ridiculous, nonsensical, ludicrous—kind of crazy. 

At first it seemed like the exercise might flop. The class was quiet, perplexed. People stared at the rules as if they would shed any light on the task we were to perform. Though we were given the option to work with a partner or group, everyone quietly focused, alone, on the task at hand, wrestling with a request we did not fully understand from a teacher whom we wanted to succeed.  And when we looked up ten minutes later, we were eager to share our ridiculous analyses and excited about what we been able to do with this unfamiliar assignment. The atmosphere of the classroom was engaged, energized, fun.

When we talked about our responses to the assignment after it was over, we all reported feeling skeptical, resistant, and even overtly hostile toward the assignment. We’re all good students trained to approach literature seriously, and no one, it seems, wanted to mix literary analysis and ridiculousness.  And yet, good students that we are, we all settled into the task, and when we did, we found that we learned far more from the assignment than we ever expected we would—far more, perhaps, than if we had done something more traditional.  All of us reported that the exercise made us see more in the original poem than we had when we used our usual methods of reading, and I think it’s fair to say that we found the activity itself exciting once we just went with it and threw ourselves into the work.

During our debrief, someone suggested that this activity might work well with less advanced students, students, that is, whose expectations for a class on poetry were less set in concrete, and that might well be true. But what the experience got me thinking about was how ridiculous some of the analytical tasks we assign—or the exercises we come up with to help students heighten their understanding of different aspects of literary texts—must seem to students when they first encounter our requests.

I’m not thinking here of particularly outside-the-box assignments; I’m thinking of the basic tasks of our field: annotating a passage; seeing patterns of language in a text; seeing how the details we notice help us to build an extended analysis.  When we ask students to do these tasks, we can be reasonably sure that some of them will be familiar with what we are asking, and will complete the task assigned. But how many others might see the instructions to an annotation assignment as truly bizarre? And yet, if they trust the instructor, students are likely to try to follow the assignment’s request and grapple with the unfamiliar task. 

And when they do, perhaps we need to be able to meet these efforts with the same spirit we met one another’s crazy responses to the poetry assignment—with pleasure, encouragement, applause. We did a strange task; we were brave enough to share our wild responses, and, most importantly, I think, we agreed that the assignment had broken through our usual responses and made us think anew. With students whose skills at literary analysis are less polished, shouldn’t we meet their efforts to do the ridiculous things we ask them to do with the same spirit?

Only by risking ourselves creatively and intellectually will we grow. This is true for us; it’s true for our students as well. But it’s much more fun and productive to take those risks in an environment where even our first fumbling attempts are seen as steps toward intellectual growth rather than as a dispiriting measure of how far we have to go.

Teaching vs. Sorting

If a student’s intellect can’t be measured with a number—or a letter—then what can grades do? What are they for? Clearly they are an attempt to account for something—how well a student has completed an assigned task; how much information they have successfully regurgitated on demand; how well they have been able to apply equations or theorems or analytical tools to unfamiliar data.  The student performs, and the teacher assesses. End of grading story.

Except we all know that it’s not the end of the story, but rather the beginning of the way in which grades begin to iron out individuality and sort students into categories, a process with negative consequences for teaching and learning.  What happens after the grade has been applied and digested by the teacher and by the student?

When a student receives a grade, their reaction to it will depend in part on how the assessment fits into or diverges from their prior experiences.  If the student is accustomed to receiving high grades and gets an A, great. Sort of. All is as it should be and the student continues to do whatever he or she has always done to succeed, not reflecting on the process until years later (if they happen to become a teacher) or perhaps never reflecting upon it at all. If a student accustomed to lackluster grades gets yet another, what would inspire them to think they might be capable of more? A student used to high marks can find a low mark so upsetting that the grade itself is all they can remember from the course (I’m guilty of this one in my own student life). A student used to low marks who receives a higher-than-expected grade may feel either that it’s anomalous, that the teacher has made a mistake or, indeed, that the teacher him or herself is not smart enough to know what kind of (bad) student he or she is dealing with.

As a teaching assistant in graduate school, I can remember being told in an early TA training session not to be afraid that students would get upset about earning, say, a C on a composition essay. “You all,” the trainer told us, “are A students. You’re used to getting As. Believe me, a C for them isn’t nearly as upsetting as a C would be for you.”  Sadly, she was at least a little bit right.

But the trainer’s comment points to the bigger problem I’ve found with grading individual assignments: grading tends to make me sort students into types. A students, B students, C students, the hopeless—even from very early assignments.  This gets back to an issue I’ve discussed before: the A students already know how to succeed in the work of the class, yet the classroom should still be a place where they are challenged to learn and grow. The others get lumped in groups from which, mathematically, they may never emerge, no matter how amazing their later work becomes.

When I am grading a big stack of papers and come across one from a student that I already know will write a terrific paper, I will slide it lower in the stack as something to look forward to as I slog through the pile. But my favorite grading moments are when I stumble upon a terrific response from an unexpected voice—one I had previously classified as unlikely to produce much of interest. Philosophically, I believe that most people are capable of producing excellent work, but practically, I confess that grading seems to make even the possibility of growth all the more elusive.