Part two of what I’m up to in English Three this year (sort of). 6:23PM-6:52PM, 08282023
My principal is on a real-world kick this year, which I appreciate, although I feel like there’s a tension that comes up in English: our job in that class has to be write, write, write, and then write some more. I don’t mean more assignments, I mean making sure that we have solid written work being produced year round.
As I wrote about last week, my second unit, “Thinking like a Critic” focuses on a series of short stories. After we’ve read, they produce a paper linking three of the stories together.
It’s a cool assignment. How do I make it “real world”? I don’t have time to mount the “learning to express yourself clearly in writing serves you better than just about any other real-world task I can think of” argument.
Tension one: there’s not a lot of audience for literary criticism as it is done right now. I don’t want them aiming at scholarly journals with these pieces.
Tension two: apart from intellectuals and book folks, people don’t read these sorts of literary pieces much. And my sense from college comp profs I talk to is that they’re after a more general approach to rhetoric and writing.
I’m thinking that I will pick the best eight to ten pieces the kids write and send them to my favorite critics to see what they make of them. Like spam, if even one responds, that’d be great, and would address this goal for authenticity.
Better yet, I want to write to them and ask how they’d structure the assignment. What would they ask of students? What do they put in their syllabi? After doing extensive research (eleven minutes on Google looking at different syllabuses), I found that most folks do not offer anything close to my awesome definition for their papers. So maybe I’ll stick with it:
I want you to be able to write something readable and engaging. Something that shows how deeply you’ve thought about these stories. Something that shows your ability to represent the ideas in these stories and connect them to each other. Something that shows your ability to develop an argument (something you need to say to the world) about these short stories.
Basically, something someone would want to read until the end and then, when they got there, make a noise of some sort, maybe a noise like, huh, never thought of it that way, or pfft, this person makes an interesting argument but I totally disagree, or sighhh, that was cool.
Other option for this unit:
If I had a full semester, I’d try and replicate the selection process for the best of short story collections. I’d do my sort (or I’d write to these editors and ask them if they would give me the second to last list of the selection process) and then I’d have the kids pick their eight and write the introduction. We’d set up meetings where they could deliberate over their choices, mount an argument for the pieces they’d include and why. (This would also address the internet problem; I couldn’t do this with any piece more than two years old as there is so much internet crap out there already.)
I’d need a full semester so that I could still maintain the momentum of analyzing a few stories together, modeling that process, trying different approaches as a big group.
Maybe create that as a bonus assignment, for my students who are all in for English and want an additional challenge?
Dinner is ready.
