Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Take your recycling somewhere else
The stack of freshman papers on my desk reminds me why I dislike assigning literary analysis papers to beginning writers: many students think it's so darn clever to recycle papers written for high school English classes. I don't really need to read the same old tired ideas about how Gatsby represents the elusive American Dream and "The Road Less Travelled" is all about the joys of nonconformity, with touching examples from the students' own lives. Any assignment that produces this much recycled nonsense is clearly deeply flawed, but where did I go wrong? Back to square one. It's time to shut down this recycling center.
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1 comment:
Ugh, sounds painful! In lower level classes, I tend to give pretty specific type assignments, and they're focused on a small moment of text, an "unimportant" character, or a prop, often.
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