Wow, do my students work hard! How do I know? Because I promised my California Literature students that I would post a sample minitheme on the course web page, and I've just finished writing it. You wouldn't think 500 words about some aspect of the portrayal of place in a work of literature could wear me out, but again I say: Wow.
I've written sample assignments before, but usually I take the easy way out and make everything up. It has given me great joy over the years to write a series of sample essays, proposals, annotated bibliography entries, and other texts on the thrilling topic of lawn statues. I have created characters like Bob Blastoid, whose lawn-statue addiction turned to tragedy when two-year-old Darcy Devlin got lost amongst the gnomes and geese and wandered, dazed, for days before police finally rescued her. I have asserted with a straight face that historians trace the proliferation of cement lawn goose back to prehistoric times, when men attempting to produce the first cement lawn geese instead created the pyramids, the Sphinx, and Stonehenge--and I have cited every source, including mythical statistics on lawn statue proliferation produced by the Federal Bureau of Aesthetics (FBA).
That kind of writing is fun and effective, engaging students in tasks relevant to various classes and topics, but today I wanted to produce a sample paper that followed the guidelines for the assignment and used real information. That's right: a real analysis of a real work, using real evidence in support of a real thesis--all in under 500 words.
I did it, but writing a focused and substantive essay in so few words was a real challenge. My California Lit students will tackle this kind of task almost every week next semester, and if they work as hard as I did today, they're bound to ace the assignment and perhaps the class. I'm not sure I quite aced it, but I'll give myself an A for effort. Extra credit for getting it in early?
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