What to do with a flawed assignment?

The paper is due tomorrow morning, so this is a really bad time to realize that the assignment's design is deeply flawed--especially since I'm the one who designed it.

I don't know what I was thinking. Well, yes I do: I welcomed the opportunity to totally revamp my freshman writing class, which was supposed to be linked in a learning community with a mass media class, but then we didn't get enough entering students interested in mass media so halfway through the summer the two classes got unlinked (delinked? antilinkified?) and I didn't feel like totally revamping my syllabus again, so I ended up with a few assignments that would be perfect for students of mass media but not so perfect for students whose interests rarely extend beyond the baseball diamond.

Some of these assignments have worked out just fine, even the one that most worried me: students had to log every contact with media over a six-hour span (not while sleeping), and then they had to spend six hours avoiding media of all types (again, not while sleeping) and keep notes on what happened. These two experiences provided evidence for a paper analyzing the influence of the media in their lives in response to some readings on the topic.

Frankly, I was really worried about this assignment: would students actually do it? Would they walk away from their smartphones, Twitter feeds, earbuds, and ambient media messages for a full six hours? Or would they skip the whole thing and lie about it? Would they turn in a seething mass of whining rants?

Thankfully, they did not. In fact, the media analysis essays were the best freshman drafts I've seen in ages, full of concrete details and interesting insights. One student couldn't find a place to eat on campus without coming face-to-face with a television screen so he sat outside and asked a friend to fetch him some supper, and others had trouble navigating through the dorms because of their classmates' constant devotion to screens beaming media at every angle.

So that worked well, but tomorrow's paper is another animal entirely: each student has been assigned a lengthy article from an anthology of recent prize-winning magazine articles, and they have to find coverage of the same event in two other types of media and write a brief rhetorical analysis comparing the impact of various media on the shaping of the stories. They have to present their conclusions in a brief in-class presentation, and then later they have to do further research on their topics and write a longer paper evaluating the credibility of the three versions of the story and arguing that one is most credible. So that makes three separate assignments related to the same material: a short rhetorical analysis, an informal in-class presentation, and a longer argumentative researched essay.

Sounds doable, yes? Except the schedule does not allow for any feedback on drafts or revisions for the shorter essay. They've had this assignment long enough to have sought out feedback outside of class, either from me, from their classmates, or from the Writing Center, but how many first-semester students will do that? 

And tonight I've been re-reading some of the articles in preparation for the first student presentations tomorrow, and I realize just how hard my students are working. The articles they're analyzing are long, yes, but they're also complex, sophisticated, and nuanced in a way that will stretch their minds and abilities and sheer endurance beyond anything else they've done in my class.

So now it's panic time--for me if not for my students. Am I asking too much? What if they bomb the essays? Should I give them the chance to revise?

I often complain about the amount of hand-holding and spoon-feeding we do with first-year students, but now I'm worried that I've tossed the babies out of the boat without a life-vest, just to be mangling some metaphors. Maybe they'll surprise me and swim like Mark Spitz--but if not, I'd better be ready to toss 'em a lifesaver.

Mmm, butter rum! My favorite flavor!