I think that some people who read this blog might think that I complain too much about my students and their work. Honestly, most of my students try their best to be successful, and I admire their tenacity and their work ethic. I enjoy my job, particularly when I'm able to see students learn and grow in their writing abilities. Every teacher, though, has at least one student--sometimes at least one student per class--who just doesn't seem to grasp the concepts you're trying to teach.
In my introductory literature course last semester, I worked a lot on thesis statements. I tried to suggest that students should be interpreting literary works in ways that would allow other readers to feel like they were being asked to participate in the interpretation. In particular, I warned against making the analysis too personal in nature since that can limit the audience for the essay.
We covered many different aspects that comprise different works of literature based upon the genres of fiction, poetry, and drama. I encouraged the students to consider incorporating multiple aspects in their interpretations, but I reminded them that their thesis statements would need to be unified and their paragraphs would need to be directly linked to each other and to the thesis.
All of this sounds like regular freshman composition level stuff, doesn't it?
Here's the thesis statement for one of the papers submitted by the student who struggled the most throughout the semester despite my having read and commented upon each draft and despite having gone to get additional tutoring and despite having come to my office to talk about this paper in particular: "Regardless of what the focus is a story heavily focused on one aspect uses other aspects to further the main one and the story I chose is no different. The story I chose for this assignment was Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield. I chose to analyze this story for the assignment because the character of Miss Brill interests me."
If you read this thesis, do you have any idea what the essay is going to discuss in terms of how to interpret Mansfield's story? Are you any clearer after having read those sentences as to what the main point of the essay is going to be?
You might be wondering if the essay "settled down" after the introduction and delved into the story with gusto and revealed some interesting analytical insights. What happened was each paragraph tackled a different trait of fiction, so there was a paragraph about the plot (which just retold us the sequence of what happened in the story), one paragraph about characterization (which just described the character of Miss Brill by telling us all of the things that happen to her in the story), one paragraph about the setting (which recounted each of the places where action occurs in the story), and so on.
Much of the rest of the class earned A's and B's on their essays and for their final grades. Of course, there are always C's and D's scattered throughout the roster as well, usually because students do not complete all of the work. It's seldom because they are unable to do the work or do it well; they just don't do it at all. Every now and then, though, you get a student who just cannot seem to progress beyond a certain point of understanding. It's perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of being a teacher when you cannot seem to reach a student like that.
1 comment:
When I taught high school freshman students how to write about literature, we discussed at length why it was important not to include subjective discussion in writing at introductory levels of writing. We would do a lot of prewriting and lively discussion that acknowledged their feelings about the work. Within those feelings and reactions are valuable insights. I tried to call that kind of writing the primordial ooze from which scientific writing emerges. They were able to grasp that pre-writing is only place for subjective verbiage. They understood that writing about literature was a study of "what," then "how." They got it, even at fourteen. Still, you must have some desire to "get it."
Post a Comment