Am I Missing Something?

I've not shared a lot with you about my classes this semester, but I'm still puzzling over the rough draft submitted by one of my students in the American literature course. It's the second half of American literature, from 1865 to the present, and I tend to divide the course into three historical periods. The second part of the semester covers Modernism in American literature, the period including World Wars I and II, roughly 1914-1945.

I ask students to write one essay and take one exam on each of the three periods that we cover. So the second essay assignment asks them to choose a literary work written in America between 1914 and 1945 to analyze. Sounds like a simple enough assignment, doesn't it? They get to choose the work and determine the critical approach that they want to take toward it. That's really all I ask of them.

When I received the rough drafts for this second set of papers--yes, I still read rough drafts even in my literature courses--I received one or two that were not on American literature from this period. Now, some were just mistakes that could be easily explained. The students had accidently chosen works from earlier or later than the period, but the works were written close to the Modernist era. Once I pointed this out to them, they quickly chose a different subject and were happy with the final results.

One, however, completely puzzled me. I wrote down the thesis statement because I knew I would probably want to talk about it here. This is what it said: "This essay will analyze whether or not the Bible is meant to be read as fully divine, fully human, or a mixture of both elements."

Did I fail to mention that this was a paper written for an American literature class? Did I also note that the period covered was to be 1914-1945? How could anyone so badly misinterpret an assignment to think that the Bible would be a good choice? When I asked the student why he had picked this topic, he said it was because it interested him. When I reminded him that he was supposed to be writing about some work of American literature produced during the era of Modernism, he said he had found a source from the 1930s that talked about the issue of the Bible's divinity. I gave him additional time to write another draft but told him that it had to follow the assignment guidelines more closely.

So, I ask you, am I missing something? Have I gone crazy? Am I the one who just doesn't get it?

He has since submitted an essay on a more appropriate topic for the class. I did not, however, give him credit for the rough draft since it didn't even begin to fit what I had asked the class to do. Now he's requested that I reconsider that decision. He says he did, after all, submit a rough draft even if it happened to be on the Bible. I will probably give him some points just to keep the peace, but I frankly don't feel too inclined to be generous at this point. Should I really be kind to someone who thinks that the Bible is a work of American literature written between 1914 and 1945? Or is it me who's losing touch with reality?