Tuesday, October 13, 2009

stop giving your students these dumb assignments!

A handful of English profs are assigning students the task of interviewing one of their professors about the kinds of writing involved in their work. This was do-able for about the first 3 semesters and 20 students. It has increasingly become a huge burden. I feel like creating some homework that will force my cultural anthropology students to pester all the English faculty (day, night, by email, phone, etc.) for an interview (10 questions at least) about how the field of English--lit, composition, whatever--has adapted to new electronic media, texting, and the proliferation of acronyms and emoticons. I'm going to make it worth 50% of the students' course grade so that they are just desperate to get these interviews. In fact, I'm going to insist on one from a lecturer and one from a TT'er. Please join me in this act of "reciprocity across the curriculum."

2 comments:

RC said...

Blogger needs a "Like" button.

P said...

Our comp director has done the same thing (so another guilty English department). FWIW, I found the entire exercise somewhat lame. Can't imagine that many outside of English would want to keep participating.