Who here has had any luck teaching students to write? Come on, be honest. And if so, please tell me how you’ve done it.
Every semester I start with the best intentions. I’ll go over writing for several days. I’ll let them do re-writes. I’ll painstakingly edit their papers. Every semester the numbers get me down. There’s too much to do. How much content can I sacrifice to teach students to write? Reading forty 5-6 page papers once is enough, but the re-writes too? Come on.
This semester I’m trying something new. Taking a page (if not a chapter) out of Lendol Calder’s Uncoverage, this semester I’m teaching my “Religious History of America” class around a series of chronologically progressing questions. I’ve discussed the method before, but what’s emerging is the opportunity to work with students on writing.
The class structure lends itself to it: five separate three-week sessions, with each section requiring a short 3-4 page response paper. This gives me ample time to work through content (the first two weeks of each section), then primary sources (the first two sessions of week 3) then writing (throughout, although each session is capped by a 3-4 page response).
The short papers do their part too. Writing 5-6 pages per essays is a bit of a bear for students (one I remember from my undergraduate days, long before TXT messaging). Equally compelling: they are easier to grade.
Plus, the students are forced to fine-tune their arguments, learn how to substantiate a claim, and be brief. Brevity, of course, forces them to think through their essays beforehand and then edit them afterward. We’ll see how far they/I come with this, but I think I’ll come farther with this class than with any before. And I won’t sacrifice too much content to do it.
I’m doing this again for sure. I think.
Oh, and if you’re wondering, the first question was: “Were we founded as a Protestant nation?” The second: “Was the Market Revolution or the First Amendment responsible for the tremendous religiosity on display in the first half of the 19th century?”
love the questions! the second one makes me think of the codified principles of the LDS under Joseph Smith and how religious liberty was one of their founding principles (which is unique, I think, for a church to state up front). I’ll post next week about the writing for the survey.
Kevin: I too love the Big Questions. Please keep posting them. I’m monitoring your progress, guinea-pig style, to see if it will work for me down the line. – TL
If your students’ basic writing skills are really low, it can be helpful to give them a template for the first essay (especially if it’s short!) I think it’s especially useful for students who have no idea what an essay should sound like. Providing them with the form helps them to focus and think through the content and their ideas.
I did this once with a group of students who had a hard time writing individual sentences — let alone an essay. It was a short paper (750 words, I think?). I provided them with the wording/rhetorical moves they needed to write a thesis, introduce quotations, and analyze them, and they had to fill in the rest. It worked out better than just telling them what a thesis was or what a topic sentence looked like because they actually had to do it themselves!
Tim: no problem. I’ll keep them coming. FYI: the third one is “In what ways, if any, has immigration altered American religious life?” They are reading Fredric’s Damnation of Theron Ware.
And Gale, this is a great idea. I think giving them a model to follow is both limiting and constructive. My fear is that they’d all copy the model and I’d read 40 identical papers, but that’s as likely as getting 40 identical exams. Thanks for the tip.