Customized Assignments:

advice for instructors with too much free time

Raymond McDaniel

Why customize?

• Because you are bored with reading 22 versions of the same paper

• Because your students are likewise bored

• Because you want to reduce the possibility of plagiarism or lazy, automatic writing

• Because you want your students to invest in their own work

Yeah, okay. But how?

That’s a very good question.

What follows is a short example of how I approached customization in one section of LHSP 125.

Step OneAbstract

Draft an assignment that lets you get to know the student’s interests.

Prompt:

Write about a work of art or piece of entertainment to which you had a strong response, but you aren’t sure why.

Concrete

Student X writes about a rock documentary he saw with his sister, which he loved even though he didn’t know much about the guitarists it featured.

Step TwoAbstract

Derive from the paper a set of the student’s interests and concerns.

Concrete

Student X is curious about how popular music evolves, and wonders about the role of age and generation in the history of rock.

Step ThreeAbstract

Assemble a media list appropriate to the student’s interests.

Concrete

Point Student X to Greil Marcus, Deborah Frost, The Sound of the City, The Runaways, Almost Famous, PBS history of rock ‘n roll, etcetera.

Step FourAbstract

Assign student to develop her own annotated bibliography of sources relevant to her project

Concrete

Student X discovers Lester Bangs, The Best American Music Writing, The Last Waltz, Pitchfork, Don’t Look Back, Westway to the World, Greg Tate and Jeff Chang.

All by himself!

Step FiveAbstract

Use the student’s peers to generate further resources and compelling questions

Concrete

Student X decides to focus on the following questions: at what point did “rock ‘n roll” become “rock”? What was the role of music journalism in this transition? What does this say about how an art relates to its own past?

Step SixAbstract

Assemble drafting teams to assist with outline generation

Concrete

You know what an outline looks like. This is what Pikachu looks like:

Step SevenAbstract

Devote class sessions to regular progress reports, two students per class, so each student learns from the process of the others!

Concrete

You know how to run class discussions. Pikachu is vexed!

Step EightAbstract

Read very many very long papers

Concrete

Pikachu is sleepy!

Good News!

Customized assignments…

incorporate analysis, research and narrative into one mega-document!

activate the student’s personal interests and place them in an academic context!

foster multi-modal understanding!

reduce odds of plagiarism and lazy writing!

Bad News!

Customized assignments…

are a lot of work.

no, really, a lot of work.

Customized Ray Ray

I’ve assigned an eight-page initial inquiry paper and a subsequent 16 + page customized research paper. The papers I’ve received include…

DUDE.

• An investigation of the origins of Young Adult literature and the invention of adolescence

• An argument about the Uncanny Valley and the evolution of animation from stop-motion to motion capture

• An analysis of the role of passive voice in the existentialist novels of Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir

• A study of revolution and popular culture via Carnival and Tropicalismo

ALL FROM FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS.