Talk to teachers, review messages posted on e-mail groups and browse professional journals, and you’ll find high school assignments that are long on fun and remarkably short on actual writing.
For example, someone who teaches an honors class for high school freshmen posts a short-story project that allows students 13 options, only a handful of which involve actual writing. Among the choices students are offered: create a map to illustrate the story’s setting, make a game to show the story’s theme, put together a collage from magazine photographs, or assemble a scrapbook or photograph album for the character.
Teaching Arthurian literature? Have your students design a coat of arms. Need an alternative to a book report? Have students draw the design for a book jacket.
While such activities may be more entertaining for students, and less work for the teachers in terms of grading the projects, kids are often showing up at college unable to write. —Donna Harrington-Lueker —‘Crayola curriculum’ takes over (USA Today)
This essay is from 2002. I tracked it down from a comment on JoanneJacobs.com.
In one of my classes, when I teach Margaret Edson’s play Wit, I read from a copy of The Runaway Bunny, a children’s book which is mentioned in the play. It’s the last week of the class, and many of the students are just starting to get the hang of studying literature at the college level; so they seem happy and nostalgic for a time when teachers did most of the work for them. But I don’t do this in place of asking them to do serious work. And since many of our English majors are double-majoring in education, it helps us talk about the playwright’s full-time job as a kindergarten teacher, and the play’s implicit anti-intellectualism.
Of course, high school teachers simply don’t have the time to get students to write and revise college-length papers. So naturally, I don’t expect all college freshmen to arrive on campus already competent in college-level work. But I’d really prefer that more arrive on campus ready to do such things as read and follow assignment instructions, and read a syllabus on their own.
Best response to this whole thing, from a commenter: “I’m so angry at this crap I feel like making a poster.”
The Runaway Bunny…ah yes, the memories. Sitting on the floor in kindergar..I mean Dr. Jerz’s Intro to Lit class (see what nostalga does?), listening to the enthusastic Mr…I mean Dr. Jerz read the story as I counted down the seconds until I had to eat.
It was a good time.
Now if only our teachers in High School could have done the same, perhaps students couldn’t just drop out.
One concern I have, Susan, is that students who are used to being praised for demonstrating their technical skill expect to be praised for simply producing a multimedia object, instead of being asked to think and speak critically about their role as creator, about the strenghts and weaknesses of their chosen medium, about its effect on the audience, etc. When I first started teaching, I was frustrated by the number of students who put off their project work, and sent me a URL or dropped off a brochure on the last day of classes, which meant they didn’t stick around to hear my comments on how to improve their project, much less do a redraft. While I do use projects and such, and while I do ask students to give informal presentations from their weblogs, I do so in order that I can give them feedback on their final project (which is usually a paper). The work they do for their clients, or the oral presentations they deliver in class, are merely the means to an end — which is a final written report.
I once had a student who wanted to deliver a final project as a videotaped performance. I told her that, since I was teaching a major capstone course, and her major was creative writing, that she was welcome to write a script and cast it, tape it, and edit it, but that since she was a writing major, I would grade her project on the quality of her writing. She seemed annoyed at first. As the semester wore on, and she didn’t have a script, and she began to see just how much work it would require to do all the production, she came around.
I think one of the problems with the multimedia presentations is that when the teachers don’t know the medium very well, they don’t have the experience to respond critically to work in those media.
On the other hand, isn’t this an excellent introduction to New Media? And yes, of course I see the dire need for essays and research–even at the high school level. Writing seems to be a lost art, just when, via the internet, it is becoming clear that almost everyone can type.