How Big Writing Assignments Fall Apart
by Joshua Gibbs
Big writing assignments are sort of like big government projects. They usually involve an egregious waste of time and resources. I will grant that big government projects may sometimes be necessary, yet their tendency toward squander and inefficiency must be acknowledged up front and managed. The same is true of research papers, theses, or the text of some big speech which the juniors or seniors have to author and deliver. I’m convinced there is a better way, but let me begin by painting you a picture of the way many big writing projects tend to go.
Let us say you’re teaching junior rhetoric and want each student to deliver a twelve-minute speech at the end of the semester. The text for this speech will need to be around fifteen hundred words, which is a longer paper than any of these students has ever written before. When you hand out the assignment sheet during the third week of the semester, students gasp. They look at one another wide-eyed. “Don’t worry,” you say, reassuringly, “you’ve got a long time to work on this. We’re going to do it in parts, it’s really not that difficult. Trust me. I’m going to help you along the way. Remember that you’re going to write a much longer paper senior year. This is just to help you get acquainted with the format and structure of your thesis.”
For the next four weeks, you lecture through the rhetorical structure proposed in the Ad Herenium and students learn about the narratio, divisio, confirmatio, and so forth. At the end of four weeks, you tell students to begin thinking about a topic for their speech. They have two weeks to choose a topic—and it needs to be political, you say. “Potentially divisive, you know. Juicy. Spicy.” You give them examples of topics that will work and topics that won’t. At the end of two weeks, they submit their topics, and you realize half of them need to pick a new topic because they haven’t followed the parameters you gave them.
Merely telling these students to choose new topics won't work, because what they really need is guidance. So, you tell everyone whose first submission was approved that they can bring in their laptops and begin working on writing their introductions—and that while they’re working, you're going to meet individually with all the students who need to choose a new topic.
You can only meet with one student at a time, though, which means that half the class has laptops out, and half the class is just sitting there, waiting. While they’re just waiting, they’re distracting the students who have their laptops out. You're not in the room to see this happen, though. You’re meeting with students who need to choose new topics in the hall so your conversations don't distract everyone who is trying to work. From time to time, you poke your head into the classroom and say, “Everyone needs to find something productive to do.”
Before going further, let’s admit that any time a teacher tells a room full of students, “You need to find something productive to do,” that teacher is failing to do his job. He is quite wrong. They don’t need to find something productive to do. The teacher needs to give them something to do. No pastor would tell his congregation on a Sunday morning, “You need to find something productive to do for the next ninety minutes.” The people have gathered to be led.
Nevertheless, it takes an entire week to get to the point where every student has a workable topic, but by this point, four students are done with their introductions, four students are not, and eight students haven’t even started. You grade the four finished introductions and two of them are terrible and need to be rewritten. You take the opportunity to give a lecture to the entire class on how to write an introduction, which is helpful to the students who haven’t even gotten started yet, but is largely redundant for everyone else. At the halfway point in the semester, each student has progressed to a slightly different point in their work, which means that’s it’s increasingly difficult to offer instruction to the entire class. You may as well be giving a lecture on Pride & Prejudice to a class wherein some students are on chapter two and some are on chapter twenty-nine.
Two weeks after the halfway point in the semester, you realize there’s no longer any point in addressing the class collectively. Every student needs individual attention. You would like everyone to finish their papers a month before the semester ends so that they can present them in class, but you’ve had far less time to give instruction on delivery than you’d like. In fact, almost no time has been given to delivery. Actually, no time at all.
At the start of every class, you now say, “Alright, I’m going to give everyone this hour to work on their papers. If there’s something you’d like to talk about with me, please come to my desk and I’ll help you.” After observing how ineffective this is, you realize you need to spread the students out. There’s something about glowing laptop screens which breeds distraction and sloth. You need to space the students out. You decide to send half of them to the cafeteria. You send your best students to the cafeteria and assume they will put their time to good use, although you have no idea, really. You tell yourself that they’re old enough to “work independently.”
Of the students who stay behind, a constant stream of them approach your desk with laptops in hand, show you three sentence paragraphs, and ask, “Is this what you’re looking for?” and it’s never what you’re looking for. You’re tempted to collect all the students so you can lecture them again on just how to write, how to talk. At this point, a few students are entirely finished with their papers. They’re coming to class and doing other work. You check on the cafeteria crew a couple time and they are not really working. In the midst of all this, you’re solving a pretty steady number of tech problems. You’ve installed Word on eight computers, recovered a dozen or so Gmail passwords from abandoned accounts so that students can get to their Google Docs. There are some students who you are convinced have not written more than four actual sentences in the last three weeks.
Before the start of the semester, you thought it would be easy. It’s hard to respect a two-day-a-week rhetoric class, so you would give them a big project that would demand respect. However, because the project was so big, you also had to give them ample class time to work on it, but they all worked at a different pace. You realize later that your problems began when your students were no longer doing the same work every day. The other problem is laptops. You are convinced of this, but you have to let the students use laptops because they’re writing is illegible and you can’t quickly edit and assess that much scrawl. Besides, a rhetoric class calls for constant adjustments of a text, and such adjustments are far easier to make in a Word doc. On paper, it’s just endless erasing or else microscopically small notes in the margins.
In the end, two of sixteen students do not finish their papers until the last day of the semester, which means they don’t deliver a speech in front of their classmates. You have them record videos of their speeches, which are sent two weeks into summer. The last week of school is spent in a series of meetings because four students had ChatGPT write their papers. At the same time, proving this means offering parents and administrators a timeline of the semester, and this is embarrassing because it means admitting just how wildly unstructured the class was, and what a difficult time you have had actually keeping track of which students finished what work at what time. In the end, you are blamed for the fact the students used ChatGPT, because you never had time to give a good explanation of plagiarism to your students, and the cheaters in question “thought it would be okay if he paraphrased stuff he found online.” He is adamant about the fact he didn’t really “copy and paste anything.”
Two of your students write and deliver beautiful speeches. These students are stars and never needed any instruction on delivery anyway. Their speeches are recorded for some national rhetoric competition. The admin at your school sees these speeches, is suitably impressed, and more or less insists that the class be run the same way next year, perhaps with just a little more bureaucracy to ensure that no one uses ChatGPT. The other fourteen students in your class have learned very little, worked very little, accomplished very little, and become a little more cynical about teachers and school and the whole task of education. Next year, many of them reflect on your rhetoric class and say to one another, “We never did anything in that class.” By the time these students are doing a mediocre job presenting their theses during senior year, sufficient time has passed that no one blames you for failing to give them any experience speaking in public. No one makes the connection.
There is a better way.
