STRANDED 101

I.

Bill and I built our assignment sequence by modifying a sequence I’d been using for some time in English 101. Over the years, I’ve found that students are good at faking attention and orientation. Usually they don’t think of this as “faking,” but as “writing papers for an English class.” I’ve decided my first job is to jolt them–as benignly but insistently as possible–out of this stance. My strategy is to assign Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature,” an essay that seems to most of them to present no obvious difficulties. Most of them therefore relax, and assume The Stance. The assignment, a brilliant one created by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, then challenges them to reassess Percy’s essay, and by extension The Stance. The real kicker is that Percy’s essay itself describes versions of The Stance (he doesn’t call it that, of course–he calls it being “common” vs. being “complex”) and does so in a way that thwarts nearly every stance one might take in relation to it. When such an essay is combined with an assignment that asks students to reason by an analogy based on a set of elusive conceptual categories, couched in for the most part in very accessible language, the result is at worst instructive and at best quite enlightening. When it works, it helps transform students into college-level readers and writers.

Indeed, for many students, this assignment feels like the “I’m really at college now” (alternatively, the “we’re not in Kansas anymore”) assignment they’ve been hoping for. For these students, the Percy assignment is the first time they’ve done real metacognitive work, the first time they’ve experienced the open-ended, maddening, exhilarating struggle that is real “critical thinking.” Students begin by searching for answers, and end by thinking about themselves as searchers, their modes of searching, and what they expect to find. Best of all, if they find themselves struggling with the assignment they soon learn that this struggle is one of the surest signs that they are in fact doing the assignment, and quite possibly doing it well.

Given that Bill and I had such high hopes for this course, I insisted that we begin with this stretching exercise.

Caution: every year, one or two students are infuriated by this essay and its assignment. Note: the assignment does NOT ask the student to “guess the magic word and win $100.00.” The assignment can be addressed from many angles, and answered persuasively in diametrically opposing ways

GO TO ASSIGNMENT 1

II.

This assignment posed some interesting difficulties. It was not what any of us were used to thinking of (lazily, perhaps) as a “personal” essay. It was very hard to get the students to write specifically about their own experience, the music they listened to, or the reasons they picked a particular album as their Desert Island Disc. Some students who were decidedly casual music listeners had an especially hard time with this assignment: the whole thing felt alien and unnatural to them. Others learned more about themselves and their DID than they had imagined possible, and were very gratified by their papers (as were Bill and I). Still others, confirmed music lovers and fans, learned how difficult it is to convey one’s enthusiasms persuasively and invitingly. Luckily we had great examples in Stranded of writers doing just that–and all quite differently. (We also spent some time talking about Greil Marcus’ “Preface” and his argument concerning the book, its order, and Nick Tosches’ place in it.) During this assignment (each of the assignments took at least 3 weeks to complete, with multiple drafts, peer-editing, whole-group discussions, etc.) we did our “narrating music” exercises that Bill describes in Volume II of Stranded ‘97.

GO TO ASSIGNMENT 2

III.

This was the research paper, and Bill and I wanted desperately to make their library work an organic part of the entire semester, and thus to avoid the usual blah-blah “reports” that masquerade as research papers in Freshman Comp. You’ll see from our assignment sheet (essential parts of which were co-written in a manic frenzy in which we had the hubris to try to define the word “idea”) that we worked VERY hard to keep students from writing reports. I think the assignment sheet is very interesting and I’m proud of our work on it. (Along the way, we tried to remind students that these assignment sheets represented our own “essays”–I don’t know if they understood what we meant by that.) Nevertheless, we left out the proverbial nail that lost the shoe and so forth. We neglected to insist repeatedly that students focus on their Desert Island Disc, not their disc’s artist. Because of this, more of the papers were indifferently good than we had hoped, though there were a few excellent ones. Next time we’ll know better.

GO TO ASSIGNMENT 3

IV.

This assignment tried to prompt the grand synthesis we had been aiming for all along: a deeply informed, imaginative, and committed piece of writing that (we hoped) would also be free of the more egregious mechanical errors. I repeated my own writing mantra for them (we had heard about this before): I love writing that is precise, inviting, vivid, and beautiful, with a sense of pleasure in the style. (I love the conflict, the inevitable trade-offs those words capture. I also like to tell a story about a fellow who memorized the value of pi out to something like 1,000 places, but I’ll save that one for another time.) Bill repeated his mantra: clear, accurate, interesting. (Bill’s a much less baroque fellow than I am: his heart lies in the Renaissance by way of the 18th century and Jonathan Swift, while mine lies in the Renaissance by way of the apt swoon and “o altitudo”). We put everything we had into this last assignment. Bill was the primary author. I spent hours making it look nice on the page, with photos of Marcus I’d found on the web. We talked it over with each other and with our classes at every opportunity. Then we sat back and waited.

GO TO ASSIGNMENT 4

The results of Assignment 4 are the essays collected in Stranded ‘97. A couple of students in each class chose not to publish their work. For the most part, though, the class was excited and eager to see their work go worldwide. And now they can.

Gardner Campbell
Fredericksburg, VA
April, 1998