Trivialize or Transfer

For a year after earning my Master's degree, I taught dual enrollment at a high school. I taught introduction to Composition and Introduction to Literature, and because this was a small school and I was the dual enrollment English teacher, I had several students who took composition one trimester and literature the next. In my composition course, I taught citation and documentation. So, when I saw several of the same students in my literature class and I told them they needed to cite the stories, poems, and plays from the textbook when writing their essays, I assumed all would be well. After all, they had demonstrated to me they knew how to do so.

However...

On the first assignment, there was absolutely nothing to differentiate between my new students and old ones. Citations were routinely absent or incorrect, and even bizarrely formatted. I hoped this would be an issue quickly resolved with a brief lesson and reminder after the first essay, but this persisted the entire semester among all of my students, and I didn’t have time to divert from literature to teach citations. And it wasn't limited to citations. I saw students who in one class had improved and excelled, written excellent essays, fall into the doldrums in the next. Near the end of the school year, I asked one of the other English teachers (who retired that year – give you an idea how long he'd been around) if they taught citation. He rolled his eyes and his head and answered: “every year!”

In short, there should have been noticeable differences between the students I had had in composition and those who had not taken composition in my literature course. But there was none. Everything they had learned and practiced was gone.

I've even seen this phenomenon happen in class. I'll teach a topic or how to do something for an essay or assignment, see it implemented in one assignment, but when students should be reapplying these practices in later assignments, it's ignored. It was as if previous lessons and concepts were locked to a respective assignment without any application beyond the task for which they were taught.

Imagine teaching someone to drive. You teach them how best to brake at a traffic light. How much pressure to apply, when to start braking, how close to the light they need to come to a complete stop, so they make a safe, controlled stop. And then, when you tell them to park, they fly right through the parking stall, as if parking and stopping at a light somehow required two completely different operations.

This is the danger of trivializing our education, of seeing each bit of information as isolated and only useful within the context it was first taught and assuming each new context carries with it brand new rules and expectations. It's like saying, “I was tested on it, so what do I need it for?” when that same information will hold value in another context. It's like an architect ignoring every geometry lesson he's ever had, and a surgeon ignoring all of his biology.

Let me give an example both personal and professional. I have taught at five different universities and colleges. Each school has different standards and expectations. On my end, I have my education, training, and experience that prepared me to teach and adapt to new circumstances. Give me a set of expectations and requirements and I'll produce a curriculum to match it. However, if I took everything I already knew and set it aside and acted as if I needed a brand new set of information, I'd be an absolute pest to the rest of the faculty as I ask them things I should already know. They'd kick me to the curb as soon as they could find a replacement. Or just cancel the classes and get rid of me.

So don't confine your education. Don't leave what you learn in the classroom. Value it by practicing it, by looking for new ways to employ it, by experimenting with what you've learned. Transfer your knowledge from one area to another. And Don't trivialize it.

Dictionary Abuse

I'm going to be blunt here. Very rarely is it appropriate to open an essay with a definition.

I'm talking about essays where the author says something like, “Merriam-Webster defines (insert term here) as...”. These statements almost never provide relevant context for the issue at hand, and frankly do more harm than good to your own argument. A lot of the reasons we write or argue something is to better understand it, but much of the time when this strategy is employed, it oversimplifies the term being used and broadens the essay's content in the process, while also suggesting the author is not familiar enough with the term itself, and the extent of their research capabilities is looking up a word in a dictionary. Or it suggests you don’t trust your audience’s knowledge and capabilities.

I believe there are a few reasons why students do this:

• First, and most frighteningly, they're taught to do it.
• Second, it's an easy way to do “research” and add another source to a bibliography.
• Third establishes how a specific term is going to be used.
• Fourth, they've seen it done elsewhere, especially in published works, suggesting this is an established and acceptable practice. However, in these published cases, rarely is it as simple as just quoting a definition.

The first two reasons need little explaining. The third and fourth, however, do warrant some explanation.

Sometimes, an author is using a common term in an uncommon way that may not be the first thing their readers will think of. In these situations the essay's thesis relies on a very specific, potentially specialized, unconventional definition. The thing here is your standard dictionaries tend to give the more general, conventional answers, those most people will already be familiar with. This is where using specialized definitions and resources can, however, come in handy. Different disciplines will use the same and similar words in different ways, and if a piece is aimed at an audience who may not share that specialization, defining the term is appropriate. However, these cases are rarely just definitions: they warrant more explanation and examples to help the nonspecialized audience.

The fourth one is a special case, especially because these sometimes pull definitions from several dictionaries. The point of these essays is to point out the problems these definitions have. In these situations, the purpose in bringing definitions into the essay is not to simply define the term but to show how the definitions disagree or leave holes. This then centers the entire essay on the issue of defining the term. It brings definitions together not to say “here’s what this term means,” but to say, “this term isn’t that simple.” In such a case, once you reach the end of the essay, you should be able to look back at the definitions quoted and see how and why they are incomplete or inadequate.

If your use of dictionary or encyclopedia entries doesn't fall into one of these two situations, then it's very likely you're doing more harm than good. Unless you need to define a term in a specialized or unfamiliar way or you’re finding issues with definitions, it’s better to trust your reader to already be familiar with whatever term you’re using. This can be particularly true in student essays where terms and concepts students should be exploring in detail, deconstructing, or should be applying, are merely defined. It’s kind of like summarizing a story or an article rather than analyzing it.

When providing a definition, it better be needed: the definition needs to be unconventional or one worth calling into question. If you find a definition you agree with and expect your reader will also, and if, by the end of the essay, you still agree with the definition and your reader should as well, then you're just wasting time and space.

Why call it a “requirement”?

The university I attended had very specific requirements for completing a Bachelor's degree in English: I had to take so many credits and certain classes as prerequisites to others. Among them was to take three literary history courses, each addressing a different historical period. For the sake of discussion, let's call one of these time periods Medieval Literature, and let's say I didn't take a Medieval Literature course. It doesn't matter if I didn't want to take it or couldn’t fit it into my schedule: I just never took it. And so, graduation time comes along. I've met every other requirement designated by the English Department for a Bachelor's degree except this one. I have the other historical periods, the theory courses, the research methods courses, the seminars, my general education courses, and all of it totaling the required number of credit hours needed for graduation.

So I go to fill out my forms for graduation, and this missing course comes up. What's the degree-granting department going to do? In a complex system, I've missed only one requirement among many. Will they then ignore this discrepancy and give me the degree?

Nope.

Why not? It's just one class.

Simple. I didn't do what I needed to do to earn it.*

Let's move closer to home then: the classroom assignments.

Most every assignment description has a list of requirements and many classes have a clause in the course syllabus stating all requirements must be met for an assignment to be accepted (and, depending on the class, an option to revise and resubmit). 

In composition courses, like those I teach, these requirements usually include:

• Length (word or page count)
• Research (number of type of sources) 
• Genre (the type of writing)
• Documentation (MLA, typeface, formatting). 

Depending on the assignment, there will be other requirements, like regarding thesis or organization. These aren’t sphinx like riddles to be deciphered to understand the true nature of the assignment: they’re clear statements of what the minimum expectations are.

Most students meet these requirements without too much trouble. So I'm flabbergasted when I receive essays that clearly miss these important requirements, and yes, sometimes a student has a hard time with a prompt or a genre, but when the assignment description says “3 page minimum” and 2 pages are turned in, or “MLA Format” and submissions are in Calibri 11 with inch and a quarter margins, or “Parenthetic Citations” and there are no citations whatsoever, the only assumption is the student has not paid attention to the requirements.

Requirement means it has to be done. Having so many pages or to have the essay written in a certain genre aren't just recommendations: they're requirements. They therefore, by definition, must be completed in order for the piece to be accepted. So, when assignments submissions don't meet the requirements, especially in college, they get 0’s.

That may sound heartless, but in a class with as few as a dozen or as many as a few hundred other students who did meet the assignment requirements, accepting something that didn't meet the requirements when everyone else did cheapens the effort of those that followed instructions. To accept two pages when three were required is to say the work and effort of those who turned in three pages was wasted. For me to do this would be to make me a hypocrite, and I'm not about to compromise my morals on behalf of someone who didn't take the class as seriously as the rest.

In short: If you want a degree, take the required classes. If you want to pass those classes, then finish the assignments as required.

*If anyone's interested, I did take courses that covered medieval literature for my Bachelor's and Master's degrees.