Damn Good Assignments
And I am willing to share them
I feel like I’ve stumbled into having created the best damn assignments in my historiography class.
Reading comprehension? Check.
Basic skills? Check.
Flexibility? Check.
Allows room to improve? Check.
Analytical and synthetical thinking? Check and check.
One is called, “Journal Article Dissection” and the other is called, “Reflection Essays.”
I came up with them for my historiography class, a class that is required of all history majors, history minors, as well as many social science majors and education majors. So, people interested in history and how to teach it.
Historiography is a topic that is not easily loved. It’s basically the history of history, that is, historians examining the variations, evolutions, and twists and turns of the ways that humans have dealt with and recorded their histories. To me, that sounds like one of humanity’s greatest puzzles. To students, it may sound like pointless and perplexing self-congratulatory self-perpetuation; if historians say enough times that the study of history is important, then history must be studied, right?
My job is to present and guide students through historiography, which often entails millennia of history. We can’t cover everything in one semester, and to encourage students to continue to read about historiography, I try to develop assignments that give them practical skills to tackle academic writing or that help them discover their own thinking.
Journal Article Dissection
This assignment is a form consisting of seven questions. It’s practical. It starts with asking for the Chicago Style bibliographical citation and ends with asking for an explanation of the article’s wider place in the historical literature. In between are a series of questions to guide a student through thinking about what goes into and what comes out of an academic, peer-reviewed article on history and historiography. Breaking an article into digestible bits, students can see how the argument was pieced together and how evidence is utilized. Students can also demonstrate that they understand the difference between primary and secondary sources. I ask students to complete the form twice in the semester, filling it out for one of four or five articles I’ve chosen.
If you’d like a copy of the assignment, send me a private message; all I ask is that you credit me if you use it.
Reflection Essays
Deceptively simple is this assignment: answer the same four questions at three different points in the semester. As the guidelines that I give to the students explain,
Being or becoming more aware of how one thinks through questions is an effective way to improve one's learning and is called metacognition.
Three times this semester, students will be asked to write reflection essays based on the same questions with the goal of integrating more and new information about the discipline of history as they improve their own metacognition.
REQUIRED ELEMENTS FOR EACH REFLECTION ESSAY
What is history?;
What do historians do? and/or What do historians study?;
Why do you think your answers to #1 and #2 are true?;
What new questions do you want to pursue as a result of this thinking?
Reading(s).
Write a coherent essay of 500-750 words addressing these five elements and explaining your thinking. Do not provide a numbered list of answers but an essay that explores your own thinking on these five elements. For "reading(s)" include which text assigned in class has had a significant impact on your current thinking about the questions; try to include in your essay an explanation of how that reading(s) had an impact on the way you think about the questions.
Post your essay in the appropriate discussion board. Please, do not use attachments in the discussion board but instead write your essay (or copy and paste it from wherever you wrote it) in the body of a discussion post. The module for the week in which a reflection essay is due contains a link to the appropriate discussion board. No one else will be able to see your essay in the discussion board.
That’s the heart of the instructions; I also provide an explanation of how the essays will be graded. Again, if you’d like a copy of this assignment, including the explanation of how it’s graded and its rubric, send me a private message; all I ask is that you credit me if you use it.
The Why: Reading Comprehension
Why? Why force students to read an article aimed at special specialists? A long, convoluted, footnoted article that they may forget within a week? It’s practice, of course. A person ought to be able to read anything and understand it. What they do next with it is up to them, but I believe my job is to help students learn how to read critically, comprehend, and think for themselves. That means that understanding a text does not mean they sympathize with it. A person ought to be able to read Mein Kampf and comprehend it and its historical context, which does not entail being persuaded by it. (Anyone who was persuaded by it, can take a flying leap. But I digress.)
Reading comprehension is a skill that is under-appreciated, under-utilized, and under threat. For centuries, most people were not taught to read at all. For the last century to two centuries, more and more people have been taught to read and it can be one of the most liberating skills a person can gain. If they do it. And if they challenge themselves to read increasingly difficult texts for the sake of expanding
Of course, the success of any assignment in one of my classes depends upon students using their human intelligence and not A.I.
I aim to teach human minds, not algorithms. I’ll have more to say about that in a few weeks, though I’ve already said a bit already…
I struggled with why I wanted to write about assignments…until I saw the Daily Stoic’s entry for June 12 called, “A Trained Mind is Better Than Any Script,” which starts with a quotation from Epictetus:
In this way you must understand how laughable it is to say, “Tell me what to do!” What advice could I possibly give? No, a far better request is, “Train my mind to adapt to any circumstance.” . . . In this way, if circumstances take you off script . . . you won’t be desperate for a new prompting. (Discourses, 2.2.20b-1; 24b-25a.)
Obviously Epictetus didn’t have digital algorithms in mind when he used the words “script” and “prompting,” but this quotation’s resonance for today’s quandaries regarding A.I. are nonetheless tremendous. When a student trusts their teacher, they are entrusting their minds, or at least their thoughts to the teacher. Can a teacher train minds to be adaptable to anything? Train minds to have the audacity to respond in their unique way to any circumstance? Train minds not to follow automatically the script, the path prescribed by someone else?
As scripted as the form assignment appears to be, it is practice and training. As repetitive the reflection essays assignment seems, it is practice and training. To skip practice and training is to tell oneself that one’s mind isn’t worth the effort. And I just never could believe that. Every mind is worth the effort.