Use the question above to begin your story/lecture which, by analogy, will reinforce the idea that students should encounter texts/data/information on their own before going to sources that summarize/edit/interpret it for them. Here’s the story:
Question: How are baby birds fed?
Answer: Their parents eat food, partially digest it, and then regurgitate or vomit it into their mouths. This practice provides nutrition, certainly.
Question: What function do (re)sources like SparkNotes serve?
Answer: They interpret works of literature, philosophy, and history for you so you don’t have to read them yourself; you know “what it’s about” by reading the summary.
Thus: SparkNotes vomits the information into your brain. But are you a baby bird? Do you need to rely on a grown-up bird for your own nutrition? Or do you want to chew it on your own?
Rationale: Encounter the information on your own first; chew it on your own first; think about it on your own first.
And then, perhaps, you can swallow the regurgitation of others. Perhaps. If you’re into that kind of thing.
P.S. Most undergraduate students love this story: it’s the right combination of vivid, gross, and thought-provoking.
Here’s another idea for forming work groups in class:
Ask students to write down (on their own paper OR on a slip of paper you give them) an alias.
Ask students what topic/issue/question they’d like to spend about 12-20 minutes in class discussing with everyone. (Hint: it’s important to be specific about a time frame AND to word your prompt in such a way that students know they don’t have to present anything to the class.)
Collect these slips. (Hint: asking students to walk up and make the pile for you encourages a bit of energetic conversation.)
Group slips by the topics that emerge.
Write the aliases on the board so that everyone can find their groupmates.
Rationale: Creative ways of knowing each other emerge with this exercise. Often, folks end up working with people they’ve not worked with before.
To show the unity of rhetoric as both a tool for analyzing arguments and a heuristic for generating them
To illustrate the irony of an individual in a society
To demonstrate that form and content are one in good art
Basically, I use the trick whenever I want to emphasize the interconnectedness of something, to dispel myths about binaries, to force students to think with their hands.
It’s easy to have students make the strips in class. Here’s how:
Just ask students to cut/tear a strip of paper the long way from their notebooks.
Make a loop.
Twist the loop just once.
Tape/staple/glue it together.
Now draw a continuous line on one side of the loop, stopping only when you get to the place you started.
Can’t anything, really, be a “teachable moment”? And can’t it happen with anyone?
For example, my carpool buddy today. S/he’s a self-proclaimed “open-minded” teacher of English in a community college. Yet s/he persists in uncritically accepting gender binaries, claiming nature trumps nurture.
Therefore, I offered this analogy about the power of said “nature” (or the social networks at work on us every day):
Think of the usual and taken-for-granted phrase we hear in every elementary school classroom: “Okay, boys and girls, let’s go to lunch” or “Girls and boys, we have a guest coming to our class today” or “Next, boys and girls, we’ll play freeze tag.”
Now imagine these phrases, also along a “natural” binary: “Okay, blacks and whites, let’s go to lunch” or “Whites and blacks, we have a guest coming to our class today” or “Next, blacks and whites, we’ll play freeze tag.”
Or imagine these phrases, also along a binary: “Okay, uglies and cuties, let’s go to lunch” or “Cuties and uglies, we have a guest coming to our class today” or “Next, uglies and cuties, we’ll play freeze tag.”
Class closing activities have always struck me as important moments for providing closure, especially if you’ve been able to create a “community of learners” during the semester. This week, I tried a variation on one of my class closures, and I’m calling the variation “Ticket Takers.”
Here’s how:
Pass out paper tickets (the kind you can buy at a party store, the kind used for cub scout raffles and church picnics).
Every person should take the number of tickets equivalent to the number of people in the room; in our case, it was 32, which included the professor.
Every person should write her/his name on the back of the ticket.
Every person should trade tickets with every other person AFTER telling that person something:
tell your classmate something you learned from her/him
offer your classmate thanks
let your classmate know what you got from him/her this semester
tell your classmate what you’re going to remember about her/him
This activity gets kind of chaotic as everyone walks around the room looking for someone to trade tickets with. But it’s fun, leads to some good smiles and thanks, and it really works to honor a sense of group cohesion. By the end of class, everyone has gotten rid of their own tickets and now has a little pile of tickets with classmate names on them.
One student, scheduled to leave for Iraq in June, said he’d take the tickets with him.
Another student who works more than 40 hours a week yet comes to class prepared teared up when I told her how smart she is.
Another student, from Somalia, talked to me afterwards and said he didn’t understand at first why we were doing this activity. ”Then I understood,” he said. ”We were saying goodbye.”
