What are you looking for? / What are you looking for in an essay? / I don’t understand this assignment; can you give me more specific/simpler instructions? / Help me understand your criteria for grading.

For essays — and indeed for classwork in general — I offer, and explain thoroughly, my 12 Criteria for Undergraduate Writing About Literature (click here). These twelve criteria are at the heart of all the evaluation of your work that I do, especially argumentative, thesis-based essays. And, nicely enough, students have reported that the materials I’ve attached to each of the 12 Criteria have been very useful in improving their work on essays overall, well beyond my classes. Check them out.

Beyond that, you should always feel free to come to Office Hours for further clarification on assignments — or, better, to ask me for clarifications during (or just before) class discussion.  Even if it’s not immediately relevant to what we’re currently discussing.  I’ll make it relevant.

But the answers I give you will never be simple — my assignments will always require at a fundamental level that you figure your way through open-ended questions on your own.  If there is no immediately apparent answer to a problem, chances are that I expect you to solve the problem as part of the assignment. 

There is rarely any “what I’m looking for,” for any assignment. And if there is, you will not get a particularly good grade if you simply repeat back to me “what I’m looking for” and nothing more. That is not what we are here to do. That is not what you are here to do.

Indeed, if you find yourself frequently asking your university profs precisely what they want you to do or to know, or complaining that your assignments lack specific instructions, it is worth asking some existential questions about what a university education means to you.  This is a subject about which I am passionate — hence the slightly intense tone here:

A university degree is not an official acknowledgement that you follow rules and commands when they are given to you, and you carry them out in a way that pleases your superior.  Proving that you can follow instructions is particularly irrelevant to the study of the humanities.  Profs are rarely, if ever, testing you on your ability to get instructions/requirements right, even where a failure to follow instructions/requirements results in penalization.

My classes require students not only to master material but also (and primarily) to generate and explore their own critical inquiries (in writing and discussion). You should demonstrate critical thinking, innovative analysis, and convincing argument in order to dig into class texts in a way that has not yet been done — and grades above 79 are reserved for student writers who teach me something, however small, that I did not know or believe before.

What you should do is whatever you deem necessary to get that done—and yes, part of how I evaluate you in marks will be my judgment on your ability to innovatively and effectively uncover a critical question on your own. I’ve chosen the language in my assignments, requirements, and instructions very carefully, and honed them over many years, to give students open-ended problems to solve.

Most of my pedagogical approaches, which I summarize in my statement of teaching philosophy, are roughly inspired by the work of Paolo Freire:

Education is suffering from narration sickness. The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds upon a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to “fill” the students with the contents of his narration— contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity…

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other… Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students (71-2).

The “banking” concept of education is now even more widespread than in Freire’s time, not least because students are now paying sometimes ridiculous amounts for their education and are absurdly overcommitted and overworked. We’re rushing through and at great cost: “I paid a ton and I have no time, so can we drop the hippie ‘find your own way’ crap? Just give me the important facts so I can get out on time.”

And the “banking” concept of education is now even more worthless than in Freire’s time, primarily because a model of education in which teachers simply fill students with knowledge has been rendered utterly obsolete by the internet. If you want clear instructions and simple answers, go to Wikipedia. If you want to practice the abilities that will help you think through, critique, or to improve the way media generate knowledge, take an English class.