When I was a new teacher still in graduate school, the director of the writing program invited a pretentious senior professor to give us advice on constructing good writing assignments. He stressed how students wrote better if we could get them writing about themselves. As an example, he suggested “Write about your first date” as a quality writing prompt. I was horrified.

I raised my hand and asked Dr. Pretentious, “My first date with a man or woman?” He immediately became flustered and started to sputter. In the mid-1980s, people did not talk about homosexuality or bisexuality as much as they do in the second decade of the twenty-first century and he was totally unprepared for my question.

I tend to agree with Dr. Pretentious’ argument that if we can have students “write about themselves”—or, as I prefer to describe it, to “make a personal connection to their writing”—students do write better. But unless we carefully consider the content of our assignments, we can set our students up for frustration and failure.

To ask a students to write about his or her first date is far too specific. Individuals are stood up on their first date, raped on their first date, have something else horrible happen on their first date. By giving that assignment, we could be asking students to be more revealing than is appropriate, to lie, or to gloss over critical incidents—all of which produce a poor paper.

But even asking students to write about a date—which is something I have advocated in the past—can be problematic because some people have never gone on a date or never had the type of memorable date they would care to share. If we must ask students to consider interpersonal relationships, it might be better to ask them to write about “a date or some other significant experience with a friend.” We can point the direction we want them to go, but leave an out for those who might find the personal too painful to share with us and their colleagues.

Sometimes, in our excitement to create interesting and meaning assignments, we do not fully consider the ramifications of what we are asking students to do. Last week, I asked my contemporary world history students to fill out a pedigree chart listing the names, birth dates, and death dates of their spouse (if they have one), their parents, their grandparents, and their great grandparents. Next week, when I teach them how to use the newspapers databases, I will ask them to begin with significant dates from their own family histories.

The assignment is designed to give them a personal connection to the material both for this specific assignment but also to help give them a more personal perspective of world events that took place since 1900. It is a well constructed assignment that should prove to be exciting for students who don’t mind talking about their families. But what about the student who had a parent commit suicide or abandon the family or beat him/her? What about the student who was adopted? Or has been disowned by his/her biological family? Or doesn’t know a parent or grandparent? Or has a relative who was a criminal? My great assignment could lead such students to frustration and failure.

Fortunately, the assignment is easy to modify. First, I acknowledged that not everyone likes to talk about their families. Then, I said that students could use a friend’s family or a family of choice (e.g. “I am going to list the woman who raised me as my mother even though she was my aunt.”) while filling out the pedigree chart. Finally, I told them that I would bring in copies of my own pedigree chart and they could use my relatives for the assignment that I plan to give.

Sometimes, I think it is very acceptable to push students in directions that make them feel uncomfortable. Later this semester when I screen Night and Fog, causing unease is unavoidable. But, I do not want to unintentionally set up students for frustration and failure because I did not think through the ramification of an assignment I give.

–Steven L. Berg, PhD

Photo Credit: Dream in the Dark Day