What did I give my students in the literature course to make them moan with pleasure?
Answer: a grammar exercise. I have no idea why the students love grammar exercises so much but I have discovered that saying the magical phrases “And now create sentences with unreal conditions in the future, present and the past” and “Fill in the blanks with the appropriate form of the verb” before they fill out course evaluations always makes for very good evaluations.
It’s simple. With grammar quizzes the answer is going to be right or wrong. They have techniques for producing the right answer (or one of the right answers) and even when you’re wrong you can add to your storehouse for producing right answers.
On the other hand, describing the formal properties of a piece of literature there’s no way to know the right answer and even a wrong answer can be right if the case is argued well enough. It’s very easy to lose your footing or fall down a spider hole.
I remember one of the toughest courses I did as a 9-hour graduate level course (taken as an undergraduate) that involved collecting a whole bunch of raw data and while trying to find order and make (qualitative) sense out of it.
It was wonderful and I loved it but it was also mentally exhausting. The only other course I took that semester was statistics (which I had been dreading) but which I purely loved. It turns out it was the perfect complement to the other course (for me at least).
Being able to find the right answer by applying the right formula to the right numbers was bliss and very relaxing before heading back to the battle of finding order in chaos with it’s many false starts and beautiful theories that turned to dust as more data emerged….
LikeLike
“It’s simple. With grammar quizzes the answer is going to be right or wrong. They have techniques for producing the right answer (or one of the right answers) and even when you’re wrong you can add to your storehouse for producing right answers.
On the other hand, describing the formal properties of a piece of literature there’s no way to know the right answer and even a wrong answer can be right if the case is argued well enough. It’s very easy to lose your footing or fall down a spider hole.”
– Exactly, yes. 🙂 Students were moaning with pleasure because of how easy the grammar exercises were compared to what we had been doing before. Follow the formula, get the result.
“Being able to find the right answer by applying the right formula to the right numbers was bliss and very relaxing before heading back to the battle of finding order in chaos with it’s many false starts and beautiful theories that turned to dust as more data emerged….”
– Oh yes.
LikeLike
Lowball effect.
LikeLike
A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment