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Friday, July 16, 2010
"But...Whitney Houston's Loyal to Crack"
Working on our autobiographies this week and having a peer-review session in class, I couldn't help but be reminded of one of my former students who I used to tutor. The class was preparing for the MCAS exam by writing a practice essay in class. They were given a prompt that asked them to write about an event, person, cultural moment, etc. who demonstrated loyalty. After writing in class, they were asked to sit with a partner to peer review. I was waved over to one group. My student's paper raised a complaint by his partner because it was not an 'academic' topic to write about in an essay. When I asked my student what he had written, he said ,"But Whitney Houston's loyal to crack. Why can't I write about that?" I spent the rest of the class period discussing with both students that as long as the essay was well written and contained supporting evidence, I would consider the essay as academic. I wonder what makes an essay 'academic'? Clearly my student who had chosen to write about Whitney Houston had thought thoroughly about his argument and his examples. Shouldn't this be considered academic writing? Additionally, how do we get peer editors to recognize this as well?
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The parameters for an acceptable topic should come from whoever is judging the writing. If it's an MCAS lesson, the parameters should be whatever has been set out by MCAS. Otherwise, it seems that you can define the rules however you like.
ReplyDeleteTwo ideas:
1. In addition to "well written" and "contains supporting evidence", another good general guideline is the concept of the "arguable thesis."
2. Go on InfoTrac and you'll find millions of essays on all kinds of topics, many of which seem to be fairly ridiculous. Yet all are published in "academic" journals.
I personally would be very interested in reading an essay entitled "But Whitney Houston's Loyal to Crack." Of course, if it was in biology, chemistry or wellness class we would then discuss the difference between loyalty and addiction. In creative writing - I think it would be interesting. I'm guessing see Whitney on the back end of all of her troubles had an impact on your student - just as seeing Michael Vick after jail will have an impact on some students, as will seeing Plaxico Burress when he is released from prison. Seems like this will actually dovetail nicely into our class topics coming up as I believe that popular culture is a big part of it very soon.
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