Notes from West Egg

Okay, so which of these assignments would you pick if you could choose:

1. Write a 1,500-word essay explaining the theme in Animal Farm, using literary elements such as character motives, symbolism and imagery.
2. Give a 5-minute presentation that relates the theme in Animal Farm to some aspect of society today, making sure to draw clear connections to the events in the novel with the actions of a current government.
3. Take one chapter of Animal Farm and rewrite it by changing the plot to include one modern tool that was not available to the characters but that might have changed the course of their fate if it had been. That tool is the Internet.

I would actually assign all three of these, time permitting. The first one would be an in-class assignment that followed several lessons on theme, literary elements and a thorough brainstorming of those aspects of the novel. The second would be researched at home and presented in class, possibly by pairs of students. The third would be a group assignment, completed outside of class on the class wiki. Here’s how it might look:

The teacher divides students into groups, with each group is assigned a chapter from the novel. Each chapter is downloaded by the teacher from Project Gutenberg Australia, a site with free e-books, and placed individually on the class wiki. Student groups brainstorm during class the ways that having access to the Internet would have empowered the lower classes of animals on the farm. Specifically, in this chapter, what might the animals have been able to do to become less confused, to remember the past better, to gain a broader perspective, to check the facts, to compare prices of goods, etc…? How would this information have negated the growing power balance between the pigs and the lower animals? How would it have weakened the effects of the pigs’ propaganda? How might the animals have used the Internet to leverage information and prevent their original revolution from reverting back to the status quo? 

At home, the students would begin to change the plot of their chapter by going online and accessing the wiki. They could do this alone or in groups or by talking in real time over Meebo instant chat. The wiki would record each layer of changes to the story, showing who has contributed what and in what order. Over the course of a week, each student in the group would be required to edit the chapter a certain number of times at a minimum, say five edits. Some students would do more, and that’s fine, but the goal would be to achieve consensus about the finished chapter. The end product would be a collaborative work that maintained the tone and spirit of Orwell’s masterpiece but played with an alternate ending… all while indirectly analyzing and synthesizing highly relevant, modern issues (information as power, technology as the means of achieving justice, how information protects individual freedoms).

Once the chapters were completed, the teacher could have students do a number of things with the new products. If there were multiple classes, groups could read and discuss other chapters that parallel theirs (i.e if your group rewrote Chapter 3, what do other periods’ Chapter 3’s look like?). The teacher could set up online surveys and have students vote which chapters Orwell himself might have written (i.e. which best embody the author’s tone and the novel’s theme). The teacher could have students act out a dramatic scene from the new chapters. 

This assignment (which I thought up this morning while doing the dishes) seems pretty Google-proof to me. In other words, they can’t find the answers on the Internet (at least not yet!) and they can’t just copy and paste their way to a product. They have to really think before they write. The work would be original, collaborative and analytical (… if this happened… then what…). They would have to understand the characters’ motivations, as well as the “rules” of the fictional universe that Orwell placed them in, and, ideally, they would create new metaphors to replace the old. For example, if the pig Squealer is the metaphorical equivalent of a propaganda minister, then which character would become the blogger? Which the Googler? Which would hack his way through Napolean’s firewall? How would these roles change the characters personalities? Which characters, because they can’t read, would still be at the mercy of the totalitarian regime?

(CC Photo Credit: “Watering Hole” by TravelJunkieoz)

One of the blogs I read is “Reflections from the Trenches“ by a high school English teacher named Julia Osteen from Georgia. The other day she posted a reaction to the widespread practice of students copying and pasting information, remixing it basically, and calling the product their own. She said:

My initial reaction to this article was one of but of course it is plagiarism! When I work with students, I fight against them copying and pasting (without thinking) and changing words here and there and calling that their own work. What I really want from students is for them to think about the information, organize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate the information from a number of sources before they write.

I am in full agreement and responded on Julia’s blog with this comment:

I’m afraid that students believe they are writing when they are merely searching for and rearranging information. This process seems to be an attempt to not have to think, because thinking is hard, and much of what we are asking them to think about has already been said/solved; in other words, they might be wondering why should they have to reinvent the wheel? Just to get a grade? Just because the teacher said to? This gets us back to creating problems for them to solve — new, relevant problems, where they can apply the existing information in novel ways. It makes thinking a bit more fun, but still hard. And that makes us have to do a bit of thinking as teachers, right?

Thinking is hard. Original ideas are the hardest to produce. It’s much easier to cull a few online sources, gather the thoughts of others who have been down this road before and remix the voices into something that is, if not original, at least uniquely arranged. But what do such student products actually reflect, aside from (usually) varying degrees of plagiarism? Good Googling skills, mostly. Perhaps exposure to a variety of perspectives on an issue, if students took time to absorb the ideas as they arranged them into paragraphs. Maybe a better understanding of how others would answer the question or present the thesis. 

It’s very tough to make a case for true synthesis when reading a patch-work quilt of (hopefully) attributed ideas. And few students go the extra mile by adding personal reflection, much less their own original take, to the mix. They figure if it’s long enough, it’s done. 

Running their work through plagiarism detection websites is not the answer… Getting them to remix more thoroughly their compilations and attribute their borrowed words more accurately will not get us to true synthesis; it’s just a more tortuous path to the same end: the glorified summary.

What I see as the real problem is that teachers are continuing to assign the types of independent work that we were assigned as students and that our parents and possibly even grandparents were assigned as students. In English, this might be a take-home paper that explores the theme of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example. Or one that asks students to explain the gun/flag metaphors in the novel. A quick Google of “theme” + “metaphors” + “Animal Farm” easily produces numerous sources and an endless possible melange of ideas. Before the Internet, these assignments year after year made more sense because high school students who wanted to glean the answers from someone else would be out of luck unless they had access to Cliff’s Notes at a local bookstore or knew a student from last year’s class who’d saved their paper. Even then, at most they might be able to find one source. Not 250,000 from a single Google search. 

Clearly, these particular wheels have been invented. And reinvented. Over and over. The answers to these assignments are not only in the back of the book, they are at the tips of our students’ fingers. And this makes them seem perfunctory and incredibly boring, just one more hoop to jump through, rather than an opportunity to produce something altogether new and different and perhaps even personal. How many 15-year-olds in the past half century have explained the theme of Animal Farm? Millions! What possibly new could be added to the discussion, so why not(!) just survey the field and see which explanations you could edit and edit into one that you agree with? The internet has become a infinite recipe book and there is simply no need (in a busy student’s mind) to experiment with Metaphor á la Orwell when there are hundreds and thousands of proven recipes ready to use.

So the onus is on us, I think, as teachers to come up with better assignments for independent work. If we must assign essays on theme and metaphor, we can assign them as in-class essays or timed writing tests (giving students no class time to survey the online field). But we need other, better assignments for independent work, ones that can’t be Googled, copied or pasted, ones that are meaningful and personal and require thinking (analysis) and creativity (synthesis). 

What do those look like? And how hard will they be to come up with year after year? 

In my next post, I will present one possibility. I would love to hear your thoughts, too.