The above represents one of those moments of being knocked off the horse. I was confident that our discussions about semiotics had been fruitful. We had done, as a class, two exhaustive examples of how to 'perform' this assignment (writing is, of course, another language). They seemed engaged, and I heard from more students during this exercise than any other class period during the semester. Looking back at it now, with all of its spelling mistakes and awkward phrasings, I'm still not sure how it went wrong. Let me explain.

Certain papers turned out beyond my imagination. Simply stunning stuff. A few turned in papers that looked nothing like the structure I attempted to articulate. The question that still lingers is, I can extend office hours, urge them to come, and go over a number of examples, but I'm still uncertain as to when/what they are uncertain about--and from experience, understanding the assignment comes in two stages: getting what the teacher says about the assignment, and figuring out what the prompt is asking when one sits down to finally write it.

I'm coming to understand that drafts are a way of sidestepping this problem, but I'm constantly focused on getting to the material at hand. I realize that this is, no bones about it, part of the course material insofar as I've made a traditional writing assignment. Nonetheless, as a student who has, more or less, understood how to write a "A" paper (not to say a good paper) for any course I took, I'm unclear as to how the intensive focus on such a process goes over with students who struggle with writing. If I can't explain how to write an essay to a class (although I do feel quite comfortable instructing on writing one on one), then matching what they write to what we've been doing in class is a much more useful way of getting at this question of instruction.

In the end, I'm wondering what the pedagogical implications are when the goal of assignments like this one (unlike traditional compare/contrast/explicate material we've read), where I'm more concerned with them simply doing this practice, as an example of a worthwhile skill to be taken out of the otherwise foreign material, are in the doing rather than the writing? Another example of how, we academics find essays useful since we tend to think in/through them in an effective way.

Rather than rewriting this, let me simply point. That is, by the end of this, I realize that I have been more concerned, at the level of the letter, with how I fit into this puzzle than than thinking the obvious: why do I feel like students need to write essays (part of me thinks it useful, and part of me can't object to creating "alternative" writing exercises that are more attune to life-after-college) when I know there's more ideology behind this feeling than critical thought?.

Moreover, a distinction that I have found useful is that the sessions in class where we went over examples might be phrased thusly: I was practicing the exercise for them, rather than letting them practice.