Several semesters in a row, I taught Dante’s Inferno as part of a broad humanities survey. In case you’re not familiar with the epic, the protagonist (also named Dante) travels through the Catholic hell and describes the excruciating torture experienced by the many sinners he sees there.
photo credit: country_boy_shane
My writing assignment asked students to analyze how the punishments match the sins committed. It was so tedious. I quickly realized I was sucking all the interest and fun out of an actually interesting and fun text.
So the next semester I made the writing assignment a bit more transgressive: “Have you ever told someone to ‘go to hell’ (or wanted to tell someone that)? Describe the scenario. What did the person do wrong? Use quotes and interpretations of Dante’s Inferno to describe what their punishment would be and why.” The assignment still met my pedagogical goals (to have the students think critically about the text and articulate connections between its parts), but the students’ answers were so much more engaged, and reading the essays was much less a chore for me. Plus, as an accidental sort of value-added bonus, I think the assignment allowed the students to experience the cathartic, semi-therapeutic effects of imaginatively punishing people who’ve wronged them—an effect that Dante himself certainly relished in imagining his hell, which is littered with his personal enemies.
In later semesters I expanded this assignment to ask students to consign various historical and contemporary figures to the appropriate circles of Dante’s hell. This added a component that I hadn’t originally considered, because it turned into a mini-lesson on both current events and notorious “sinners” from history. It was also fun!
My only problem is, not every text I teach seems to lend itself to writing assignments that both achieve my goals (for them to become sharper critical thinkers and analytical writers) and engage students creatively. Any ideas? Anybody else trying to design these double-duty writing assignments?
I think your idea of having students write through a scenario from the book is a great idea, especially because I’ve been thinking about the barriers to students “finding their voice” (a phrase that come up at the last wac conference). I think it can be hard for students to find a voice in writing, when the voices they are reading are often so different than their own. What they read, as research for their own papers, and as primary texts in fiction class, can seem like it is written in a whole different language sometimes, I imagine.
So, your assignment seems like a great way to try to yoke together two authorial voices. And even create a space in between, where the student an author can meet.
So, that’s the best I got for now on how to make other assignments like this one: keep creating bridge scenarios between assigned text and student. Although, I imagine not all books have sinning and vengeance, which might get your most vivid reading…