Thursday, July 15, 2010

Can't Generalize

I'm teaching at NCSC this summer, and as usual I've forgotten just how concrete-minded my students there are.

They have a paper coming up, and they asked how to write it. One guy was perplexed because the minimum length is five pages and that seems like a lot for a five-paragraph essay. They asked what they should do with the assignment, so I said something like, "Well, if I were doing this, I might choose William Faulkner's 'Barn Burning,' and do thus and such." The obvious question: "So we have to write about 'Barn Burning'?"

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