Get Silly!

And now for something completely different.

In short, a

curricular curve ball.

Winter Break is a-comin’. And it can’t come fast enough. So why not throw caution to the wind and surprise your students with a fun, crazy assignment?

The Outrageous Claim Essay.

Here’s the assignment (which actually doesn’t have to result in a full-fledged essay. It could result in an outline, for example):

1) Think.

2) Turn your thinking into a claim. Make sure that claim is outrageous. (Read: silly, sardonic, satirical, even just plain false. Or true!)

Like

• Christmas sucks.

• Pythagoras was a model human being.

• World War I wasn’t so bad.

• Things Fall Apart is a terrible novel.

• Just as drivers have to get drivers’ licenses, parents should have to get parents’ licenses.

• COVID has been a great gift to humanity.

(Agree with the class ahead of time which topics are off limits. Violence and sex, for example. The students should be involved in setting these limits — or else they’ll want to test them.) (You the teacher may want to approve the claims before students move on to the next step.) (Or the entire class can agree on one claim that every student writes about on their own. Or do it in groups.)

3) Muster evidence to support your claim. Feel free to make the evidence and the accompanying bibliographic information up.

4) Write your essay (or outline or whatever).

5) Share.

6) Discuss.

I know. This assignment is outrageous. Because students will go crazy with it. They’ll go out of control.

Maybe.

Or maybe they’ll just have fun. Given constraints that they themselves determine, given a structured container for their thinking, they might just demonstrate what a standard essay assignment might not: They know what an interesting claim is; they know what supporting evidence looks like; they know how to write a logical outline or a bibliography; they can engage with the content in your course.

And if they don’t know these things, perhaps they’ll be inspired to figure them out so as to make their outrageous claim essays as effective as possible.

Mantra: Take a chance. Change it up.