In which we (try to) concisely narrate one instance of students completing assignments in which they'll be graded by more criteria than may be necessary...

Imagine a course on American History up to 1865. Not hard to imagine, I think. Now think about a possible assignment: choose from a selection of prompts and write an essay. After the essay has been assigned and the students have toiled away at their submissions, the instructor receives a big stack of essays to look at. As the instructor begins the process of grading, she finds herself distracted from the students' application of critical thinking to historical facts by characteristics of their writing style. Perhaps they are poor writers and haphazardly string independent clauses together; perhaps they misuse semicolons. Maybe they too often slip into passive voice. Maybe there's just something about the structure of the essay that doesn't seem to work all that well. She ends up spending time giving them feedback--and grading them--on these skills as well as the quality of the ideas discussed.

Is this helpful or reasonable? Maybe and maybe not. Are writing skills among the competencies of the history course? Maybe and maybe not. Should they know how to write a long-form essay? Maybe and maybe not.

What sometimes happens is that we, as instructors, require our students to demonstrate knowledge in forms that require unnecessary complications. This is not to say that essays don't belong in the History classroom (in fact, I am far from suggesting that). I'm just saying that it might be true that essays don't really belong in most places and that other kinds of things might demonstrate mastery in ways more relevant to the 21st century.

Before you get all nostalgic about essays on me, let's try to get through this module and see some suggestions and examples of ways that we can avoid the unnecessary constraints of the "disposable assignment."