Monday, April 25, 2011

Stating the Obvious, Part II

I have now declared my struggle to prevent students from using their essays to communicate painfully self-evident things to me to be over. It is a struggle that I have lost. In their final essays, students have informed me of the following:

a) ours was a course on Spanish literature;
b) during our course on Spanish literature we read works of Spanish literature;
c) the works of Spanish literature we read in our course were written by Spanish writers;
d) Spanish writers can be male or female;
e) these male or female writers write their works of literature in Spanish;
f) these works of literature have many differences;
g) but they all share one important characteristic, namely, that they are works of Spanish literature which we read in our course on Spanish literature.

We also watched some movies, but I'll let you imagine how essays analyzing the movies were structured on your own.

4 comments:

Z said...

Yes, I have this phenom and also a bunch of copied things by foreign students who believe that is the only acceptable way to do things. And my language class refuses to speak Spanish, too.

Clarissa said...

In a really perverted way, it's good to know that I'm not alone here.

maitreyi1978 said...

Wait, are these essays in Spanish or English?

Clarissa said...

They are in Spanish but I translated this for the benefit of my English-speaking readers.