1. Customized
Assignments:
advice for instructors with too much
free time
Raymond McDaniel

2. Why customize?
• Because you are bored with reading 22 versions
of the same paper
• Because your students are likewise bored
• Because you want to reduce the possibility of
plagiarism or lazy, automatic writing
• Because you want your students to invest in their
own work

3. Yeah, okay. But how?
That’s a very good question.
What follows is a short example of how I
approached customization in one section
of LHSP 125.

4. Step One
Abstract Concrete
Draft an assignment that
lets you get to know the
student‟s interests. Student X writes about a
rock documentary he saw
Prompt:
with his sister, which he
Write about a work of art loved even though he
or piece of entertainment didn‟t know much about
to which you had a strong the guitarists it featured.
response, but you aren‟t
sure why.

5. Step Two
Abstract Concrete
Student X is curious
about how popular
Derive from the paper music evolves, and
a set of the student‟s wonders about the role
interests and concerns. of age and generation
in the history of rock.

6. Step Three
Abstract Concrete
Point Student X to
Greil Marcus, Deborah
Assemble a media list Frost, The Sound of
appropriate to the the City, The
student‟s interests. Runaways, Almost
Famous, PBS history
of rock „n roll, etcetera.

7. Step Four
Abstract Concrete
Student X discovers
Lester Bangs, The Best
Assign student to American Music
develop her own Writing, The Last
annotated bibliography Waltz, Pitchfork, Don’t
of sources relevant to Look Back, Westway to
her project the World, Greg Tate
and Jeff Chang.
All by himself!

8. Step Five
Abstract Concrete
Student X decides to
focus on the following
questions: at what
Use the student‟s point did “rock „n roll”
become “rock”? What
peers to generate
was the role of music
further resources and journalism in this
compelling questions transition? What does
this say about how an
art relates to its own
past?

9. Step Six
Abstract Concrete
You know what an outline
looks like. This is what
Pikachu looks like:
Assemble drafting
teams to assist with
outline generation

10. Step Seven
Abstract Concrete
You know how to run
class discussions.
Pikachu is vexed!
Devote class sessions
to regular progress
reports, two students
per class, so each
student learns from the
process of the others!

11. Step Eight
Abstract Concrete
Pikachu is sleepy!
Read very many very
long papers

12. Good News!
Customized assignments…
incorporate analysis, research and
narrative into one mega-document!
activate the student‟s personal interests
and place them in an academic context!
foster multi-modal understanding!
reduce odds of plagiarism and lazy
writing!

13. Bad News!
Customized assignments…
are a lot of work.
no, really, a lot of work.

14. Customized Ray Ray
I‟ve assigned an eight-page initial
inquiry paper and a subsequent 16 +
page customized research paper.
The papers I‟ve received include…

15. DUDE.
• An investigation of the origins of Young
Adult literature and the invention of
adolescence
• An argument about the Uncanny Valley
and the evolution of animation from stop-
motion to motion capture
• An analysis of the role of passive voice in
the existentialist novels of Sartre, Camus
and de Beauvoir
• A study of revolution and popular culture

16. ALL FROM FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS.