Essay Week 11 Positive and Negative Assignment

Each week we have a reading assignment for this class and each week the entire class reads the same story. We post notes on our blog pages and then we follow it with a storytelling assignment. This week however, we were allowed to choose which story we wanted to read. This method of allowing the students to choose the story they wanted to read allowed for greater freedom, not just in exploring our interest, but in our storytelling ideas as well. This of course does present positive and negative issues in regards to the student and the assignment.

The positive of course is that this method does break up the monotony of the class. Each week because the entire class reads the same story there is little in the way of surprise and discovery when doing the storytelling response posts. This is because each student is basically rereading the story that they have just read. There are of course surprises in that each student has a different perspective on the story and that does come through in the storytelling posts, but still there is very little in the way of discovering something new about the story. This method is good because it allows each student to read a different story and then post a storytelling post based on that the new story. Which in turn allows another student to discover a new story and become interested in that new story.

One of the negatives about this assignment is the lack of direction due to the amount of options. The assignment page is like a buffet of topics, so simply choosing a story to read becomes an issue in itself. This may not seem like it could cause a problem, but when looking at the topics to choose from then opening the assignment link the student is then left with even more choices to choose from, so trying to simply narrow down what to read can be time consuming. Once this is figured out by the student then the issue becomes the length of each story. Because the stories are short, when it comes time to choose a topic for a storytelling post the student must narrow down their topic so that they can retell one of the stories. A student may enjoy having a set reading and storytelling topic and sometimes too much choice can be a bad thing.

Still the positives of this assignment do outweigh the negatives. Though the assignment does break from the format by allowing the student to choose the assignment topic, it also allows the reader to remain in the structure of the class by offering the option to do an assigned reading on the current class topic. By adding this element of choice, the class is injected with new creative subjects that work toward opening the other students up to different stories and possibly peaking there interests to literature outside of the class. So while there are possible negatives with this assignment, there are definite positives with this assignment that add to the strength of the class.