Thesis Days

At a basic level, composition and literature classes both ask how we understand and interact with the world. They both explore how we receive ideas, how we interpret them, and how we contribute our own. While composition classes usually no longer address the beaux-arts tradition of literature, they do still involve textual and other forms of close analysis. Similarly, for at least the last decade, the literature classes in our department have re-emphasized the importance of writing literary and cultural analyses (with the concurrent de-emphasis on testing that relies so much on memorization). Under these happy circumstances, I started a thesis day tradition years ago in my composition classes that not only transferred readily to my literature classes, but in many ways seemed to be even more effective there.

Thesis day is celebrated on my syllabus by the communal sharing of working theses for assigned papers several weeks in advance of their due date. My initial hope was that this would reduce the confusion on the part of some students that a thesis is a barely contestable statement of description rather than a specific claim. Indeed, hearing each other’s theses, hearing my responses and questions, and being invited to respond to their peers and to suggest their own questions, these things helped many to understand the process of writing and the expectations of the assignment better. With class caps in core composition sections set at twenty-five students, it was easy to have them arrange a circle of desks to face each other and then to share their thoughts. Next to one-to-one paper conferences, this was the next most favorably commented upon component of the class on student evaluations.

Since I was meeting similar confusion in my literature classes’ assigned papers, I next decided to try thesis days for those papers, too. I worried, however, about sacrificing a day that we would otherwise spend looking at another work of literature, but if it could improve enough of the papers, then, I thought, the sacrifice would be justified. As in the composition classes, thesis days seemed to reduce, though not eliminate, procrastination; they seemed to let students model scholarly behavior for each other; that is, they showed each other how to approach the assignments and that it was within their means to do the assignments. But what I hadn’t anticipated was how well it would work to engage the students with the texts we had read and the themes we had discussed. Thesis days not only served as an excellent review exercise, allowing us to revisit connections between texts, ideas, and even centuries, but also as a means of generating new insights and connections we hadn’t considered before.