Questions are Important, Dammit

Update: It's post number 300...whatever that means.

If there's one thing that frustrates me about my current job (Ha! There's definitely more than one!), it's the students' unwillingness or inability to ask questions of the material.

I get that they don't bother because they don't care or don't think the material is relevant, I do. But I'm a hopeless romantic when it comes to the intellectual life, and it slays me a bit every time when students fail to get excited by the awesome and interesting material they are being exposed to, especially when it's so obvious that the poem or story in question has something to tell them about how to navigate their lives. I'm also die-hard about interrogating the hell out of pop culture, just to be clear I am a) that boring and b) not talking just about Teh Classics.

That said, I really liked this Q & A from Rate Your Students. I doubt the students I work with could really utilize the method, at least not without some practice, but you never know:

Q: How in God's name do you get your students to stop writing book reports and start writing actual papers with actual theses?

...

A2: I build my literature classes around the idea of asking questions. We begin the semester with a challenging poem -- usually something fairly modern that they wouldn't have seen before -- and instead of my telling them anything about it, I simply instruct them to read it and make a list of questions. They pair up, see which questions they can answer, and ask more questions. With their lists of questions, we can talk about the 3 basic types of questions about literature (as I define them): Questions that could be answered by knowing more background information -- about culture, history, writer's biography, etc.; Questions that could probably be answered by reading more closely, more carefully, or (in the case of a longer text) further; Questions that could probably only be answered by analyzing or interpreting the text. We discuss some major branches of literary theory, but primarily in the context of what questions each theory asks about literature (How do socioeconomic issues shape the characters' interactions? What is significant about George taking on the typically feminine role of caring for the baby?). This sets the stage for what I tell my students all semester: scholars -- your professors, the people writing your texts and journal articles -- don't know all the answers. Scholars know which questions to ask. The class is then built around the students asking -- and struggling to answer -- questions. We are discussion-based from the beginning, and the discussions come directly from the students' questions (I only put forth my own questions if I think they are critical to understanding the text, and no one in the class has gotten there. I'm always surprised by how rarely this happens.) I make it clear that the "Questions that could be answered by reading more closely, carefully, or further" are questions that students should attempt to answer before coming to class. Once it becomes clear that if they bring those questions to class, I am not going to answer them, the students usually buckle down and get to work. When it comes time for the papers, I ask the students to write several questions about course texts. They work in groups and with me to evaluate the questions -- are they likely to have a complex answer? Is there likely to be an answer at all? When the student has a good, solid question, I explain that the paper should answer that question, and show the reader how the student came to the answer. The thesis to the paper is the answer to the question. Since students are comfortable with asking questions, with struggling to answer questions on their own, and with accepting that there may be multiple plausible interpretations of a text, most of them do relatively well. Even the worst papers I see are more complex than book reports.