By Rodney E. Tyson
First of all, I have a confession to make. My title is in quotation marks because I stole it from one of the students in my class. I just couldn't think of any better words to explain what I expected from my students this semester. The same student also had this to say in the first paragraph of her last assignment--an essay in which she was asked to reflect on the work she had done during the semester:
When I was a sophomore, one of my seniors said, "If you take Professor Tyson's composition class you will have to do endless homework." At the time I actually didn't care what he said. However the class was starting with my enormous assignments. (Jung Yu Kyoung)"Endless homework" and "enormous assignments"... All right, I admit it. There was a lot of homework, and perhaps there were even some "enormous assignments" in this class. I'm sure I asked my students to "think more, write more, [and] correct more" than most of them had bargained for when they registered for the class. Why? Because learning to write in a foreign language is not easy. It necessarily requires time and effort and a lot of hard work. But in the end, all of the hard work can pay off, as another student pointed out so well:
I was frustrated by those times, but the important thing was that I began to be proud of myself at the end of the semester. Literally, I couldn't explain why, but now I feel happy, and I am satisfied with this class. (Kim Jung-Mi)The results of the students' hard work this semester are represented here in Red Lips and Popcorn, a collection of essays by the sixteen students in my advanced English composition class this semester at Daejin University. For their first major essay assignment, students were asked to describe influential people in their lives and explain what kind of effects those people have had on them. The second assignment required students to write either a speech or a newspaper article in which they stated and defended an opinion about a current social issue or controversial topic. I'm especially happy to report that four of the students took this particular assignment beyond the classroom. Two students presented their speeches at national English speech contests, and two students' articles were published in national English-language daily newspapers, one in The Korea Times and one in The Korea Herald. For their final major assignment, students could choose either to write an individual book or movie review or a research paper, or to carry out an original collaborative research project. How well they accomplished these very difficult tasks can only be judged by reading their essays.
Here are two more collections of Daejin University students' essays:
Should
I Revise One More Time?
Fall
1997