Paper Assignments; or, trying to understand the student mind

I am working on my classes for the fall; specifically, I’m looking at my Composition I classes (I have three sections of that) and, even more specifically, I am looking at the Compare/Contrast assignment I give for their second papers, and it’s really starting to piss me off.

My Compare/Contrast assignment has always been based on advertisement. The introduction to the assignment reads:

“…it’s safe to assume that the media have a profound affect on our culture as a whole, as well as on individual minds. During this unit, we will be looking extensively at advertisement specifically and how it works. Advertisement speaks to us, and presents a chicken-or-the-egg paradox: Is advertisement a reflection of our culture, or does advertisement shape what our culture is? These are the two fundamental questions guiding our study for next couple of weeks.”

I think this is brilliant, of course.

Anyway, the assignment goes on to ask students to find two ads that are related in some way, do a thorough analysis of them, and write a 2-3 page paper based on their findings.

To my surprise, students pretty much hate this assignment. First off, they don’t know what the point is of doing ad analysis when they claim that they never pay attention to advertisement anyway. Secondly, they have a helluva time knowing what it means to look beyond what is there in full color on the page. Many simply won’t make the leap from what’s there to what it means. To help them out, I show Tough Guise and Killing Us Softly III (one is about the portrayal of men in the media, and the other is about women’s image in advertisement) as a way of looking at larger cultural influences and how they differ between the sexes. I do this to help, I really do, but many have apparently viewed my showing these films as a not-too-subtle suggestion that they must choose men/women ads to compare/contrast (and they must side with the women!!) if they are to do well on the papers. This could not be further from the truth, and at one point last semester, I let them now outright that, and I quote, “This could not be further from the truth!”

So here I am. The summer more than half over, and I need to make some decisions. I don’t want to let go of my ad analysis, but how do I get students into this assignment? Perhaps it is a matter of getting them interested in the material, the broader philosophical and socio-economic issues that are in the ads. That certainly won’t make things any easier, though. Another difficulty will be letting students know that they have the power to look at ads and participate in the exploration of what ideas they present. It’s simply ridiculous to think that ads don’t represent anything in our society (which is also a card students will play: “This doesn’t mean anything!”); though they are fake realities, they are realities that we literally and figuratively buy into. And that’s worth looking into.