How to teach college #10: Evil imagination

Fairly early in my teaching days, I painted myself into a corner. Thankfully, I found an escape that turned into both a good teaching tool and a nice bonding experience with my students. As with nearly all my favorite techniques, I stumbled on it by accident, and kept using it because it works well.

Many, although far from all, college students love to brag to one another about how they throw a paper together the hour before it's due, or write a speech the night before they're scheduled to give it. One of the best ways to discourage this behavior is to set deadlines for preliminary stages of the assignment. For a speech, I can require that students submit their topic, their draft outline, etc. But the first time I added that requirement to my public speaking class, I learned a stressful lesson: you've got to think your course policies through, just in case someone calls your bluff.

By that time, I'd already made up my mind not to accept late work. I don't knock ten points off a day, as some instructors do; I just evaluate any extenuating reasons the student offers, and I either accept the work with no penalty, or refuse it and record a zero. But the first time I required students to submit their speech topics to me, a large number of them simply missed the deadline. So, now what? I hadn't attached a point value to topic submission; was I supposed to just give them a zero on all the assigned speeches, and tell them they'd flunked the entire class just two weeks in? If they went to my boss and told him what I'd done, would he back me up? Would I, if I were in his shoes and an instructor pulled a stunt like this? I felt very stuck.

Then it hit me.

They didn't choose? Fine by me. They forfeited their privilege to choose their topics, so that must mean they were delegating that choice to me. I would therefore choose for them a topic that was completely do-able, but embarrassing enough that they'd wish they had been responsible and chosen for themselves. To this day my students know that if I give them a chance to choose a topic, they'd best notify me of their choice by the deadline if they don't want to unleash my Evil Imagination.

What does my Evil Imagination look like? I'm glad you asked. Here are just a few of the speech topics I've assigned over the years after students failed to choose before the deadline:

• Colorectal cancer
• Constipation
• Dead body disposal
• Fecal transplants
• Mucus
• Murderous dictators
• Painful medical procedures
• Suppositories

Any of the topics on that list could yield a well-researched speech that supplied an audience with important, useful information. But, I freely admit, none of those topics would be especially fun to talk about, and they're not what speakers likely would choose to talk about, especially if they were beginners. Easier and more pleasant topics were available, but only to students who got their act together and made their choice before the deadline passed.

The approach had several advantages. First, as I secretly hoped, most students found the situation funny, and easily drew support from their classmates for their predicament. That actually broke the tension a bit; I've found that introducing elements of absurdity to public speaking class can actually counteract student anxiety quite a lot, and being assigned to speak on something like fecal transplants was just the right dose of absurdity to trigger that effect.

Second, a surprising number of students rose to the occasion and gave good, polished, professional speeches about their topic, emphasizing how an understanding of the subject could be vital to everybody's physical or financial health down the road. The student to whom I actually assigned constipation did an absolutely outstanding job on her speech, and she told me afterward that it enlarged her confidence a great deal. "For the rest of my life, no matter how bad a speaking situation I'm in," she said, "I can always tell myself, 'Hey, one time I had to give a speech on constipation, and it went well. Whatever I'm facing now is nothing compared to that!'" Plus, it's not lost on the other students in the class that it's possible to give a quite good speech on an uncomfortable topic and survive the experience. It's a lesson that benefits everybody on the roster, both responsible and less responsible.

The technique isn't limited to public speaking, either. In a number of my lower-division classes, I assign article reports. I put together a curated list of journal articles that relate closely to the course content, and assign students to choose one of those articles and write what amounts to a book report on it. As with the speech topics, I prod them to start early by requiring that they sign up for their article near the start of the class. And, as you can guess, students who don't sign up for articles forfeit their privilege to choose, and I assign them their article.

This is a little more challenging than it is in public speaking class, since I can't let my Evil Imagination run amok, exactly. Instead, I have to fall back on my old debate skills and find evil articles. Still, over the years I've amassed a good little collection of them. Here are some of my favorites, with links to prove that I didn't make them up:

• How do anonymous sperm donors signal credibility through their self-presentations?
• Interpersonal communication apprehension, topic avoidance, and the experience of irritable bowel syndrome
• A meta‐analysis of the relationship between social skills and sexual offenders
• The monster within: How male serial killers discursively manage their stigmatized identities
• “That's just a basic teen‐age rule”: Girls' linguistic strategies for managing the menstrual communication taboo

What I like best about this approach is that I can discourage procrastination and deadline-missing without lowering students' grades. It gives them a wake-up call, but all one hundred percent of the assignment's value is still available to them provided they mend their ways and get down to business. It shows them that I'm quite serious, and also teaches them that the outcome of immature choices is increased difficulty and unpleasant working conditions, which strikes me as a bit more true-to-life than point deductions.

Plus, in my upper division classes, when we approach the midterm hump, very commonly fatigue sets in and a few of my better students start getting a little sloppy with their day-to-day preparation. But all I have to do is give them a certain look and say, "Do I have to unleash my Evil Imagination on you?"

It makes them laugh, but it also makes them straighten up. If I can do both of those things with a single teaching strategy, then I'm onto something.