Here is a quotation from my assignment that apparently was misinterpreted by my students:

“Your project structure will include the following in sequence:

• A cover page with a title of your project, your name, the date submitted, the class, and my name

• Citations in MLA 8 format for four sources (types and date restrictions noted below)

• Annotations (described below) for each source under each citation”

Following this note is a description of what I wanted annotations to each source to include.

While there is much and continuing confusion (or perhaps inattention) concerning citation style and students often have trouble with cover page format (I think because they don’t see it as important), given that we’d been working two weeks on this assignment, I assumed that students would understand that citations (as stand-ins for sources) were being annotated and so said annotations for a given source would appear as indicated in the assignment phrasing “under each citation.”

Today, a handful of my most industrious students in my afternoon class came in with drafts of the assignment in which they presented paragraphs and paragraphs of annotations with no citations. All the citations appeared at the end in a Works Cited list. . .

Honestly, I was surprised by the way my students misinterpreted my assignment instructions. To clarify, I was not surprised that students could and would misinterpret instructions because I know they can and will do this, just as I can and will sometimes misinterpret or misremember directions to someone’s house or how to make something. After all there was that time I left the giblets in the turkey on Thanksgiving even though the directions told me to take them out. What the heck are “giblets” anyway?

Now, after 28 years of teaching writing classes of one type or another, I have become confident in my ability to predict what might trip students up in an assignment. I anticipate such confusion and shape my assignment sheets with an idea of the questions that might come up. I then make lesson plans with my eye on skills I think may be new to them. I knew from experience that they would need “annotated” explained to them and that they would need me to explain it to them a few times. The definition occurs a couple of times in the assignment sheet and I reinforce that orally in class.

In case you are wondering, annotations are any kind of notes, and an annotated bibliography is a bibliography that includes notes on the content of each source. The nature of these notes are prescribed by the purpose of the particular bibliography or the requirements of the particular bibliography assignment.

I presented this situation to David, my husband, as we debriefed about our teaching at the end of the day, and we mulled over potential causes. He said, “I feel I’ve always known what annotations are because even as an 11-year old I annotated the moves of my tournament chess games.” I talked about my experience growing up in a fundamentalist Christian tradition that emphasized annotating scriptures, and later in my college work on medieval literature, I came to expect annotations in my textbooks that would explain arcane language or ideas in the literature I read. Annotation as a basic concept (i.e., a note explaining or elaborating something that follows or is attached somehow to that thing) is embedded in our repertoire of literacy practices.

However, in the end, no matter how clear one’s directions are, the literacy practices of each student may (and probably will) clash with the teacher’s repertoire of explanations, and we are going to be surprised by the misinterpretations our students have. Today, I found it refreshing, though exasperating, to be reminded that teaching is a dialectic, a give and take, rather than a one time transferral of perfectly and permanently retained knowledge. I have another month before I have to remember what that big syringe looking thing is supposed to do to my turkey.