When A Syllabus of Failure Has Failed

Identify where you think students may fail in an assignment in your syllabus, and how you will use that as a teachable moment by design. 

Nobody likes to admit where a student could botch up an assignment in a flawless or next to flawless syllabus, but there are chances where one assignment can rise above the others and be completely horrible to students who work on it for the first time. The assignment that I think that most students would struggle with the most is the Rhetorical Analysis, for a number of reasons. One reason being that students wouldn't be able to tell what an example of a good rhetorical argument is in any form of media. They'd probably be too fixated on another assignment in the class, or another class in general. They could pick any number of rhetorical arguments from a TV news show or a video game or any work of fiction without understanding what they're trying to find, meaning that my assignment as it stands has no real scope to it. A student could try to pass off Bill Pullman's speech from the movie "Independence Day" (you know, the one where he's saying "We will not go quietly into that good night" and so on) and try to over-read a rabble-rousing speech from a fictional movie, and not understanding what the rhetoric in relation to such an argument is. I'd make that more of a teaching moment by giving students more of an idea of the fundamentals of rhetoric, as well as giving an assortment of questions that give a sort of criteria for rhetoric, i.e. a couple of guidelines on how to detect any sort of rhetorical argument in any speeches or presentations. So in effect, I would be teaching these students to know where to find hidden forms of rhetorical argument, giving them a better understanding of the different types of rhetoric that we have in the world. By instructing them thoroughly with this checklist that tests if something you read or hear is any kind of rhetorical argument, students can have a better understanding on how to approach the assignment and rhetorical arguments in general.

Students also might fail to keep up with the assignment or even fail to actually put effort into the assignment, due to the really late deadline at May 2nd. I can make something like that equally as teachable as the instructions on different types of rhetoric by having them work on it for most of the semester and setting up times that they can see me in my office and discuss their progress on the assignment in general. I can set up some kind of due date for a rough draft of the analysis early on the semester, just to give students ideas on what to use and to get them thinking about the assignment in general. The rough draft would generally get a good grade, while having lots of criticism on how to handle the assignment. The sort of thing that I'd be teaching them would more or less be a lesson in planning out an assignment in advance, while giving a clearer understanding on how to handle the complex idea of a rhetorical analysis. The rhetorical analysis, while 10% of the final grade, is necessary for giving students a better idea of the different aspects of rhetoric, but hard to nail on someone's first try. So special countermeasures like due dates for rough drafts and teaching rhetorical qualifications are more than necessary in helping to turn around students' failures to understand the assignment at hand.