My upper-division writing courses are challenging, so I offer some generous extra credit.
One of the ways students can earn it is participation in a book club. I pick a book (one related to the course ideas, often one I want to read), they read it, write a response paper, and meet at the end of the quarter to talk about it.
My favorite choices, ones I’ve used again and again, are Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Maus by Art Spiegelman, Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss, and Red Son by Mark Millar.
My Writing in the Health Science students are the most compelled to raise their grades. Many of them have enjoyed Atwood, but we’ve also read Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, Adam Alter’s Drunk Tank Pink, Alan Alda’s If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face, Rachel Pearson’s No Apparent Distress, T.R. Reid’s The Healing of America, Paula Kamen’s All in My Head, Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, Anne Fadiman’s When the Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, and books by Atul Gawande and Mary Roach, among others.
In a tight quarter system, it’s a much needed chance for students to have a good discussion in a small group, to think through issues in a low-stakes way, and to remember that they do actually like to read. (Many students ask for further book recommendations for the break.)
It’s also a way for me to learn more about them, what they don’t yet know, what moves them, what surprises them.
Recently, for example, a few students in my Writing in Social Justice class said they learned a lot about the Holocaust from Maus–they had never heard of the camps. My premed students learn about patients who weren’t believed, who were told it was all in their head (they didn’t think doctors would ever abandon someone). They learn that our ideas of villainy are completely determined by point of view. They learn great scientists can also be great writers.
