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I decided I didn’t want to be a cop. I didn’t become a teacher so that I could spend hours with AI detection tools, trying to catch students cheating. Instead, I wanted writing to be fun again. I wanted students to stop thinking about a writing assignment as an “assignment,” and more like an adventure. So, here’s what I did.

There are myriad ways to demonstrate mastery over material in writing, and the “traditional” essay is only one of those ways. I want students to engage with the stories they read by internalizing their rhythms, duplicating their syntax, and building on those stories’ characters. Students can learn by doing, and everyone knows that it’s far more noble to play than it is to “work.”

I invented excursions related to each of the required COR 101 texts. For the Epic of Gilgamesh, I met students at the head of the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Trail, or “Ogletrail,” and after taking them on a brief jaunt through the woods, they could write their own “Journey to the Cedar Forest,” where their heroes could battle whatever “Humbabas” they might encounter. Along the way they were to mimic the rhythmic and linguistic signatures of Gilgamesh.

A couple weeks later, we met at the , where students found an artwork that spoke to them—in whatever manner—of Antigone. They engaged in ekphrasis: writing artistically about another work of art to show the connections they saw and felt. Students wrote intricate and moving poetic pieces about a pair of young girl dancers who reminded them of silence and Antigone. They described the light hitting the facial expression of a woman reading a letter with concern and they imagined her to be Eurydice learning of Haimon’s death.

Next, we met at an OU women’s soccer match, where students used the language found in Plato—truth, justice, accusers, defense, etc.—to respond to events in the game, such as a yellow card foul called against our Petrels.

Students stepped out into the quad in groups to act out Act 3 Scene 3 from Othello. They then regrouped in the classroom to compare and contrast the experience of reading Othello in solitude versus acting it out with their peers. In doing this they incorporated details like the warmth of the fall sun on their shoulders as they envisioned Iago’s deceit.

Before the semester ends, these students will be writing short paragraphs that connect these disparate pieces, using a blend of natural imagery, metaphor and rhetorical schemes in order to discover just what they think is “the self” they’ve found through reading these narratives and writing their own.

My students are encouraged to be creative in organizing the paragraphs of these exercises such that one flows into the next, but so that the overall effect is more of a collage-like work. What they are writing is, effectively, a lyric essay about what they’ve learned of the self from reading Gilgamesh, Antigone, Plato, and Othello.

This first week of November we begin class wide workshops. Since my background is as a teacher of creative writing, I employ the poetry workshop model for providing students feedback towards working on revisions that will be due at the end of the semester. All students receive copies of their classmates’ essays, and the students are added to a class schedule. Most days we’ll workshop 2 students. These workshops are frequently cited in student reviews as their favorite part of the semester. They gain valuable feedback on their work (we usually spend about 20 minutes on each student’s essay).

While there has been a little hemming and hawing, students have seemed to enjoy the excursions and writing exercises. All initial work was written longhand, and I think they genuinely have been reengaged as writers this semester. I guess we’ll see what revisions the end of semester brings. But I’m hopeful that this process helps students to feel reinvigorated by the idea that they can write creatively and critically at the same time. Even after the soccer game excursion ended that Friday night, by Monday morning most students returned to class saying they had a lot of fun. That’s what I would hope college is supposed to be.