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Pacific banana slugs (ariolimax columbianus) of the Olympic National Forest

One of my favorite slug facts is that their mucus is a liquid crystal. It can transition from lubricant to adhesive depending on what the slug needs.

I'm looking for readings to assign to my Introductory Composition* students, and am hoping Tumblr might have good recommendations... that seems weird typing it out, but whatever.

* The writing kind of composition. This is the "welcome to college, here is How To Essay" course.

Specifically, I'm looking for material on the history of the English language, but if y'all want to throw out other ideas, I'm always happy to add new stuff to the rotation. (The specificity is because as a medievalist, I'm very interested in the history of language & writing before the modern age, and I'd like to give my Composition students some exposure to those sorts of things because I don't think it gets covered much in the standard curriculum, but I've never been able to find the right readings to make it work.)

Here's why I'm having difficulty finding good options myself: the goal isn't just "give students information on the history of the English language". One of the aspects of the course that seems to be particularly effective in getting students to engage & learn is the student-led class discussions we do most weeks, each of which is centered around an article / essay / something from outside the textbook, all of which are about topics related to writing and/or language. So I'm looking for texts that can be the basis for a student-led discussion; through trial & error over my time as an instructor, I've found that texts' degree of success in this role seems determined by how well they exhibit the following traits.

Criteria

The text should be opinionated in some way. Reading something that's mostly/entirely informational and forming an opinion on it, especially if it's not a subject one is particularly familiar with, requires more cognitive labor than reading something that presents an opinion or an argument and taking one's own stance on that same argument. And while I DO think that's a type of cognitive labor that's worth asking students to practice, it's one I tend to reserve for solo writing assignments, where if students struggle with it, it doesn't cause an in-class discussion to flop and screw up the lesson plan.

The text needs to be the right length. There's plenty of wiggle room here, but the ideal is around ~4,000–5,000 words. It's my experience that if we drop below ~3,000 words students have difficulty finding enough material in the article to have a decently long discussion, and if we go above ~6,000 words the proportion of students who just refuse to read the whole thing rises to untenable levels. (I mean, there's always some, and even ~3,000 is enough that I'll get complaints about the length, but the discussions tend to fizzle out after 15 minutes or so if I actually assign texts as short as they want, because they run out of things to say.)

The text needs to be able to stand by itself. It can't be something we work through over multiple weeks, because we've got other readings to discuss. Individual chapters from books sometimes work, but usually don't, unless we're talking an anthology and each chapter actually is a stand-alone essay.

The text needs to be at an accessible reading level. Again, cognitive labor. I do WANT students to have the educational experience of working to understand a text that they don't initially grasp, but that's better saved for other assignments -- if too many of them aren't willing to put in that labor in this case, the discussion flops for everyone. This doesn't quite map onto any measurable "reading level" scale: if a text is difficult in an interesting way, creative or unusual, they're more willing to engage than if it's difficult because it feels too formal or technical. (E.g., students will buy into trying to interpret Toni Morrison's Nobel lecture, but react to George Orwell's "Politics & the English Language" with notable hostility.)

Anyway.

Back when I worked at the hospital, I had to take MRI training and it was my favorite thing every time. It was only like 10 minutes long and went a little something like this:

Hey. The MRI is basically a really big magnet and by basically I mean it is and we literally never turn it off. It's like really big. Really really big and powerful and The Magnet is always on. We don't turn it off Ever, for any reason. We mean it bro, The Magnet is literally always on. It's crazy strong and will definitely kill you. So don't bring any metal into the MRI room, man. You will fuck up the machine (because The Magnet is always on) and then you will die (again, because The Magnet is always on). Here's some fun questions for you to test your understanding!

1) The ______ is always on.

2) The Magnet is ______ on.

3) How often is The Magnet on?

4) The Magnet is always __.

5) The Magnet is always on. T/F

6) The Magnet is usually on but we know to turn it off for you because you're a very special boy :) T/F

7) My weak fleshy body can survive the wrath of The Magnet. T/F

8) Look at this 500 lbs steel hospital bed, which The Magnet has crumpled into an origami crane. Imagine if that was you.

9) Is The Magnet ever off?

10) Sometimes we turn The Magnet off. T/F

Thank you for taking MRI training. We hope you learned that The Magnet is always on, because it is. It's on Right Now and it will be on every time you come to the MRI. Have fun and remember: The Magnet is always on!

me: i don’t think that is true