Note: What you are about to read is more about the Donald Trump television show than any college-affiliated apprenticeship (well, unless you count Trump University, of course).

I recently employed a version of Trump's "The Apprentice" game show in my "Publication Workshop" classroom on the spur of the moment, and I thought I'd post about it here.

I frequently distribute a page of text -- ostensibly a page from a writer's "manuscript" or a mock "student paper" -- and ask students to edit it by hand for homework, or in class...and then I project the page onto a screen (using an overhead or document projector) and go through the passage with my pen, asking students what changes I should make along the way. It's workshopping -- or collaborative editing -- and it often helps students learn how they might more consciously proofread and edit their own work, in the process. I try to employ this method in every writing class I teach now, because it offers a great model for peer criticism and establishes an environment of critical reading.

For homework in my advanced creative writing class last Friday (called "Publication Workshop" -- a course in, essentially, how to be a freelance writer), students had been given a chart of typical proofreader marks that copyeditors will use, taken from the Chicago Manual of Style and were asked to apply them to a passage of mistakenly typset text I created with more gaffes, errors and blunders than you will ever see in the real world. Every line had a typo or an awkward construction or a misaligned character. Things were centered that shouldn't be; carriage returns were everywhere early. Every sentence needed to be corrected, often in multiple ways.

Instead of the usual "Arnzen standing at the projector" and vocally calling out for students to offer potential edits for me to make, I decided to mix it up off the cuff. I asked a student in the front row to start at the beginning of the passage and "walk us through" his edit step-by-step. I like having students take charge of the class like this, and I found a seat while he put his paper on the projector and adjusted it so everyone could see. Then he went through the first sentence, smartly spotting some blunders that demanded to be fixed.

I interrupted him before he could move to the next sentence. "Hold on..." I turned in my chair. "Are there any other changes anyone would make?"

People shook their head no. He had it right.

I twisted back to the front row, where the student smiled, eager to move on to the next line.

"Um...how do you spell ____________?"

He furrowed his eyebrows and bent over the projector. "Um...I think...um..."

Time ticked by and he looked up at his classmates for possible help.

I made a stupid "Dragnet" sound (dummmm-da-dumpdum) and then pointed at him like Donald Trump in the boardroom: "You're fired."

"What?"

Students laughed. He smiled, looking confused. "I don't..."

I chuckled. "Come on...You're fired. Sit down." He shrugged and picked up his paper.

I called on the person who was sitting next to him. "Why don't you show us how you fixed the next sentence?"

She apparently was a fan of The Apprentice, and was eager to play along. But eventually she was fired. As were the next batch of students. And a few who hadn't done the work, who I "fired in place" before they even were invited to go to the front of the class. One student had drawn doodles in the margin of his copyedited manuscript that made the whole class laugh when he displayed them on screen. I can't recall if I fired him for that, or just for his oversights on the manuscript, but he too was fired.

The students were playing along with me and didn't take my massive layoff of the whole classroom as a hostile act. One crucial element that made it fun for them was that I handed them the power to fire. I made it a group activity. I didn't just judge their editing skills, I would turn around and ask the class if they spotted any problems, and if they did, I would say: "You're right -- tell him he's fired." And they loved it.

In fact, we went through the entire single paged document, and the fun escalated as we went, because it was a little surprising how quickly the turnaround was as students got up and then sat back down. And because everyone's critical lenses were in focus, every single student was fired, missing some pesky little thing or another, save for the last person, who did the last sentence.

Now, I have to say in my defense that there are many problems with this method. I don't necessarily subscribe to the Darwinian "survival of the fittest" worldview of the Trump boardroom -- and in many ways I feel a college classroom should be a sanctuary from such cutthroat nonsense. I'm a big fan of collaborative, not competitive, learning. But there was something fun about the students competing to stand up in front of the room and "survive" the editing drill for the longest period of time without getting fired. And it was something of a thrill for the class to try to "catch" a student oversight just so that they could say "You're fired." Perhaps it was somehow empowering.

I could go on and explain how the event may have underlined the entrepreneurial skills that this particular class hopes to engender in the student writers, since an editor who rejects a manuscript is perhaps doing the equivalent "firing" of a Donald Trump to a game show contestant. And Trump himself might even have something to say about the relationship between art and business. But the truth be told, I just had my class do this exercise for kicks -- to get them out of their seats and a little more engaged in the daily grind of manuscript proofing -- and the whole "firing" business just made for an efficient way to speed up the process and get multiple students to take the stage.

I was surprised when I did a quick web search to see if others have used The Apprentice in the classroom. It's very popular, apparently. (I should confess here that I never watched the show until the most recent Celebrity Apprentice series, just to see what KISS bassist Gene Simmons would do on the show (and he got fired quickly!)).

Obviously, the Trump show is attracting the attention of media culture critics and business theory scholars. The Wall St Journal and CNN have run in-depth articles on how some MBA programs are actually integrating the structure of The Apprentice into their curriculum, which are borrowing the show's model as a way to grade student performance ("You're flunked!"). The show, these programs argue, not only teaches entrepeneurial skills, but also the arts of negotiation, the work ethic, and interpersonal business communications. (Scholarly work has been done on the latter, see David Urban's "Deconstructing the Trumpster" or "What the Apprentice Teaches About Communication Skills" by Katherine N. Kinnick and Sabrina R. Parton).

You can ping this entry by using http://blogs.setonhill.edu/mt/mt_tb-awoisdlkfj.cgi/13550 .